Hide this logo that I cannot see.
During the World Cup, FIFA imposes what it calls clean stadiums. Any brand that hasn't paid for its sponsorship must disappear. Black tape on hand dryers, on soap dispensers, on ketchup bottles. An army of little hands methodically covers up everything that looks like a logo.
And that's where the story gets interesting.
Because by hiding the brands, FIFA has just given them their best advertising campaign.
Take Heinz. Its label masked in the stadiums has become the starting point of a campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi in Dubai. The principle is wonderfully audacious: even stripped of its name, the bottle remains immediately identifiable. Its shape, its shield label, its deep red are enough.
Take Levi's, the perfect case. Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, modestly renamed San Francisco Bay Area Stadium for the duration of the competition, had its signs covered with tarps. Except the tarp follows the silhouette of the logo. The famous batwing, this shape of bat wings inspired by the stitching of back pockets, remains perfectly legible in relief. The brand immediately turned the situation to its advantage, with a video that went viral and, as an additional bold move, signs deliberately covered in Paris and London, where FIFA imposed nothing at all.
What these brands have understood, and what many others have not yet integrated, is that the logo is not the brand. The logo is the signature. The brand is everything that remains when you remove the signature.
Levi's registered the arcuate, this double arc stitching on the pockets of its jeans, as early as 1943. Eighty years later, this stitching identifies a pair of jeans from ten meters away, without a word, without a logo. Coca-Cola can suggest its bottle with a simple typographic play, the silhouette does the work. KFC has just rethought its entire identity around its bucket, this mundane object that has become a totem. National Geographic has relied on a simple yellow frame for decades.
This is what we call distinctive assets, the distinctive assets of a brand. A shape, a color, a sound, a gesture. Elements that trigger recognition even before the brain has read anything. And the ultimate test of their power is precisely censorship. If you mask your name and everyone still recognizes you, your branding work is done. If you mask your name and nothing remains, you do not have a brand, you have a logo placed on emptiness.
There is, however, a downside to this coin, which Graphéine rightly points out in the article that inspired these lines. By reducing identities to minimal silhouettes, brands end up looking alike. When everyone simplifies, no one stands out. The distinctive asset is only valuable if it is truly distinctive, meaning built over time, legally protected, and nurtured with every communication.
The question I ask my clients is therefore simple. If tomorrow we covered your logo with a black tarp, would anything remain? A shape, a color, a tone of voice, a way of doing things that your clients would recognize with their eyes closed?
If the answer is no, the good news is that it can be built. That's exactly what a brand strategy is for.
Thanks to the Graphéine agency for its excellent article on the subject, which I recommend to you: https://grapheine.com/magazine/fifa-censure-marques-et-les-rend-plus-visibles/