How a Paint Company Accidentally Made an Avant-Garde Masterpiece
Branded Entertainment Before It Had a Name
In a world drunk on jingles and sales pitches, one regional paint company accidentally funded a psychedelic masterpiece—and changed branded storytelling forever. Colors was a strange, seductive, and utterly unmarketable spoken word album that started as an unceremonious ad campaign.
In 1962, the Fuller Paint Company commissioned a series of radio spots to promote their product line. The creative brief was minimal: “mention the Fuller Paint Company, do a color, and say ‘A century of leadership in the chemistry of color’ at the end.” No mood boards. No KPIs. Just a green light and a dare.
Enter Ken Nordine.
Nordine made his name in the “word jazz” scene of the 1950s, using his unmistakable baritone to thread Beat-era surrealism into everything from radio ads to philosophical monologues. Before the culture knew how to name it, Nordine made advertising psychedelic—and proved that even a paint commercial could whisper existential truths.
The Acid Trip That Accidentally Sold Paint
In the Mad Men era of the early 1960s, Jazz was a wild card. It was rebellion incarnate. It didn’t care about product placement. It cared about tension, about improvisation, about giving shape to feeling.
And Nordine? He turned language into jazz. Transforming traditional radio spots into poetic explorations of color as emotion, memory, and identity. What aired didn’t sell paint—it sold vibes. Each spot was a meditation on a single color, brought to life not as a visual but as a psychological presence.
These were not ads. These were transmissions from a different dimension.
Consider Lavender:
“Lavender… Lady of the soft edges, tell us all. Or tell me. Where day goes with night, and what they do there.”
Or Olive:
“Olive is an uninvited guest who forces you to ask yourself, ‘Is it green, or is it brown?’”
Listeners didn’t tune out. They tuned in. They called radio stations and asked to hear the commercials again.
Imagine that: a commercial people requested—because it moved them, unsettled them, made them see the world through a rainbow of colored glasses.
The unexpected popularity led to a full studio album: Colors—34 tracks, each one a mini-monologue diving into the psychology, mythology, and contradictions of a single hue.
What began as a corporate commission became an avant-garde artifact. A pure collision of brand storytelling and artistic subversion.
Cultural Intervention Disguised as a Campaign
What Fuller Paint accidentally funded wasn’t so much a commercial as it was a cultural intervention.
Nordine wasn’t trying to “go viral.” He was trying to say something true—about perception, about ambiguity, about the way color shapes our consciousness. And because the brand let go of control (or maybe just didn’t realize what they were greenlighting), Nordine’s vision arrived untouched.
The Blueprint for Branded Entertainment
Colors is a reminder—maybe a warning—that brands don’t have to choose between sales and soul. Done right, the two can feed each other.
Fast forward to the 21st century, where brands like A24 are creating experiences that feel more like performance art than movie promotion. YSL is producing Oscar-winning films that blur the line between mainstream cinema and a couture hallucination. Coca-Cola lets AI compose soundtracks that mutate based on emotional inputs. All of this traces back, consciously or not, to the kind of risk Fuller Paint took.
When brands fund true creativity—when they make room for strangeness, ambiguity, and emotion—they don’t just sell. They embed themselves in the culture.
Make Something That Haunts the Future.
So, how do you create branded entertainment that respects both artistic integrity and brand objectives—without diluting either?
For starters, it’s not a formula. It’s an act of trust—of daring. Of seeing your brand not as a static logo but as a living character in an ongoing cultural story.
Colors was never meant to last. It was supposed to air once and fade into the background. Instead, it became timeless—a weirdly wonderful proof of concept for what branded entertainment could be.
For creatives and strategists navigating the evolving landscape of brand storytelling, Colors offers a timeless lesson. Great branded entertainment doesn’t sell—it resonates. It lingers. And sometimes, like Nordine’s work, it becomes a cultural artifact.