ISIS Hijacked The Twitter Bird

ISIS Hijacked a Brand and Created The New Big Thing in Marketing

By Sevan Gerard

I am not a logo designer but my 30 second rendition above for Homeland XYZ’s twitter account symbolizes a new future in corporate marketing where an image can tell two stories: Who I am and where you can find me.

Logo design has been the quintessential marketing task of all businesses stretching back to the earliest foundation days and is considered by most to be the life blood of an organization’s brand. These images have become the universal marketing tool to connect the mind of targeted audiences to respective brands without having to write or utter a company name. More so, marketing strategists have long invoked feelings in their audiences and segregated specific targeted groups through selections of colors, shapes and other inferential tactics.

We have seen the power of simple images like Larry, twitter’s notorious bird (shoutout to Larry Bird of course) which has become a globally recognized symbol. Of course a large part of Larry’s success as a ubiquitous logo stems from the massive growth and widespread use of twitter across all sociotechnical layers of the web. But here is the important thing: twitter has become a new dimension of the web, a tool, a device offering a service while at the same time permeating every web user’s communication quiver. Kids use it, grownups use it, protestors use it, governments and businesses use it, and terrorist organizations have now leveraged it better than any!

Let me ask you a question. When looking at these adjacent images, is there any doubt in your mind what group this represents and where you can find them? Well that is the point! ISIS inadvertently used it with such novelty that they have created a new recognized symbol by combining their brand flag with a hijacked Larry. They have Co-Branded. In good ISIS style they kidnapped someone and propped themselves on the shoulders of a giant: Twitter. ISIS was leveraging the momentum of emergent technologies and popular resources to propagate their message and legitimize the nature of their organization. With a public marketing strategy, and using legitimate and valid social media accounts, websites and other common technological platforms, ISIS entered the global marketplace posturing as an above ground, “legitimate” pre-State entity. The concept of the integration of technology and online presence as a means of legitimizing and validating organizational culture needs more exploration but does offers some intuitive validity. What is relevant to us here though is that business owners, venturists and entrepreneurs need to keep in mind that if they have a good brand, they are now at risk of hijacking. This is both the worst and best things they could wish for. The ISIS use of twitter created some concerns for the message dissemination app which now holds a small part in the success of ISIS, as does Facebook, YouTube, Telegram and so many others. Twitter should not loose sleep over what has been done but it now has to engage in activities it may have otherwise chosen to avert. Emergent opportunities keep rising from adaptive organizations and terrorist groups probably yield the greatest level of innovation in order to frame new doorways they can push their ideologies through. Their hybridization of Larry with their own brand is going to alter the way logos are designed in the future. If you run a company that offers a service or platform that the rest of the world uses to operate in some manner, then make a logo that can be hybridized with the brand of your users and you will more seamlessly become their voice. Basically offer a Larry with which organizations can do what I attempted at the top of my story and Co-Brand themselves. I suspect the Twitter Public Policy department has already braved the worst by being co-branded by ISIS, so any other ordinary business would probably be a step in the right direction.

From the social media user perspective, companies seeking to promote their web presence, hybridizing or combining design concepts from other logos could be as old as the third logo in existence, but they should no longer be thinking about having a single logo to represent the totality of their purpose or existence. Organizations should rather create a main logo and then a good recognizable filler to create a corporate set of platform specific logos representing the company.

Uber and Uber Design have recently launched down the path of multi-logo design for the different services they provide. Their new logo, although a bit alphabetically controversial for the client-community of upright U seekers, now offers a prime white or potentially empty space in the rotated U where organizations that use Uber for let’s say food or medication delivery could include their own logo details. The local grocery store now has a new market to break into thanks to Uber’s service, and Uber gets the increased business from the grocery store’s marketing and client base all in a single image.

Media company logos should be used a bit like a creative commons for all organizations using the media platform. If a large organization brings a large set of users or followers with them, copyright and trademark laws may have to change to account for the user value brought by that organization leveraging the symbol. I doubt a company would go after IP infringements if an entity is essentially advertising for them while bringing user convenience and organizational legitimacy. In biology this common advantage is called mutualistic symbiosis. Everyone comes out a winner!

But for full disclosure, I am not an IP lawyer and I have no expertise in marketing litigation, so it’s back to good old disruptive innovation.

Here are a few recommendations for some applications of these co-branded logos. In addition to including the standard social sharing buttons for visitors so they may post their content on their own social media pages, companies can add their co-branded version of social sharing buttons at the bottom of a webpage to take their visitors straight to a subscription page. This would allow visitors to understand the purpose of a button and provide them the ability to subscribe or follow a company’s social media accounts with the click of a single icon. There are many other opportunities that emerge from this co-branding hybridization that allows user communities to know exactly what services an organization uses and where they can be found on the massive web. Medium for example could inspire themselves on the icons provided above (although unlike mine, a professionally curated and designed version by Marcin Wichary, Brad Birdsall, Brad Simpson, Sasha Lubomirsky or anyone from medium’s design team, could actually look good). Medium, being the first platform on the web where I have published this concept, may now become the first company to leverage co-branding and optimize users experience of the many social media accounts they have through the web. Currently, Medium has over 3.2 million followers on their own medium.com site but only 1.65 million followers on twitter (perhaps a surprise given that Ev Williams and Biz Stone whose past endeavors included twitter, are the co-founders of medium). So the addition somewhere on the site of a medium-twitter link could boost their twitter following and thus their overall web presence and discovery. This idea of co-branding logos, which if we seek a silver lining to the ISIS crisis, we may have finally found, could become the next little thing in big marketing.

After combing the web for a while looking for these new types of logo hybrids, it seems the chargers may be leading the pack. I guess they chose marketing victories over a spot in this last super bowl.