Today on Twitter, my agency WILL released a speculative brand video for Twitter Blue, “It’s Never Over.” It will only be available on Twitter.
Watch it here
Wide Dog, renowned based digital artist and winner of the first place Passage Prize in Art, did the animation. The team behind it also included Lomez,
, Spendo, and myself.What is the purpose of this brand video, and why did we spend so many hours of our free time making it?
We find ourselves amid a culture war being waged in the private sector. At the behest of international banking entities, American corporations have taken it upon themselves to spread the gospel of ultra-left globalism. For years, they have filled our public spaces, airwaves, and homes with an ever-growing wave of imagery that ordinary Americans find abhorrent and ugly.
Until a few months ago, we accepted it without much of a fight. But then Bud Light happened. As I said at the time, it was an inflection point. The moment enough normal everyday Americans decided to stop playing along.
As June and the corporate celebration of “Pride Month” begins, the battle heats up. We’re seeing wins. Target removed woke items. Heckler and Koch disavowed identity politics. Bud Light continues its downward plummet.
But none of these corporations admit the truth: they’re infected with a poisonous ideology devouring both them and the country from whence they came. Instead, they deflect, they distract, and of course they blame their own customers for daring to be religious, moral, traditional.
Refusing to buy their products is the beginning, but it’s not enough. We must also re-build our beautiful American brands, and create new ones unpolluted by toxic ideology. We must fill our public spaces, airwaves, and homes with beauty and aspiration—the values that built Apple, Nike, Budweiser, and yes, Twitter. We call this “Based Marketing.”
Marketing presents an important front in the culture war both because it has immense power to indoctrinate, but also because the industry itself is so rotten and bloated. Woke-ism dominated Big Marketing because it’s hidden from the public—full of blind apparatchiks unmoored from reality or the people they supposedly serve. It’s an unguarded flank where we can win, as we saw with Bud Light.
“It’s Never Over,” was made by creatives silenced by every other platform, many of whom are still anonymous out of fear of losing their jobs. They found their friends on Twitter after Elon made it free again. It celebrates the beauty of this new free platform, in a way that speaks to us users who need it most. It answers the question, what would the world look like if marketing was created honestly, truthfully, and for the people. And it looks forward to the ongoing fight.
This is what “Based Marketing” means to us. And it’s time we made more of it.
This is fantastic and necessary work.
Toxic "wokeism" is the result of toxic neoliberalism ("capitalism") and a complex of dysfunction and corruption in the corporate-state system in general.
Reforming the marketing industry is necessary, but not sufficient.
The problem arises at a deeper level.