Spike DDB Explores Brooklyn the Brand in New Short Film

While Brooklyn has recently risen in vogue, it has always been at the cutting edge of culture. The borough and its bridges have captivated authors from Jose Marti to Walt Whitman. It is estimated that 1 in 7 Americans can trace their immigrant heritage to or through the streets of Brooklyn.  Today it stands as an example of America's diverse future with 64% of its population not being white and nearly half of its population having a language other than English as their mother tongue.  From breaking the colour barrier in baseball to being home to America’s second largest public art museum, Brooklyn is simply at the center of culture creation.  

All this cultural richness and heritage has manifest itself over the last twenty years in a growing home to incredible entrepreneurial growth and innovation.  Brooklyn is now home to a number of great restless new brands and has developed a great identity recognized by people globally.  Brooklyn today embodies a special mystique, identity and ubiquity

In many ways, then, Brooklyn is a classic brand and brand story. As such, Spike DDB sought to explore the core pillars of “Brooklyn the Brand” with its current “brand managers” – the leaders, entrepreneurs, and makers who are invested in the brand, leveraging the brand in their business or involved in some form of commerce as a result of the Brooklyn phenomenon. The result was this film and key learnings/lessons in brand building. Those can be summarized as:

- Timelessness of brands as ideas

- Cultural competence

- Scaling as a measure of proficiency not efficiency

- Growing with a community vs. selling to a community

Participants in the project included Spike Lee, Brooklyn Brewery, anthropologist Marcus Watson, DJ Spinner, and a series of small Brooklyn business that are branded as such.