Everyone planted the same flag

A couple climbed the Empire State Building, planted a flag, and proposed. Within a week every brand had pasted its logo over that flag with AI. Here's what that says about brand identity, and the difference between making a moment and renting one.

By Tymel Young, Owner and Creative Director

By now you've seen it. Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov, two daredevil climbers with a following for scaling skyscrapers, got to the top of the Empire State Building, unfurled a banner, and Ivan proposed. Call it planting a flag. It was reckless and romantic and a little insane, the kind of real, chaotic, cinematic thing you can't script or fake. The internet did what the internet does and lost its mind, for about a day.

Then the brands showed up.

Within a week that banner was every logo on earth. Grab the image, drop your brand mark onto it with AI, add a caption about "planting our flag" in whatever you happen to sell, post. One did it. Then ten. Then everyone. A genuinely poetic feat got flattened into a template, and the template got run into the ground by lunch.

The moment was real. The copies weren't.

Here's what got lost in the pile-on. Two people climbed a skyscraper they had no permission to be on, past security built to stop them. There was risk, and fear, and a story they'll tell for the rest of their lives, partly because they spent the first night of that engagement in separate holding cells and now face eight charges. That's why it traveled. Not the banner. The nerve.

The AI versions kept the flag and threw away the nerve. They kept the picture and deleted the only thing that made it worth looking at. What's left is a logo on a borrowed sky.

There's a reason people still lose it over a real stunt. When Tom Cruise hangs off the side of an actual plane, we feel it, because some part of us knows a person is really up there. Swap it for a clean CGI version and the whole thing goes flat, even when it looks better. We can tell. We can always tell. A real moment carries something a rendered one never will, and audiences read that difference on instinct whether they can name it or not. It's the same shift we wrote about in the rise of the intellectual influencer, where people started rewarding the real thing and scrolling past the manufactured one.

Pasting your logo on someone else's climb is the CGI version of having a point of view.

The couple risked arrest for their moment. The brands risked a prompt.

Borrowed relevance is not a brand identity

I've started calling this borrowed relevance. It's when a brand rents a cultural moment it had nothing to do with, staples its logo on, and calls it marketing. It feels productive. You're "part of the conversation." You shipped something today.

But borrowed relevance is not a brand identity. A brand identity is what people recognize when the logo isn't there. A point of view, a look, a way of showing up that reads as yours. Borrowed relevance is the opposite. It's a costume you put on for a day because everyone else was wearing it, and you take it off the second the trend cools.

A brand identity is what people recognize when the logo isn't there.

You can't build an identity out of other people's moments. You can only build a habit of chasing them.

One is a wink. A thousand is wallpaper.

To be fair, the first one or two were fun. The first brand to do the logo-on-the-flag bit got a laugh, because it was fast and knowing and a little cheeky. That's the whole appeal of a trend, done once, with timing.

The problem is a trend has a shelf life measured in hours, and there are a million brands online. So the wink becomes a shrug becomes wallpaper. By the time you saw it, made your version, ran it past legal, and posted, you were the four hundredth identical flag in the feed. Nobody remembers the four hundredth of anything.

This is the quiet tragedy of trend-first social media marketing. It optimizes for the one thing that doesn't matter, being present, and ignores the only one that does, being remembered.

But it got reach

I know the counter-argument, because I've made it myself. Reach. The trend was free distribution. Riding it put you in front of people who'd never have found you otherwise, and brands have always borrowed from culture, so what's the problem.

All true, and none of it saves the move. Borrowing from culture is old and good, when you bring something to it. A great campaign takes a cultural moment and adds a point of view, a joke, a craft, a reason it belongs to you. The logo-on-the-flag version adds nothing but the logo. That isn't borrowing from culture. It's photocopying it.

And reach was never the point. Reach is a means. If a million people scroll past your logo on a stranger's flag and not one of them can tell you apart from the brand that did the same thing nine posts earlier, you didn't get seen. You got averaged. You paid attention rent and built no equity.

So what is the brand for?

Which brings me to the question under all of this, and it's a real one, not a rhetorical one. What is the goal?

What's the goal of your branding, if your brand identity is interchangeable with everyone else's on a Tuesday? What's the goal of your social media marketing, if the win condition is "we also did the thing"? What's the goal of a brand identity at all, if it dissolves into the sea of memes the moment a trend gives you cover to stop thinking?

The goal was never to be in the conversation. It was to be worth talking about. Those are different jobs, and only one of them compounds. It's the same reason we keep arguing that the best brand work is built to last, not built to trend.

The only flag worth planting

Trends aren't dead. They're fine. Use them when you have a real angle and the timing to pull it off. But a trend is a borrowed moment, and a brand is one you make yourself. The brands worth remembering plant their own flags, and that's the work we care about.

The couple climbed the building. You opened an AI tool. Everyone can tell the difference, and they're keeping score whether you like it or not.

Plant your own flag. It's the only one anyone remembers.

Raised Media Co. is a New York video production and commercial photography agency built for brands.