the no name® brand account on TikTok used 18 original songs in their posts. they are presented here in their original upload quality, concatenated into one file.
i wish the musician wasn’t without a name to us.
when i tried to explain no name® to a friend of mine who doesn’t live in Canada, a brand that seems like an absurd joke of the sort that might be made on XKCD — which it was — i discovered that no name® had an online marketing campaign. (i have insulated myself from advertising so aggressively that i never knew about this.) my understanding is that it functionally ran from from 2019 until January 31, 2023. Loblaw Companies Ltd. had controversially turned a routine price freeze on their products into a public relations stunt, with president Galen Weston Jr. announcing that their no name® private label was actually the consumer's lord and saviour from the economic squeeze put on them all by this well‐established period of unprecedented corporate greed. despite being known to engage in price‐fixing, they expected public opinion of their brands to be shaped by these empty words and gestures. after the Canadian public instead continued dunking on Loblaw Companies Ltd. and with greater volume just as the price freeze was about to end, Galen Weston Jr.’s arrogance (i presume) demanded that Loblaw Companies Ltd. confrontationally gaslight the entire country about food prices. this whole debacle instantly killed whatever remained of the no name® brand’s online marketing where it stood, as they could no longer post anything online without receiving exclusively justifiably pissed‐off replies.
so yeah, prior to this ruthless destruction of the ubiquitous online endearment to the ubiquitous no name® brand, there was some advertising for it. which is incredibly bold to do, as all customers exposed to this will immediately become aware that the “no‐frills” ethos no longer actually applies to the brand as they’ve expected.
it’s hard to overstate the extent to which no name® was already a ubiquitous landmark in Canadian society. it’d already been advertising itself just fine with its black‐on‐yellow packaging design and low prices. they evidently didn’t need to do anything besides that to get the attention of most Canadian shoppers. like, the no name® brand and No Frills grocery stores were so ubiquitous during my youth that i did not realize for some time that “no name” and “no frills” were also just generic terms and didn’t specifically refer to these things that were the property of Loblaw Companies Ltd.. in fact, Loblaw Companies Ltd. (as i will continue to refer to them in full to make clear that this entity is distinct from the “Loblaws” supermarket chain that they also own) have so many different grocery store chain subsidiaries that i think a surprising number of Canadians, who saw it in all the big grocery stores they went to, didn’t even know that no name® was technically a store brand — something that an advertising campaign from Loblaw Companies Ltd. would more obviously alert them to.
but despite an advertising campaign for no name® being a bad idea in many ways, Loblaw Companies Ltd. pushed forward with it anyways, which naturally begs the question: how do you actually advertise a no frills brand? well, considering that no name® products themselves have no identity by design, the only thing to actually focus on in terms of visual identity and merchandise is the design of the packaging. admittedly this is, as covered before, broadly iconic as far as packaging designs go, and so if you have to hinge a brand identity on a packaging design, this is maybe the best one to go with.
this resulted in some genuinely funny and surreal stunts like a hilariously awkward commercial where every single thing in the frame — even the floor — is spraypainted yellow and labelled in black Helvetica Bold, and a building in downtown Toronto painted as though it were a packaged no name® product (image via Erin Laidley on Twitter).
but when you get further into this rabbit hole, the taste left in your mouth grows more sour. the merchandising in particular is very gross, being big yellow objects made in China which are selling exclusively on their novelty value. they didn’t seem to be fazed by how this confronts us with a glimpse of a truly disturbing dystopian future where a corporation takes so much control over society that all products sold in stores are also branded with advertisements for those same products, a world where all choice has been stripped from consumers as they are reduced to cogs in the yellow monolith’s machine. (they’re also all “corporate giveaway” sorts of items, like the kind of cheap objects that your real estate agent will send to you in an attempt to further endear you to them, hoping that these household things like pens and water bottles — of which you already have plenty — will somehow not get immediately get thrown out.)
it’s also clear that these were being managed by larger professional marketing teams, as the different incarnations of no name® brand advertising differed significantly on different social media platforms, optimized to grab the attention of their specific demographics. “surreal comedy” was the primary schtick across the whole campaign, but that can still take shape in very different ways. the YouTube video ads usually lacked music and just went for simple jokes like being deliberately bad at writing poetry. on Twitter though, even though you can post videos there, they knew that wasn’t optimal for the platform, so they almost exclusively posted images. they also made jokes relevant to whatever current holiday was going on (as Twitter was a more real‐time platform), and frequently baited people into “engaging” like by posing questions or by inviting users to tag their friends (as these gave tweets broader reach due to Twitter’s promotion algorithms based on these metrics).
and then there’s uh, TikTok? i have not once in my life used this platform, but i know several people who do. it seems to cultivate the youngest audience. and i guess it’s all about short videos set to music? but no name® couldn’t go using other people’s music, they wanted their own music for their own brand identity. and also maybe because licensing music costs money.
small tangent: i use a browser extension called LibRedirect to redirect TikTok and Imgur links to more lightweight proxies. TikTok proxy instances use ProxiTok, which nicely exposes the “original audio” that the video uses separately as an mp3. this made me notice the track titles that were given to these, which made me realize that these are all apparently bespoke compositions, what with names like “no name song 7”.
and like, you clicked play earlier, they sound weird. when i imagine what “no frills” music might sound i think of like, elevator music. not uh, whatever you’d call this. (electronic music classifications are something i won’t touch, i am not knowledgable enough and there seems to be a lot of debate around them.) they’re almost all either in minor keys or atonal, and their similarities also lead me to believe that this was all the work of one person. which, my intuition is that this style wasn’t the prompt given to that person, but rather that this is just what they like to make.
which like, who made these?? who’s the budding electronic musician who suddenly landed this strange gig just making whatever weird music after someone in the Loblaw Companies Ltd. office was like “yeah i know someone who makes music, lemme hit them up for some no name® beats”?? i wanna hear more of their stuff!
through all my trudging across the corporate wasteland of what the no name® brand is exactly, this was the one thing that felt human to me, like there was a single person i could connect with on the other side of the yellow wall. unfortunately, that branded obstacle is impenetrable, and so my journey ends here.
i’m genuinely surprised that @nonamebrands does not have “unverified” status. it 100% should.
No Frills has apparently published a full length album. i have not listened to it.
