In this video, we are going to talk about the rebrand that pushed Bad Bunny to the next level. But really, we're going to talk about creative relationships and the creative direction of personality. It's timely, as we are about to see Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl, and there is a cultural conversation around him like never before.
But also, this is something I've been looking at a lot personally, as someone who has gone from a normal person to an internet personality and been noticing more and more kinships to what actually happens with musicians as we've gone on tour, begun thinking about our content and releases, and had to think more about art direction beyond just the content being made online. And with that, in Southern California life, my friends are musicians, they're on reality shows, and more and more, we're talking about how they can creative direct their career.
And over the course of the last two years of sharing all the creative and marketing things I know, I've been hit up by countless artists and had a quandary I'm sure a lot of other creatives deal with. Should I be solving for them or for me? Which vision makes the most sense?
So today, we're going to talk about counter positioning. We're going to talk about the power of art direction inside developing a personality and in the music industry. We're going to talk about creative relationships and the role of having someone by your side as a personality, or the role of being a creative in someone else's world. We're going to talk about vision extension and how to create a movement that's larger than life. Creative bravery in the modern era, and authentic, unapologetic, cultural authenticity. And how staying true to yourself is helping people go more pop than ever.
It's a bit different than any other video I've done that still has those same through lines of tactical creative advice you can apply to your career, whether you are a personality yourself or whether you are on the creative side. We will have plenty of Bad Bunny's incredible graphics inside this video. Let's lock in. But first, I want to talk about positioning. I've used this term before in marketing. How your brand stands against the others that are in the market already, that are established.
Now, when you walk into a store, this is easy to think about. If you're launching a mac and cheese brand, you're positioning against Kraft mac and cheese. You can choose to position based on making a healthier option, a lower-price alternative, specific ingredients, a look and feel like the Liquid Death position to say we're counterculture. But how does that work for a personality?
When Bad Bunny entered the reggaeton category, he came in with a perfect example of counterposition. The current category codes were extremely hip-hop-based and mainstream hip-hop: cars, chains, ultra masculinity. And he came in with nail polish, pink hoodies, cross-dressing, with the same attitude and feeling. The album title, YHLQMDLG, was a turning point for this, and it translates into, I do whatever I want. And this wasn't just an album name. This was an operating system for how Bad Bunny, as a personality, approached this industry. But by loudly moving left when everyone else moves right, he immediately positions himself out from the crowd.
And we've seen examples of this before. Tyler, the Creator, basically did it twice. First, with the collective they have with Odd Future, which counterpositioned against the current hip-hop of the time by being extremely in its skateboard roots, by being a collective, by being provocative, but also by just having all of its facets, its ability to move back and forth between his music to Frank Ocean, the storytelling of individuals, the personalities, in a way that we'd rarely seen in that era, especially from people so young.
But then he repositioned this, rejecting every visual code, both of underground hip-hop and of mainstream rap: pastels, golf, preppy camp, Flower Boy aesthetics. Smart in several ways. It positioned him against himself, against the dark and angry lyrics that we saw prior, against the vision of Odd Future as something that wasn't safe for families or kids and your teens shouldn't be listening to. His brand is the anti-streetwear streetwear. And it created a lane so strong, it arguably didn't exist before, and took him all the way to collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Something stylistically, without this visual lane, never would have gotten there.
And you can imagine, as someone fashion-forward, when you're starting to look at that vision, it's not about where that vision is, it's about where it can take you. In 10 years, is this a vision that can collaborate with Louis Vuitton? There's data that came out this week about what Bad Bunny's appearance at the Grammys did for Schiaparelli's numbers. A Parisian couture house making a menswear look for reggaeton, their first ever haute couture menswear look. And something that, when you look at this initial vision, this initial counterculture, you can see all the through lines and how that would be embraced by modern fashion to where it gets to today.
