Marx to Marketing

Hi, it's Anna here.

I genuinely love making New Year's resolutions, and always follow through on those I set. But this year is different, I’m moving around too much to form habits or see clearly the path I’m on. So instead of goals, I'm working on a 2025 manifesto. More vibes and intentions than goals and ticklists. After two decades in advertising, it’s a familiar format for me.

Manifestos have been used for centuries by academics, artists, politicians and provocators to challenge conventions, spark debates and explore the irrational. The Communist Manifesto might be the most notable example. Widely referenced, though too dense to be widely read.

Centuries after Marx and Engles outlined a worker’s revolution, the manifesto is once again a trending Google search. There has been much speculation over Luigi Mangione's scrawled note and at the time of writing journalists are still unpacking why a Tesla Cybertruck was blown up in front of Trump Tower.

Despite these darker appropriations, manifestos continue to evolve as tools for radical imagination. While the Futurists once proclaimed the death of museums, more contemporary artist manifestos often explore the spaces between the self and the system. The Cyberfeminist Manifesto is one of my favourites, drawing a through line from the womb (“matrix” in Latin) to the internet matrix: “we are… saboteurs of big daddy mainframe.”

These creative proclamations often embrace contradiction rather than certainty, suggesting that perhaps the most radical act is to remain open to continuous transformation. Less destroying the old world and more imagining multiple possible futures simultaneously.

I wonder if this resurgence of manifestos will influence how we think of the form in advertising.

Thanks to agencies like Wieden+Kennedy, manifestos have been spilling out of pitch decks and onto our screens for years. Our commercial breaks are filled with booming voices declaring things like "where there are cooks there is hope" to sell butter. The most compelling brand manifestos succeed by doing what art manifestos have always done - they make the familiar strange again.

Diverging from Marx the advertising industry has developed a particular style of creative manifesto. Short sentences. Punchy sentiments. Fragmented like the way we consume media.

But, some brands use the creative format to express deeper corporate commitments. When Patagonia declared "Don't Buy This Jacket," they demonstrated how the sum of a manifesto can be bigger than the short sentences it contains. Their message carried weight because it emerged from decades of environmental activism - inviting us to reimagine our relationship with consumption.

Nike's "Just Do It" touches something deeper about human potential and Apple's "Think Different" simultaneously critiques and participates in corporate culture. Their impact comes from this intersection of style and substance rather than choosing between the two.

The most famous brand manifestos work at this meta-level, not just selling products but reframing how we think about entire categories of experience. They give us handholds on massive cultural shifts, creating what philosopher Timothy Morton might call a "hyperobject" - something too large to see in its entirety but that we can feel the edges of.

As we move deeper into an era where brands increasingly function as cultural actors, the role of brand manifestos becomes more complex. What happens when corporate declarations become our most widely-shared visions of possible futures? How do we navigate the space between authentic cultural contribution and commodified revolution? These are questions worth exploring as we continue to blur the lines between commerce, culture, and collective imagination.

As we step into 2025, an age where attention spans shrink but crises loom larger, perhaps the manifesto - brief, bold, uncompromising - is exactly the form we need. Or perhaps, brands should leave this form to the artists and the assassins and move on to something new?

Anna Rose Kerr
Freelance Creative Director & Consultant

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