This Is A Generic Branding Video, released last week by Dissolve, the video stock service, has already garnered nearly 870,000 hits on YouTube.
It’s funny, and clearly struck a nerve.
Based on a piece by Kendra Eash in McSweeney’s, and stringing together footage from Dissolve’s video library, we’re presented with a branding film that is uncannily familiar.
Now, it’s easy to mock corporations for what appears to be their collective commitment to unimaginative conformity.
But they may be hipper than you think.
Generic Branding Videos Are Fashion-Forward
Consider the fashion phenomenon of Normcore Fashion. Over the last few months it’s been all the rage, with journals like Vanity Fair and Vogue writing about it at length.
Put simply, Normcore is a fashion trend that celebrates conformity. As Fiona Duncan writes in New York Magazine, Normcore embraces “sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool, rather than striving for ‘difference’ or ‘authenticity’.”
It’s not about standing out, but blending in. It’s an open rejection of individuality, expressed through bad mom jeans and sweatsuits.
Rather than aspire to artisanal uniqueness, Normcore is about corporate homogeneity. And unlike the hipsters who try so hard to carve out an inimitable identity, Normcore followers expend as little energy as possible (or so it seems) to renounce personal style altogether.
There’s an honesty and integrity to Normcore which I just love. And you can look at generic corporate videos as being equally upstanding.
Like Normcore, Generic Brand Videos Acknowledge Who We Really Are
Normcore recognizes the dull collective sameness of contemporary American culture. Despite the media bombarding us with the message that we are all unique, that we all pursue singular “lifestyles,” Normcore finally acknowledges what we’ve all secretly suspected for some time: that we’re just consumers who spend our lives browsing the internet, purchasing corporate dreck and getting stoned.
We’re as manufactured and generic as the stuff we buy.
So, This Is A Generic Brand Video can be seen not as lampooning corporate culture, but rather as celebrating its wisdom and insight.
The bland corporate videos it parodies may be the most fashion-forward artifacts our culture has to offer.
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