I was browsing drearily on my iPad the other day, looking for some new diversion, and found something called the “Logos Quiz.” Stupidly I assumed (for various reasons) that this was a Bible quiz. And I’m just a fool for Bible games and such.
But the game is far more insidious than any Bible quiz.
You are presented with a table of several dozen advertising logos: images, typography, color schemes. None is complete. You must identify them.
At first I was sniffingly scornful. Some ad agency put this together, I thought; product placement as a game. Hmm. Starbucks, of course. Firefox. Barbie . . .
Then: goodness, I thought. This is harder than it looks.
There are (I think) eight levels; I’ve only made it to Level Five. The brands aren’t just American, but worldwide. Some are achingly familiar; others are almost-but-not-quite obvious. (Quick, describe the insignia on a Saab!) Sometimes it’s just a font, or a combination of colors.
I was amazed when I opened the Financial Times on Monday and found that the redoubtable Lucy Kellaway had written this week's column on the Logos Quiz! (I was angry, a little, because I’d already made up my mind to write about it, and Lucy stole most of my thunder by making most of my points before I could. But she writes so much better than I do, so there’s no real harm done on the cosmic scale.)
Here are some of her points, and mine:
Point One: Advertising / logos are insidious. They dig into your brain and nest there. You will be amazed at what you recognize viscerally. (Quick! Sketch me the Nike logo! I know you can!)
Point Two: Things that are obvious to me as a fifty-four-year-old are not obvious to a twenty-year-old, and vice versa. (Lucy, close to my age, recognized the Kodak logo right away, but her young son didn’t; he recognized the Xbox logo right away, but was scandalized that his mother didn’t.)
Point Three (Which Lucy Didn’t Make In Her FT Article): The companies must be giggling about how this game is working in their favor. People are actually Googling their logos and corporate branding! (My first thought, when I saw the game, was that it was somehow sponsored by a corporation or group of corporations. I still think that this might be true. Who knows?)
Postscript: I don’t know if you read Thomas Gibson. He’s a little too FutureWorld even for me. But I read one of his novels, “Pattern Recognition,” a few years ago, and it made a little impression on me, mostly because its main character is a media consultant who reacts to corporate logos on an instinctive level. You know the Michelin Man? She has a reaction to him that resembles anaphylactic shock.
I think I understand that. I used to feel the same way about Speedy Alka-Seltzer.
(Now: can someone explain to me the logo with the letter “N” shooting a laser beam off into space?)
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