Was it a coincidence that this year’s Victoria Park fireworks were Blitz themed? Or that the muted colours of fashion’s contemporary pallet echo wartime sobriety? Or that the Conservative’s Party Conference slogan was ‘together in the national interest’? Probably not. We Brits slip all too easily into the wartime spirit. Shaped by our grandparents’ experiences, our wartime mentality today rears is head in unexpected places, like battling through the supermarket on Christmas Eve or when it snows. Or during a recession. The French riot and the Greeks strike. The Brits really do seem to keep calm and carry on. Such a large number of bright young things who can’t find jobs are starting up rather than signing on, that Britain is experiencing a start-up boom in the middle of the crunch with the number of new business enterprises more than doubling in the first half of 2010. Over 200,000 kitchen table entrepreneurs set up companies this year, based on lean and adaptive business models that can be nimble in a volatile economy. As a nation we love the sense that we’re all in it together – and we thrive in the face of adversity. “A nation famed for our privacy and reservation, we show a very British unity through hardship,” says Max Wind-Cowie, head of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos. “Far from the fad of 90’s Cool Britannia, our modern, quiet patriotism is stronger than anyone cares to admit.”

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Whilst the rest of society wastes away its days staring at the idiot’s lantern, rock and pop stars continue their march towards world domination. It would appear that banging out pop songs for the hit parade qualifies you to do…well, pretty much anything. As Jon Bon Jovi so humbly and helpfully explained in his rockumentary When We Were Beautiful’, he isn’t just a soft rock front man but “CEO of a major corporation whose been running a brand for 25 years”. The latest popular brand extension for musical types is film score composing. Hot on the heels of Nine Inch Nailer Trent Reznor scoring Social Network, comes Daft Punk and the Tron remake. The electro robots didn’t just contribute individual tracks, but worked with the studio from the planning stages to score the whole movie, even down to sound effects. The results are well worth the wait. Not all brand extensions are a success however, as demonstrated by Kanye West’s crushingly awful ‘hip-hopera’ Runaway. However, thank God someone is cranking out operas because the rest of us are too busy watching TV.

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There’s a lot of talk about ‘hipsters’ at the moment. From the YouTube hit ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’ to hipster hate forums, one thing is clear: it’s not about a tribe of hipsters anymore; it’s about a tribe of anti-hipsters. So I was intrigued to learn recently of an alleged new hipster on the block: The Christian hipster. This involves pastors looking to hipsters in a bid to keep the faith relevant, according to a new book by Bret McCracken When Cool and Christ Collide. McCracken says shock value is key to hipster Christianity, and explores the hipster influence on the religion, from services held in bars, to metrosexual pastors wearing tight Ed Hardy-esque tees and faux-hawk dos. Its “yoof” marketing at it’s most horrible. What Christian marketers don’t seem to get is that today’s twentysomethings want authenticity more than they want cool. If Christianity has any youth appeal, then it probably lies in its perceived integrity and heritage. As Scholar David Wells in his book The Courage to be Protestant says, ”Younger generations who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them.”

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So Banksy’s done a title sequence for The Simpsons. Whilst he’s not actually a graffiti artist, you can’t help but marvel at how far ‘urban art’, for want of a better term, has come. The Simpsons is the final and ultimate confirmation of cultural significance to the masses. How fitting then that the man most hated by the graffiti community – lambasted as an ‘artfag’, a fraud and a sell-out – should claim the accolade. Although they spend most of their free time painting anything that stands still long enough to gain fame and notoriety, hardcore writers are totally against the level of mainstream attention that Banksy has got. He’s cultivated himself as a commercial brand. And that they cannot abide. Ironic really when you consider that all writers are brands. Apparently they just like them local and independent.

