CopyDiva

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang’s tweet last week, I found out about BrandTags, an interesting experiment being pulled together by Noah Brier. Basically, you visit the site and get presented with a logo or brand name. You type in the word or phrase which comes to mind when you think of the brand. It aggregates all the data from what people enter and creates tag clouds, based on the frequency of what people say, with the largest words or phrases being the most frequent from all taggers.

There are a few very interesting things to me about what I am seeing on BrandTags:

• stalwart brands in CPG are easy to identify based on their tags: I tested my mad branding skills, and was correct 100% of the time for consumer products such as McDonalds, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, etc. Interestingly enough, even though the biggest tags for most of these products were negative (for McDonalds it was fat), their brand message was still easy enough to pick out. Overall, their strong efforts in branding, I suppose, have paid off, as the message still comes through.

• Internet brands were difficult to decipher: I could just suck at it, but, the tags for msn and for Facebook were very similar - I thought Facebook was Myspace. To me, this speaks of the more difficult task of brand marketers in the constant state of flux that is Internet properties. Its hard to have clear branding when your brand promise is changing ever 3 to 6 months. Also, some Internet brands — such as ReadWriteWeb, Gawker, Digg, had large tags for question marks, meaning they have no brand recognition with many of the participants in this experiment.

Now, I have no idea how many people are participating in this experiment, but clearly these are Internet-savvy people who probably use many of the Internet properties listed, just like me. And, who spend more time online than watching TV, where most of those consumer brands live.

I am a rare user of many of these consumer brands and I spend more time online than watching TV. So what gives? Are CPG messages still so ubiquitous that I cannot otherwise tune out? What would Rob Walker have to say about this?