For the sake of anyone that doesn’t know Tyler The Creator he has successfully built a music career, without benefit of radio air play, and leveraged it into commercial production, including Mountain Dew, a carnival, The Loiter Squad- a Cartoon Network TV series and a clothing line which sold more than $250,000 in socks alone last year. His success is built on an innate ability to build himself as a distinctively differentiated brand. I am posting his interview here from a recent Arsenio Hall show where he makes, I think, a very solid observation, and illustration of a missed brand differentiation opportunity, for the recent YouTube Music Awards.
Traditional television is pulling out all the stops and gathering resources and marketing talent to outdo Internet “television” (like Netflix and Hulu) and streaming video platforms (like YouTube) through distinctive audience engagement and first-to-market programming, Internet extensions and branding opportunities.
YouTube success and continued growth is all about a model that lets us all finds the undiscovered. It provides a platform for and access to creativity we might not otherwise encounter. That is a distinction of the YouTube brand. True brand differentiation is marketing gold.
As “traditional television” aggressively moves ahead to the next new thing it is surprising that rather than leveraging the music awards to affirm its brand differentiation YouTube instead jumped on the bandwagon of the same old same old and produced a “me too” awards show. The recent YouTube Music Awards were a great illustration of a missed opportunity for brand differentiation. I’ll Tyler The Creator take from here.