In female pop, Billie Eilish is a perfect example. Refusing the hyper-sexualized pop star uniform that we see again and again today: baggy clothes, spider imagery. And when she does choose to do it years and years later, it's on her own terms. That gives her the ability to collaborate with Nike, to be able to be an outlier versus the field.
And this has more power than you'd think. Look at this in the guru world that I inhabit, guru countersignaling. Think of all the old marketing people you've heard talk about the things you learn from. And there's a certain demographic that will hear me in a House of Errors hoodie that says a lot about me and how I want to communicate to an audience versus what the field was prepped for. To be able to say, hey, the expertise doesn't necessarily come from the old guard now, from people whose fashion or look doesn't matter. People like Hermozi that position against that, against caring at all.
But if you want to be good in marketing, you want to be in branding, you need to be in the know. Everything you say is a signaler. This whole presentation is a thing that embodies the taste that I have and why you would listen to me versus someone who doesn't care about the details. Which brings us to art direction over everything. You'll notice this transition in 2020, at the album I talked about, where all of a sudden, Bad Bunny's videos became spectacle. The album shoots became mirroring what we see in the rise of streetwear and fashion that happened at the same time. And this now, for a large part, defines pop reggaeton in general.
Rosalía is perhaps my favorite art-directed artist overall. She deserves her entire own video. But the combination of high fashion, religious iconography, execution of campaign, there's nothing she does that is not visually stunning. And the combination of the two of them, and how visually driven they are, how every release looks like a fashion shoot, how every music video is an art form, set a standard for that entire niche. But it couldn't happen without this next segment, creative relationships.
So this video is a little bit about Bad Bunny, but it's more about Stills, a photographer that started as Bad Bunny's tour photographer at 21 and eventually became his creative director. His partnership became official around the 2020 music video release of Vete. And you'll see a specific creative vision in all the work that mirrors the creative director.
You go back through Stills' entire Instagram, you see all this shot-on-film and shot-on-Polaroid items that capture real life in a specific way, a lot of it of Bad Bunny, a lot of it of scenes from all around the life he's lived, around interesting, fame-adjacent people. But there's a relentless connection to the moment. There's a focus on craft and that film narrative. But importantly, there's a story of the two of them growing together, that it's not just Bad Bunny's journey or just Stills' journey, but we're basically watching the vision play out in music and visuals and amongst personalities that couldn't exist without the other.
And in a world where anyone can be a creator, where we can all pretty easily attain some degree of internet fame, pop stardom becomes harder than ever. How do you rise out of the ashes, get your viral song, make your hundred clips again and again until something catches on, becomes a TikTok trending audio, then release proper visuals and continue forward? In the same way that if you are a photographer or videographer, an artist, you're just chipping away to get whatever fame and work you can, utilizing these democratized platforms. But the power comes in numbers.
One of the themes you'll hear me talk a lot about throughout this entire year is the theme of squats, that we don't want to follow just the one person. We want to follow the group, who are inherently more interesting in how people interact, about the friend group that's online, about why collaborations go so well. And they're algorithmically rewarded as well, because if you watch a video with someone, they do a collab video or show up in someone else's video, the algorithms test the audiences to each other. And if they like them, they cross-pollinate them. Hence why you'll see make your hundred clips again and again until something catches on,
becomes a TikTok trending audio, then release proper visuals and continue forward? In the same way that if you are a photographer or videographer, an artist, you're just chipping away to get whatever fame and work you can, utilizing these democratized platforms. But the power comes in numbers. One of the themes we'll hear me talk a lot about throughout this entire year is the theme of squats. That we don't want to follow just the one person. We want to follow the group, who are inherently more interested in how people interact, about the friend group that's online, about collaborations go so well. And they're algorithmically rewarded as well
