Art or branded content? You decide

As an artist, it’s not easy to stand out on a crowded platform like Instagram, but that’s exactly what Kode Abdo, (aka Bosslogic), has managed to do.

Starting out as a  Melbourne university student with a pad of paper and a pencil, success did not happen overnight for Kobe. He’s been sharing his art on the Internet consistently for the last seven years, slowly gaining momentum. But it’s only recently that he’s finally hit success on Instagram.

Now, with over 300,000 Instagram followers and a dedicated fan base with high engagement rates, he has become a mainstay among fans of pop culture, often featuring on movie news sites such as ScreenRant. Though he’s created a vast portfolio, his specialty is the pop-culture mashup, like drawing well known celebrities and transforming them into superheroes.

But what’s the appeal of hiring such an artist if your brand has nothing to do with pop culture?

After all, if you’re selling burgers, you’re not going to be featured in the same way as a custom Harley Quinn image for the Suicide Squad movie.

Well, if you work with a talented artist, they’ll find a way to make it work. Take this example from Abdo featuring McDonald’s burgers.

Using both his skills as a digital artist and his fandom for superheroes, Abdo turns normal McDonalds food into imagery that resonates with his audience by relating it to “The Flash”. To a creative mind like his, art can tie any two things together.

And that’s exactly the kind of content creator brands need to be working with. Fans didn’t tear him off his platform because he featured some McDonald’s products, but rather embraced it because it was consistent with the type of content he posts. He turned what could have been an ad into an artful piece of content, and the superhero connection sold it to his fan base.

This connection is what separates great content from the mundane, the memorable from the forgettable.  Collaborating with an artist’s strengths when creating content is what’s going to ensure the best results. It’s by finding a way to seamlessly integrate a brand into their work that a creator delivers content that doesn’t just feature your product, but transforms it into art.