An adman from Germany recently told me that 20,000 new brands are launched worldwide every year. He may well be right - a quick Google search reveals that there are more than 20,000 brands of beers in the world right now. And that's just beer. No wonder brands are shouting at us more loudly and insistently than ever before.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that, at the same time, I was writing an article about advertising within iPad apps, but this business of 20,000 brands actually gave me nightmares. (My mother used to say that eating cheese causes nightmares, by the way. But that can't be true, otherwise French people would never sleep.) In my nightmare, newspapers had begun selling their photos to brands. In other words, let's say you have a photo of Barack Obama in your app for Le Monde. When you swipe Obama's suit with your finger, it tells you which brand it is and then provides a link to a site where you can buy it. Touch a picture of starving folk in Sudan and you're taken to a site where you can make a charity donation. Photos of sports stars are digitally linked to their sponsors. And so on. With newspapers still struggling to rebuild their business model in the era of free online information, my dream seemed frighteningly plausible. Except for the part about Obama's suit. After all, he seems to have a pretty awful tailor.