because if you watch a video with someone, they do a collab video or show up in someone else's video, the algorithms test the audiences to each other. And if they like them, they cross-pollinate them. Hence why you'll see there's a relentless stream of TJR and Brez, all the way to TJR and Chris Heen, if you're operating in the male world. The same thing happening with Alex Hromozzi and Tony Robbins. And a lot of this creator collaboration is based on the traditional music collaboration, on the guest verse or feature. There's a lot more that these have in common than you'd think. But for anyone who's in that creative field, you need a vehicle, whether that's a brand,
whether that's a person, but tend to be not just your own stuff, someone else to build on top of. Can you go creative direct inside of someone else's world, help them build that out, and create something bigger than either of you could have done prior? We've become so self-reliant. We can do so much on our own that there's less of that collaboration than ever. And if you look at this, Kanye West may be the most interesting example. Virgil Abloh, Hashi Murakami, Vanessa Beecroft, George Kondo. He didn't hire designers. He collaborated with artists. He brought them into his world, other producers, other people operating around him at all times,
helping propel his vision forward. And they all leaving with even more fame, recognition, inspiration, and understanding of how to navigate this world of fame, of music, of branding than they had before, even at the highest level. Murakami graduation bears, an entrance point to a different world. Kanye elevated them and they elevated him. And we haven't seen anything even remotely like it since. And it doesn't have to be that big. It can be what we see here, that one-to-one relationship. All right, so I want to help you add a skill to your toolkit today. So I'm going to give you an overview of how to do a competitive website audit in 2026 using the platform SimilarWeb.
And you won't believe the info that you can actually get about competitive brand websites. And so if you have a brand, you can actually research what's really happening with your competitors. And if you are a marketer, you can create a concrete plan of steps that you need to do with your team to have an impact. So starting inside the platform, there's a whole bunch of tools you can see here: Keyword research, backlinks, advertising activity. We're going to start with AI brand visibility. So this is a big conversation right now. And you can quickly see if a brand has a modern strategy. You'll get a breakdown of how much traffic they're actually getting
from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity. And we'll break down how often AI chatbots recommend your brand in the topics relevant to your business. You can see here brand visibility, the brand mention share, the key topics that are happening, and an LLM comparison based on those topics you can go through. Then a list of prompts with their top brands. There's also some notes on where it pulls citations from. And then sentiment analysis, whether the AI talks about your brand in a good or bad way. This is the first year where, for a lot of brands, this is becoming a significant referral traffic source. So you can go into any website specifically and then look at
much more information inside SimilarWeb. I can go here and click into referral and see how many referral visits that they're getting over this 90-day period, adjust the timing, and I can look at what sites are actually driving that. Monitor to see where sites are sending traffic to competitors and not you. Same thing in search. You can see the search traffic that a brand is getting. You can see their branded and non-branded keywords. And importantly, you can see their landing pages. Where are they driving their organic and paid traffic? You can see what's being tested and click into those. Same thing with ad and campaign performance. You can actually see the display ads
that they're running: Google ads, YouTube ads, info on their PPC spend, and exactly what creative they're running. This checklist will give you a comprehensive list of how I would go through a web audit and all the different things that I would check if I was doing a comparison inside an industry that you can tap back to anytime you need. And you can get all this info about your industry on SimilarWeb, which I will link down here in the description. And I want to thank them so much for sponsoring this video. And with that comes others, right? Sturdy does a ton of Bad Bunny's tour work and have amazing looking product and a real focus on what they do. Rosalia has multiple
creative partners, Canada, Pill, and Spain. But this doesn't come from waiting for the gig to hit you up. For Stills, it was a tour photography gig that led to a creative direction. It comes from collaboration in the moment with people as they rise. That leads us to vision extension. Taking a creative vision beyond music into a full world. The album art, the stages, the merchandise, the collaborations, the other artists, the social media presence, working to become a vibe. There's been a lot of talk, you notice I didn't go deep on it because it's so saturated, about the Marty Supreme rollout. And it's reported that Aiden Zamiri, the creative mind behind Brat,