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Maybe brands are in the best position to be the new impresarios – organisers, sponsors, and producers of public entertainment. Certainly the arts can’t look to the government to fill the funding gap. Tate Modern gets less than a third of its sponsorship from the state versus 82% five years ago, and that’s before the Coalition swings the axe. Yet art is now mass populist entertainment: more people went to a museum last year than to a football match. Brands are already in on the act. Intel’s Creators Project, in partnership with Vice, describes itself as a new kind of arts and culture channel – distribution medium meets content creation studio. What speaks for itself is the range of talent involved, from music, gaming, film and art. Taking the role of impresario demands originality. By creating dance productions like no one had seen before, the Ballets Russes electrified an entertainment format that had been trading on past glories. In marketing, fashionable wisdom holds that the future for branded communication is giving individuals the means to remix and recombine existing elements on behalf of a brand (recombinant culture theory). Diaghilev is a reminder to advertisers with a budget to create – and curate – original content, that nothing galvanises audiences like the shock of the genuinely new.

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Now in its 3rd year, the mini festival that is the Do Lectures made us want to do all over again. Craig Mod, a vexingly smart and young publisher and writer, talked about the future of the book in the iPad age. He believes that rather than killing off the publishing industry, new technology will enable it to survive. In the future publishing ecology, there will be fewer but better made books and currently unforeseen ways of reading. This will arise not just from advances in technology, but through a more independent, DIY culture in the way stories are written, designed, promoted, and consumed by audiences. iPads and Kindles will possibly doom paperbacks to extinction, but with Will Self bemoaning that a book is published somewhere in the world every 45 seconds, that, let’s be honest, is not necessarily a bad thing.

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Lots of brands try to associate themselves with the arts but it doesn’t often come off as a genuine, seamless fit (think BP and wildlife photography?!). The big corporate contribution to this year’s festival comes from Audi. What’s interesting about it from a brand point of view is that they’ve managed to pull off making it a public spectacle and use it to bring meaning to their brand ethos. Created by techie designers Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, their project Outrace allows the you to take control of eight industrial robots on loan from Audi’s production line. Visitors to Trafalgar square, or people anywhere in the world, can book a slot to interact with the installation via a Twitter-like mechanic at outrace.org. By attaching light heads onto synchronized mechanical tentacles that are equipped with LED technology from the Audi R15 race car (winner of this year’s LeMans 24h), the installation ingeniously allows users to trace light messages into the air in real time. As users write their messages, each unique light trace is recorded and uploaded to the web via HD cameras. Science fiction author Bruce Stirling has described the process as ‘Light-painting’. Explaining how they move he says, ‘They are fluid, brush like inscriptions written on the very air of London.’ Whether this was a marketing exercise by Audi or genuine involvement from their design, it is a smart expression of the Audi brand ethos and strapline ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ (progress through technology).

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Burberry is rolling out a global, state-of-the-digital-art ‘Retail Theatre’ in its stores, where the normally excluded, non-fashionista punter will be invited to see its London Fashion Week show live-streamed and buy it instantly on a special Burberry iPad app. While there is an obvious element of showmanship to the whole thing, there are also some very practical business strategies sitting at the heart of Burberry’s digital endeavor. For the best part of a decade, the high street has looked to the catwalk for ‘the next big thing’. They’ve copied it, produced it quicker, sold it cheap, and become the first place consumers go to find the latest looks. Clearly, this is not only infuriating to the major designer labels but can affect their bottom line. Burberry’s Retail Theatre is just one of the steps designer brands are taking to fight back. Its ‘runway to reality’ production model outwits the high street. We expect to see the luxury market behave more competitively with the high street, fuelled by the recession and it’s uptake of digital, which has been slow to start. But there is more than one way to play the game, so as well as a speeding up we will also see a slowing down of the luxury market. The success of timeless brands like Burberry, Hermès and Chanel right now, is a sign that consumers are looking for something more lasting and crafted.

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It’s an accepted evil. Studios buy the rights to the new Bond / Bourne / Batman and code up a piece of garbage, confident it will sell by the bucketload. Twats. Fortunately, a few bright sparks have spotted that the best way to monetize an entertainment brand might actually be to make a good game that allows fans to spend more time in the world they love. Batman: Arkham Asylum was one such cracker. And the sequel – Arkham City – looks no less substantial. These are not terrible plot-ports, but genuine additions to the Batman mythology. And coming in the next few months we have Star Wars: The Old Republic. What is it? Well, you know massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft? Well this is going to be one of those, but set in the Star Wars universe, so you can be a Jedi. Good idea, yes?

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