Advertising

"Advertising is the 'wonder' in Wonder Bread."

-Jef I. Richards

Andy Warhol: art, advertisement, and propaganda.

 Advertising is a field dedicated to finding the most effective approach in convincing a "target group" to buy certain products, support certain individuals or ideas, or become involved in certain actions. Harry Holligworth, one of the most influential psychologists involved with advertising in the 20th century, believed that for an ad to be effective it must do four things: attract the attention of the target group, focus their attention onto the message, make sure they remember the message, and cause them to take the desired action. There are different names for fields that do this, including advertising, marketing, and public relations. However, all of these fields are wish to convince the public, and achieves this by using essentially the same tactics.

In modern-day USA, we drown in advertisements on a daily basis. Cities sport banners, billboards, and posters along every street. Radio stations and TVs channel have scheduled interruptions for ads. Even when commercials aren't playing, many shows and movies engage in "product placement," where companies promote their goods by exposing them to the show's audience. Actors and actresses promote stylists and clothes designers on the red carpet, and sports players wear logos of companies on their jerseys. Even relatively anonymous individuals, like us, are often engaging in advertising without meaning to. We do so when we wear clothes with a company name on them, have bumper stickers on our cars, or put up posters of our preferred political candidate in our front yards. In fact, we often enjoy some forms of advertising. We all know at least one person who doesn't watch the Super Bowl for the football; they watch it for the half-time commercials.

Every step you take in these shoes is an advertisement for Toms. Some people want to be associated with the ideals this company has promoted for itself.

This person likes the Super Bowl half-time commercials because advertising appeals to its audience's deepest emotions and perspectives. Though there is a rich history of the union between psychology and advertising (starting in the early 20th century with Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays), I won't go into the details here. But it was this combination made advertising what it is today: a powerful ploy to invoke certain deep emotions or perceptions and associate them with a certain object, person or idea. Put more simply, advertising is an artfully-put opinion; a story; it's the art of persuasion. But does this mean that advertising is more similar to art, or to another form of persuasion I have discussed in this blog: propaganda?

Advertising is visual in most cases, and therefore the industry attracts visual artists to collaborate with advertising specialists. We can instantly see the difference between a well-designed ad campaign and an ad that  was made by an amateur. But, like all things related to art, psychology, and politics, advertising is rarely clearly separate from art. Take Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell soup cans. This is an example of advertising turned to art, but was he just promoting the advertising with his work? In other words, was Andy Warhol advertising Campbell Soup, was he advertising Campbell Soup's advertising of its soup, or was  his work not advertising at all?

Perhaps the clearest distinction between advertising and art would be the intent with which each is made. Advertising is made and tailored for a specific audience to mold their feelings and perspectives in a premeditated way. Art is not meant so much to persuade as it is to reveal; art in its purest form is a representation for a truth. This message, believed in by the artist, is conveyed to the audience to analyze and do with it what they will.

DKNY's "guerilla advertising" installed around NYC. Can this be considered art, or is advertising inherently not art

 It's undeniable that advertising still overlaps with art, but it may have even more similarities with another category: propaganda. Advertising is meant to persuade or trick people into thinking or acting in certain ways, after all. H.G. Wells said that "Advertising is legalized lying," and he's not alone in his perspective. Scholarly papers have been written on the subject, psychologists have compared the two, and modern-day activists have rebelled against having advertising in public spaces.

Additionally, advertising shares almost every technique used in propaganda: bandwagon, card-stacking, glittering generalities, name-calling, plain folks, testimonials, transfer, inducing fear, and asserting opinion as truth. Though ads today cannot legally present factually incorrect statements, they may make value judgements and give opinions or perspectives. Advertisements for a certain brand of automobile can't tell you it gets 100 mpg when it gets 15 mpg, so professionals use a different tactic than lying. They try to convince you that you want this car, that you need this car. Their ads may use attractive and fun-loving people in its visuals to imply that if you buy this car, you are attractive and fun-loving too. They will try to convince you that frugality, a value you may have held beforehand, is unnecessary and foolish when it comes to spending thousands of dollars on this product.

One of the most successful advertisement campaigns of all time, created in the 1950s.
"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."
-Mark Twain

 I could not find a single satisfactory distinction between propaganda and advertising on the web. Some said advertising is trying to sell a product, while propaganda is an attempt to alter an individual's ideals. However, this definition doesn't hold up. Political advertising campaigns, after all, are attempts to change individual's perspectives on certain matters or candidates. Others have suggested that the difference between the two is that viewers know that they're intentionally being manipulated when they engage with advertising, whereas with propaganda you don't know what the angle is. This isn't strictly true either, though. Citizens living in Czechoslovakia during the totalitarian regime often knew that the propaganda the government was spouting was false and had ulterior motives. Conversely, children in today's society don't understand that advertising is targeting them for a specific purpose.

Others assert that propaganda is a tool of the government, whereas advertising is used by companies. If we look again to political campaigns, or to the motivational posters seen in corporate settings, we can still see that this isn't a true distinction. In the end, we may have to accept that these two concepts are synonyms with differing connotations: things labeled as propaganda are seen as evil, things labeled as advertisements are seen as harmless background noise to our daily lives. Maybe this distinction is itself the product of advertising (or propaganda).

Advertisement or propaganda? M&Ms doesn't help clarify the distinction.

What does it mean that advertising is practically inseparable from propaganda? What are the implications on those of us who spend our lives literally clothed in advertisements and brand names? Most of the public doesn't consider advertising to be wrong or an infringement on their lives. They see advertising as a necessary tool in a capitalist society, they believe they can ignore the jingles and posters, and they generally don't compare it to propaganda. These perceptions aren't accurate. Psychologists have shown that people are easily manipulated by advertising and branding. We even base our preferences on unconscious trivial matters, such as the color of a product or the height of a politician. When advertising appeals to our unconscious desires, we often have no line of defense since we rarely know what these desires even are. The only comfort is that there are multiple groups fighting against each other for our attention: Democrats and Republicans both have tactics to gain our support, brands of toothpaste try to out-whiten each other in their ads, and service companies try to show that their company does the best job for the lowest price. However, the scale is not always balanced. For example, fast food and candy companies have far more revenue to spend on their advertisements than do health-food advocates.

Yesterday's blatant propaganda has evolved into something that might be even more sinister: propaganda that people don't see as propaganda, propaganda that attacks the subconscious, and propaganda that the public willingly engages in. It's possible to fight against some of this capitalist ideology. Google and facebook use cookies to cater advertisements to web surfers' personal tastes; turning off the cookies on your browser stops these sites from reading your history. Choosing not to wear clothes that are branded whenever possible is another action the public can take. Additionally, knock-off brands often sell items that are identical to the branded items, and are much cheaper. I buy these whenever I have the choice. 

However, the most effective tactic may be the simplest one: be aware of the tools advertisers use to persuade you, and analyze why you are making your decisions. Live in the truth, not in advertiser's wallets.

"In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope."

-Peter Nivio Zarlenga