was also behind the rollout of Marty Supreme. High-impact, bold, unconventional marketing tactics that built a world that surrounded themselves with a color, the green of Brat to the orange of Marty Supreme. The stunts, the iconography, taking the platforms these artists already had and saying, how do you escalate on top of this as heavily as you humanly can? And thinking about the cultural moments, Boiler Room and how that's branded into this rollout, people being able to make their own covers, into Timothy's run across music, film, shouting out Susan Boyle. Creating a world isn't easy, but it starts with a vision. And someone, at some point, on the creative side
or the musician side has to sit down and say, we need a vision, who's going to craft it? Fun anecdote I have is before Brat rolled out, I'd say maybe nine months before that, I was on a call with Charlie XCX's creative team because they were hunting for people. They want to do merchandise better. They want to do creative direction better. I was very popular online talking about a lot of that. That was in the era where I still did tons of custom merch as one of the main things I worked on. And their team was hunting for the people that eventually became the Brat team. And I remember at the time being lightly bummed and surprised that I wasn't hit back on stuff
because I was pretty good at the things I was doing. And then when I saw the full extent of the rollout, I was like, all right, touche. But it starts with we have to hunt for the vision. Then comes the people you are going to work on it with and what it could be. And then comes the cultural ways things move in the world now. And it has to exist in memes and shareability. It has to exist in leveraging the monoculture moments that we have left and the clipping of those. Boiler Room is a monoculture moment for a certain segment. Monoculture might not be the right word, but penetration of a subculture to its maximum amount. For the London, New York party megaplex,
you hit complete saturation there and there's enough tastemakers that can shift outward. The press moments, the collaborations, the generation people can take in their own hand, the physical artifacts people can pick up and buy, the popcorn buckets, the extensions into the virality of the world, the sphere. That's operating at the highest level. How can you operate at the level that you're at? If I think about my small town that I'm in, the handful of accounts that there are, the places where everyone congregates, you can begin to film a picture of what that universe looks like you can operate in. But it comes down to wanting to have that vision. Someone has to decide
that they want to take it that far. This ties into creative bravery because a lot of these campaigns weren't for everyone. Tyler, the Creator, dressing like he did, saying what he said, for better or for worse, takes a significant amount of creative bravery. Bad Bunny going in full drag, getting involved in the politics of gender in both America and Puerto Rico, being in the ring for the Super Bowl, can take in their own hand, the physical artifacts people can pick up and buy, the popcorn buckets, the extensions into the virality of the world, the sphere. That's operating at the highest level. How can you operate at the level that you're at? If I think about
my small town that I'm in, the handful of accounts that there are, the places where everyone congregates, you can begin to film a picture of what that universe looks like you can operate in. But it comes down to wanting to have that vision. Someone has to decide that they want to take it that far. This ties into creative bravery because a lot of these campaigns weren't for everyone. Tyler, the Creator, dressing like he did, saying what he said, for better or for worse, takes a significant amount of creative bravery. Bad Bunny going in full drag, getting involved in the politics of gender in both America and Puerto Rico, being in the ring for the Super Bowl, Kendrick Lamar
choosing to go as hard as he did on a beef where he's essentially risking his life. But this ties to that bigger trend of true authenticity. One of the things I love to call out about Bad Bunny is that if you're in LA, you've ever worked in any kind of manufacturing warehouse. If you know some of my past, we had a bunch of manufacturing in Los Angeles, in Arizona, and in Oregon. Remember that the only music everyone can agree on, why Bad Bunny is so popular in these areas, is that everyone in general, if you're in any space like that, you have a bunch of different cultures, everyone agrees on Bad Bunny. So it's constantly playing throughout that. But it's all in Spanish.
