According to Marketing Dive, Beats launched a new ad for its customizable Beats 360 headphones in which a cafe is packed with different versions of Kendall Jenner. The cafe in the ad is, of course, called Kendalls.
The genius of the Franchise of One is that the math works. One Kendall is a celebrity. Eleven Kendalls in a room is a business plan. The CMO said the point is that everyone has many different versions of themselves, which is a roundabout way of admitting the product is one woman with swappable parts, exactly like the headphones. The ad does not need other people in it, per the CMO, and the book one of the clones is reading is called The Parallel Lives of Us. That is not a prop. That is the entire memo.
Set to Are Friends Electric? and the whole campaign fits in three words. Yes. Friends. Electric, and all of them Kendall. Beats will tell you this is a partnership, not an endorsement, because partnership is the word that survives contact with a lawyer. The Beats family now includes two half-sisters, which is as close as the headphone business gets to a soap opera.
Next time the algorithm decides you want a headphone, know what is on the other side of that retargeting pixel. An empty cafe where every woman is her own focus group.
YOUR TURN: Is a room full of Kendalls an ad, or a hostage situation?
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