On Brand with Jimmy Fallon Is Selling You a Lie About How Branding Actually Works

Standing in the middle of my living room, remote in hand, I was hunting for a new show on Peacock when I saw the title: On Brand. I braced myself. I figured there might be something to learn.

I learned something, alright, just not what I expected.

On Brand is the true definition of how to make branding look like a walk in the park. Fun. Easy. And completely divorced from what actually makes branding work. The timing couldn't be worse.

We're in a moment where mission-driven organizations are fighting for survival. Sales are declining. Funding is disappearing. Unemployment is climbing. The noise is deafening. And here comes a primetime show teaching millions of people that branding is basically taglines, merch designs, and hoping something sticks. I hate to say it, but it's true. 

No shade on the hosts, but I need to talk about what this show gets wrong, why that matters more than you think, and what's actually required if you want branding that does anything beyond visuals.

What On Brand with Jimmy Fallon Actually Shows You

The format is simple. Contestants get an hour to pitch campaign ideas to real brands like Dunkin' and Southwest Airlines. Judges pick a winner. Sometimes the campaign gets executed in real life.

Sounds fun. Looks entertaining. Teaches you absolutely nothing about how branding actually works.

Here's what the show gives you: slogans, visual concepts, maybe some merch mockups. All surface. All aesthetic. All the parts of branding that look good on TV, but it's only half of the equation, and arguably more like 10% of what goes into building a brand that survives contact with real audiences.

What's missing? Everything that determines whether a brand actually connects with the people it's trying to reach.

No audience research. No competitive mapping. No messaging architecture. No brand positioning platform that would tell you what the hell you're even supposed to say before you start designing t-shirts. No testing. No validation. No measurement.

Just gut feelings and a timer.

And millions of people are watching this, absorbing the idea that branding is something you can figure out in an hour if you're creative enough or understand how to tell a story.

Why Big Brands Are Fine With This

Here's what I had to sit with after side-eyeing the show, On Brand with Jimmy Fallon and Bozoma Saint John. The brands participating aren't dumb. They know this isn't how real branding works. They have entire teams doing the actual strategic work that never makes it on camera, similar to the work of Dr. Rajesh Srivastav, a contestant who is a professor of marketing, would be engaged in.

What they're getting is: Free exposure. Free spec work from contestants. A chance that someone stumbles onto something useful (Rory Sutherland calls this alchemy, the possibility that randomness produces value). And the best part? The show maintains the illusion that branding is simple while they quietly keep investing millions in the real infrastructure that protects their market position.

This is social engineering. You're not watching a competition. You're internalizing messaging that makes you think you don't need what the brands behind the curtain are actually using to win. The brands' contests are trying to win the accounts and get visibility and ideas. The network gets ratings. The contestants get a shot at a prize.

And the viewers and contestants? They get a fundamentally misleading education about what branding requires.

What Gets Left Out Matters More Than What Makes The Cut

Real branding starts before anyone picks a color palette.

You begin with research. Who is this for? What do they actually care about? What language do they use when they're looking for solutions? What are the psychological and emotional drivers behind their decisions? What makes them trust one brand over another?

Then you build a positioning platform. This is the structure that determines everything else. Your unique value. Your competitive differentiation. Your brand promise. Your core messaging pillars. The narrative that ties it all together.

From there, you develop brand architecture if you have multiple products or services. You create messaging hierarchies that map to the customer journey. You establish voice and tone guidelines so your brand sounds consistent across every touchpoint.

You test. You validate. You refine based on actual feedback, not judge reactions.

And only then, after all of that foundational work is locked, do you start thinking about taglines and visual campaigns.

The show skips every single one of these steps. Frames them as unnecessary. Makes it look like the real work is what happens in the last 10% of the process.

This isn't just incomplete. It's backwards.

Who Benefits When Branding Looks Simple

When the public believes branding is easy, several things happen that benefit big enterprises, such as big corporations maintaining their competitive advantage. 