There's no English crossover. I like to run a parallel between Bad Bunny and BTS, the K-pop stars, who also are Korean language, Korean concepts, Korean cultural references. They refuse to make English-language albums to break America until very late in the arc. They made the infrastructure and the stardom theirs, and it carried on beyond them, without language having to be a factor. The same thing happened for Bad Bunny. My kid knows more Spanish from Bad Bunny songs than anything else. Cultural authenticity can reach industrial scale because we don't buy into just the songs anymore. You buy into what's happening in pop culture, you buy into the visuals,
you buy into the social media experience, the fandom. And the mantra now is we do not go pop. Pop comes at us. Brat is an abrasive album for most of the population. It's not an easy listen if you like traditional pop music. But all of these are rooted, whether her and the queer-adjacent party scene, whether Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico, BTS in South Korea, they have actual cultural authenticity. And you'll notice that the scale with which people can operate is limited without it. Timothee Chowell may perhaps be the most interesting one, where he's able to embrace his love of the Knicks and his New York culture and the film references and how deep he is inside his own world
and comfortable in being this kind of next-generation savant of so many things that people see themselves in, and being able to love New York sports and love college football and love film equally, and be authentic about it, versus a lot of people who simply just aren't that interesting. They don't have anything to be intensely passionate about. There's a huge difference there. And what I'll call out is you'll need to change yourself to do it. That the more in touch you are with however native that is to you, wherever you are in the world, whatever that true culture that you actually represent is, the more powerful it is to not try and change, not be apologetic about it,
to lean into it as a through line in what you do in a world where everything matches together, that more and more people have an appreciation for so much about the world because of how we consume now. Anyway, I know this is a very different type of video from some of the ones I've done before, but continues this art direction and creative direction through line. Next week, I'll be back and we'll be talking about luxury. As always, we are doing monthly community calls. Another big one coming the last week of February. I'd love to have all y'all join. We'll have the link down below. This is just covering the tip of the world you can get into of Bad Bunny's visuals
and art direction, of music and culture in general. If you enjoyed it, before we talk about any other artists or people, I'm always looking for recommendations, and we've been doing more and more of those videos. The Creative Systems video is a recommendation. The starting social media from scratch video is a recommendation. I'm excited to try and take on some new angles this year. As always, thank y'all so much for watching. Bye. Bye. Bye. to break America until very late in the arc. They made the infrastructure and the stardom theirs, and it carried on beyond them without language having to be a factor. The same thing happened for Bad Bunny. My kid knows more Spanish
from Bad Bunny songs than anything else. Cultural authenticity can reach industrial scale because we don't buy into just the songs anymore. You buy into what's happening in pop culture, you buy into the visuals, you buy into the social media experience, the fandom. And the mantra now is we do not go pop. Pop comes at us. Brat is an abrasive album for most of the population. It's not an easy listen if you like traditional pop music. But all of these are rooted, whether her and the queer adjacent party scene, whether Bad Bunny in Puerto Rico, BTS in South Korea, they have actual cultural authenticity. And you'll notice that the scale with which people can operate
is limited without it. Timothee Chowell may perhaps the most interesting one where he's able to embrace his love of the Knicks and his New York culture and the film references and how deep he is inside his own world and comfortable in being this kind of next generation savant of so many things that people see themselves in and being able to love New York sports and love college football and love film equally and be authentic about it versus a lot of people who simply just aren't that interesting. They don't have anything to be intensely passionate about. There's a huge difference there. And what I'll call out is you'll need to change yourself to do it.
That the more in touch you are with however native that is to you, wherever you are in the world, whatever that true culture that you actually represent is, the more powerful it is to not try and change, not be apologetic about it, to lean into it as a through line in what you do in a world where everything matches together that more and more people have an appreciation for so much about the world because of how we consume now. Anyway, I know this is a very different type of video from some of the ones I've done before, but continues this art direction and creative direction through line. Next week, I'll be back and we'll be talking about luxury. As always,
we are doing monthly community calls. Another big one coming the last week of February. I'd love to have all y'all join. We'll have the link down below. This is just covering the tip of the world you can get into of Bad Bunny's visuals and art direction, of music and culture in general. If you enjoyed it, before we talk about any other artists or people, I'm always looking for recommendations and we've been doing more and more of those videos. The Creative Systems video is a recommendation. The starting social media from scratch video is a recommendation. I'm excited to try and take on some new angles this year. As always, thank y'all so much for watching.
Bye. Bye. Bye.