Logorama – Pulp Fiction for Brands

The world around us is dominated by products, companies and brands both figuratively and literally. Logorama, created by French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, takes this idea one step further by building a world solely constructed by brands. This short opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.

A brand is the identity of a product, service, or company. There’s  a fantastic website that I love browsing called Brand Tags. Brand Tags is a collective experiment in brand perception. The site works by flashing a brand image at the viewer and the viewer writes the first word or phrase they think of when they see the image. These tags generate a word cloud for each individual brand. In my opinion, the top words/phrases are usually pretty indicative of what the majority of people think of a brand. For instance, the most common words that are tagged of Abercrombie & Fitch are moose, clothes, preppy and gay. Apple, is most frequently tagged as apple, mac, cool, and ipod. McDonald’s on the other hand is perceived as fat, fries, food, and big (haha).  It only takes one image to trigger a bunch of words, thoughts and emotions;  it’s fascinating and powerful. This is why companies spend so much time building brand equity.

I love the personalities that the creators have attached to the brands in this short. Ronald McDonald is most definitely the best pick for the bad guy (clown, scary hair = evil) and Big Boy can totally pass as the annoying young perv. Never thought that the Michelin man would be speaking in ebonics, so unexpected and hilarious. I’m surprised it took me this long to discover the video…did it not go viral?

Edit: 1.5 million views according to Vimeo. Not that many considering how many views Justin Bieber has for any one of his music videos. Also, it is sad that I’m using Justin Bieber’s MV views as a benchmark…