If small organizations and mission-driven brands believe they can achieve effective branding through DIY methods, focusing solely on gut-driven visuals and storytelling, they often skip the crucial steps to developing outcomes-driven messaging, not by choice, but due to a lack of awareness. This is especially common among SMB mission-driven businesses, including SMB nonprofits, which are often started by everyday people looking to make a difference. 

These are the same everyday people who don’t know about verbal branding and its impact on visual branding, as public media never conveys the existence of such concepts to them. 

Several platforms offering AI subscriptions benefit. If you think branding is just about generating taglines and logos, those tools look sufficient. You subscribe. You churn out content or creative. Nothing converts. But hey, at least it was cheap.

And here's the part that should make you angry if you are wondering why you haven’t made it big yet despite your best efforts. Well, without both verbal and visual branding, you're playing your game of business on hard mode, all because you never made it into the rooms where you got to see firsthand how great branding really works. 

It’s like the game, The Legend of Zelda. If you miss a key item, like a hookshot or bombs, it can make dungeons much harder or impossible to complete. Missing hidden heart containers or upgrades even leaves you underpowered for bosses. 

And these are also rooms that have always looked like the cast of Mad Men. For those who don’t look like anyone on that show, now you see why you don’t know much about what goes into a messaging strategy or why it should matter for your brand, business, or organization. For us, the lockout was systematic (hence why many nonprofits don't have brand or messaging strategies). 

In essence, the organizations that need strategic clarity the most are the ones least likely to recognize they need it, instead thinking "just getting the word out" should be enough. 

They're drowning in scattered messaging while watching a TV show that confirms their suspicion. That great ideas and storytelling tactics are all you need to succeed at a core business function of ALL businesses—marketing. 

Additionally, research, insights, and strategy are not typical parts of the creative and story development process. The result? People who don’t even think about, let alone prioritize, the steps that 100+ year old enterprise-level brands never skip before going to market with an idea. Never. Because they aren’t trying to play the losing game you’re being set up for by not having a messaging strategy.

What This Actually Costs You Right Now

We're not in a moment where you can afford to lead with gut feelings like the contestants on this show. Right now, in America, attention is expensive. Audiences are overwhelmed. Funding is competitive. If your message doesn't land immediately, you don't get a second chance.

And unclear messaging isn't just a marketing problem. It's an operational crisis.

When your stakeholders can't explain what you do, they can't refer you. When your team doesn't have consistent language, your communications fracture. When you pivot without a positioning foundation, you confuse everyone who was just starting to understand you.

The organizations surviving what's coming have one thing in common. They can articulate their value with precision. They know exactly who they serve and why those people should care. They have messaging systems that work whether they're writing grant applications, website copy, email campaigns, or social posts.

That clarity is built. It's not stumbled upon during a brainstorming session.

What You Actually Need If You Want Messaging That Converts

Strategic messaging isn't about being creative in the right moment. It's about building a foundation that makes everything you create more effective.

You need audience intelligence that goes deeper than demographics. The psychological drivers. The language patterns. The cultural signals that build trust. The irrational factors that actually drive decisions.

You need a brand positioning platform that defines your unique value, your competitive differentiation, your promise, and your proof in language clear enough that anyone on your team can explain it.

You need voice guidelines that document how your brand communicates across every context. Not just "sound professional but warm." Actual specifications for structure, pacing, vocabulary, and tone modulation.

This is what separates brands that scale from brands that plateau. What makes messaging consistent when you delegate or automate. What allows you to pivot without losing your identity.

And this is exactly what gets trivialized when a TV show makes it look like something you figure out between commercial breaks.

Here's What To Do Instead Of Guessing

I built a free guide for exactly this situation. It's called The Targeting Gap: The Gap Between Knowing Your Audience and Understanding Them. It is my complimentary thank you for reading this article. It covers the first step in the branding process, which is also the first step of the messaging strategy and content strategy processes.

Go through it today. Because in the next 90 days, the organizations that figure out what actually makes messaging work will separate from the ones still hoping creativity is enough.

Your work matters too much to lose because a TV show convinced you that branding was simpler than it is. Get the foundations right. Then everything else gets easier.

Download: The Targeting Gap: The Gap Between Knowing Your Audience and Understanding Them