The shock! The vehemence! The vigorous impetuosity! A person from a company I like a lot just revealed to his followers that he will be experimenting with putting advertising into his software. Read the comments on the page. Wow! I’m not quite sure I could get so passionate if Brent Simmons did the same with NewNewsWire but depending on how it was accomplished I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself grumbling and moving on to another piece of software. But the whole conversation among the blog hermits about how much they reviled advertising and would in fact, be happy to pay for upgrades rather have to look at advertising made me realize, advertising got spoiled somewhere in the 80s.
Seriously, advertising, you’re, like, everywhere. I myself even engaged in a bit of billboard liberation when a Comedy Central (my favorite channel, btw) ad started talking to me at the urinal. Something snapped and I dug the electronic voice box out of the ad and through it in the toilet. Enough! Advertising jumps around in banner ads more than a five-year-old after a 20oz coke. And I really think that’s largely due to the fact that ads are just a fading fad. When the whole world’s information is at folks fingertips and you’re trying to get a message to them, what’s the use in irritating them?
It strikes me that advertising got spoiled during the good ol’ days of linear media where every fifteen minutes on the (free) radio or the free (television) it got to yack at us. But when media goes nonlinear like the web, you just can’t afford to be that obnoxious. Advertising needs to get its class back, like The Deck or like BMW films. Class, advertising! Class! You can talk to people without shouting, you can persuade people without lying. But in the long run, business is still going to have to get back to basics and start trafficking in real information; not shinola.
First of all, free free to answer the question for yourself. It’s not what I would consider the most scientific study, but que sera sera. I draw a distinction between graphic design and art based on what is being communicated and what is the intent of the communication. Art attempts to communicate emotion, it evokes feeling. Graphic design has to communicate information—and I emphasize has to. If an artifact of the visual medium does not communicate information (or data, to be technical about it) then it is not graphic design. When information is communicated it can sometimes be done with excellence, and graphic designers want to call that art (because it is their art, as in trade) but other folks will still call it technical or design or advertising. But when the emotional content outweighs the communication of the information, as in, drowns it out, then I think graphic design can attain “artness.” And mind you, I am not saying the reverse of this: that art has nothing to say. On the contrary, art can say nothing at all or nothing specific. In my mind, a great deal of the cleaving of the two forms comes down to Andy Warhol’s “Soup Can” and an actual advertisement for the same soup. One form is trying to get you to think about your world, what it looks like and how it feels. The other form is trying to get you to think about soup. [Thanks to Kitblog for today's inspiration!]
This week ad last have seen some pretty strange things going on with advertising, and even though I generally put posts on advertising into the Mind Control section of the sight (because it is all just propaganda) it seems to me that it would be a good idea to introduce a new section: Fabertising. That’s Fab- as in fabrication and -ertising as in you know, “shoving bullshit down your throat.” I would love to call the section bullshitising, but the icon for that would be grisly. I think there’s enough manipulation of the facts in commercially developed communications directed at the public that focusing on it should generate more than a few worthy posts. I’m also going to put summations of research here on how exactly advertising manipulates you into bad choices.
A blog appears on the internet, written by a man named Håkan Nordkvist who claims to have traveled to the future and that he has proof. Later, a video surfaces. Apparently, this man crawled under his sink and into the future where he met himself and took a mobile phone video of the event. The video is viewed thousands of times and debated by many. The problem? The entire matter was conceived by AMF Pensions to market to a “younger” generation. This video is part of a portfolio of “guerrilla” marketing campaigns propagated by Forsman & Bodenfors. The apparent logic of the marketing campaign is that you should give your money to people who are willing to deceive and lie to you for a good laugh. The problem with this sort of campaign is that not everyone finds out that the matter is a hoax; more disinformation is created in an already incredibly noisy environment. This kind of marketing is simply unethical and is the worst kind of propaganda because it is in no way concerned with the truth or even willing to make a case, based on evidence, for the value of the product. It’s bullshit is what it is.
There are lots of products out there that might accomplish some silly task like “stress relief” but whose real and primary purpose is humor. The Tiddy Bear more than applies here, it’s actually best in show. But I don’t want to ruin the joke for you, so watch the video and then I’ll say my piece.
