Back to the

surface, finally.

Six weeks, a product launch, a couple major holidays, and over 15,000 flight miles ago began The Attack of the Workload.

Oh, and lest I forget the North American International Auto Show in balmy Detroit.

The Auto Show punched me with the power of brand. Wanna watch people OVERLOOK or JUSTIFY really bad product design to avoid disparaging their favorite marque? Go to an auto show. How about watching millionaire 60 year-olds run like pre-schoolers on Christmas morning to a long-awaited line addition? Get thee to Detroit in January.

Want to be threatened with violence for disallowing a show attendee from opening and sitting in one of your floor models? Come and stand next to me at the next NAIAS. (No joke — a giant dude gilded in bling and an ill-fitting track suit told me to get out of his way "or else.")

Click the link above and scroll until you find proof of the mass hysteria paid to the new Camaro concept. Don't TELL me brands aren't powerful aphrodysiacs. Hell, I thought the throng had just discovered a living, breathing alien.

More than a few dozen of the people with whom I spoke drove over from Canada or up from various Southern states, flew from way out West — even traveled from Japan — just to be among the first to witness the unveiling of one of my clients' new models.

In the dank cold of the Upper Midwest, just a month after the mass brand agnosticism that are the Holidays, and in the thorough financial exhaustion of January, the power of brand was alive, well, and wearing Fila.