There is an age old expression often tossed around the creative community: “Life imitates art.” This is sometimes used in a joking fashion to describe when the events of a fictional story become paralleled in the real world later. For example, when David Duchovny plays a sex addict in Californication, only to learn later that he, himself, suffers from sex addiction. But it also refers to the philosophical belief that people are so profoundly affected by the art they consume that society itself is reshaped. Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” Academically, this idea forms the framework for many types of media criticism, like cultivation theory which posits that the more time people spend ‘living’ in the television world, the more likely they are to believe social reality is like it’s portrayed on television. There is certainly some truth to this view. Although it is widely considered one of the finest films ever made, Clockwork Orange inspired a number of real life copycats, including a gang of wanna-be droogs who beat a homeless man to death, mirroring an early scene in the movie. Kubrick voluntarily withdrew the film from UK distribution as a result. It remained “banned” in England until the end of his life.
There is another expression popular in the creative community: Art is about understanding the human experience. This was Aristotle’s stance. In his mind, art was a reflection of reality, and was a tool for understanding beauty, truth, and the good in our physical world. Academically, this is known as mimesis, defined as representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature. While art has become more nuanced since Aristotle’s time, the importance of realism, especially in the storytelling arts, is born of this first principle. Defenders of the mimesis side of things will stipulate that art must reflect life because it is made by people, people who are influenced by life, and therefore art must be a product of experiences and not the other way around. Consider violence in video games, especially controversial franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. The violence in these games serves a purpose, drawn from a desire to reflect life and understand a piece of the human experience. Grand Theft Auto is often a scathing satirical jab at media’s glorification of crime and the emptiness of a common interpretation of the American dream: one driven by greed and consumerism. Does this sop to realism have adverse consequences? Is the media’s furor over legions of young men playing “murder simulators” justified? Well, no. Numerous studies have demonstrated that video games do not lead to increases in violent behavior. This, of course, directly conflicts with what we might expect based on Clockwork Orange’s copycat killers.
So which is it? Is art something that shapes society? Or is it something shaped by society? It’s both. In my opinion, culture is more of a feedback loop than a linear track, where different types of media, including advertising, sit at more than one place in the cycle. At times, art is defining culture and influencing behavior. Watching Dead Poet Society might make you want to live a life of meaning. Watching opulent rap videos might make you aspire to a life of loose women and fast cash. There was a brief time when watching Scrubs made me envy the sense of camaraderie around the hard but meaningful work of health care. Scrubs is a heightened version of reality, mixed with elements of pure fantasy, that balances, tonally, both the harsh realities of medicine (the consequences are often death) with the false trappings of TV (will-they-or-won’t they relationships, bromances, etc.). For someone less uncomfortable with guts and viscera, this somewhat idealized version of the field could easily have inspired their future career goals. At other times, art is being defined by culture. Another medically-focus sitcom, M*A*S*H, was inspired heavily by the pervasive anti-war sentiments during the 1970s, when the film was made and the TV show began shooting. If the political climate were closer to that of World War II, it’s unclear if M*A*S*H would have even been made, let alone been a massive success.
This feedback loop, and knowing how to best navigate it, is of the utmost importance to advertisers. Advertising wants to sit in the driving position I described above, being the influencer more than the one being influenced. If, instead of making Scrubs and inspiring a kid to become a doctor, you could create “#MakesChristmas” and inspire kids to become a loyal Waitrose shopper, you’d certainly make Waitrose a happy client. So let’s dive deep and try to understand this cycle even better.
For the sake of abstracting some of this, let’s pretend that we live in Norway in the 800s, but with all the tools of modern media and storytelling. As members of a Viking society, our lives are brutal and often short. The TV shows we watch, books we read, and music we listen to all reflect a society where young men don helmets and furs, grab their trusty sword and shield, and hop in their tribe’s longboat to go a-plundering. Culture critics decry the media landscape that encourages young men to pursue this lifestyle, but creators rightly claim that they are merely making things that are true to their real, lived experiences. If we, as advertisers, wanted to use our tools of persuasion to reshape society by convincing less Vikings to go pillaging, it will take some very precise strategies. You can’t just make sponsored content that features Vikings dropping their weapons in favor of running massage parlors, it simply won’t ring true to the audience. Even if they are Swedes. But by the same measure, if the only role models young Vikings grow up with are the violent heroes from popular sagas, of course they are going to grow up thinking that that’s their route to a successful and fulfilled life. To change their behavior we have to provide them some alternative they can believe in.
It all comes down to two factors: how believable is the new reality you are promoting, and your ability to convince people to buy-in. I like to relate the first factor to hypnosis. I read an interview with a performance hypnotist years and years ago. He described the power of suggestion under hypnosis as only being capable of convincing someone to do something they were already willing to do. That’s why they screen the candidates at the beginning of a performance: they are targeting the people most open to influence, as they are more receptive to the sillier and crazier suggestions that make for a better stage show. In the same way, advertising can’t convince people to believe something unless they are open to the idea in the first place. You can talk a teenage boy into thinking a scent will make him more attractive to girls, but not if that scent is raw sewage. An author who wrote a book about the first black president of the United States in 1820 would have been considered an idealistic moron, even amongst abolitionists. The same premise written in the mid-2000s would be considered an interesting and totally plausible scenario. See the TV show 24 or the movie Deep Impact. And that’s the trick. The new reality you are trying to use as influence has to be close to the current reality, or at least be relatable and believable. To return to the Viking example, making an ad selling young Viking men on spending more time on the farm at home, instead of murdering the Irish, could be what we’re looking for to end the violence. Working the farms means more comely Scandinavian girls and less risk of getting your head cut off. Farming was also already a part of their society, so this alternative is relatable and its benefits are immediately apparent. If the goal is a more peaceful Scandinavia – mission accomplished.
The second factor, the ability to convince people to buy-in, relates to group dynamics and some uncomfortable truths about our pack mentality as human beings. Whether it’s a massive cultural shift from warriors to farmers, or a convincing product strategy, or a character’s haircut from a popular sitcom sweeping the nation, it all starts with a small number of people who buy-in. There are a number of well established, scientific reasons why this is true. A study out of Leeds found that with people, like sheep, it only takes about 5% of a population to influence the “herd’s” direction, and that most of the remaining 95% follow without realizing they’ve been influenced. In the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini describes how people typically look to others to see what is socially allowed in group situations. It’s why crowds freeze during a traumatic event instead of calling the police. Everyone is looking at everyone else to see what they should do and no one is picking up the phone. This is all about creating the snowball that will grow until it reaches a critical mass and becomes accepted as the norm. This snowball starts, not with the first person, but with the first collection of people. There was a video passed around some years ago, of a dance party at the Sasquatch music festival in 2009, that started with one lone man dancing, and then grew and grew until most of the people on the grassy hill had joined in. Many pointed to the first man and waxed poetic about how one person could start a movement. I disagree. One man dancing is a crazy person. It was the next five people that joined him that started the movement. They gave the first man the critical mass needed to convince others it wasn’t shameful or socially unacceptable to dance. As advertisers we have to learn to appreciate the first guy, but worship the next five people. If Leeds is right, and we’re like a bunch of sheep, these people are the Bellwethers. So how do we, as advertisers, get them on board?
Well, no one really knows how to make those five people do their thing. Some have tried, with mixed results. Klout, for example, was originally founded on the idea of connecting brands with social influencers who will promote their products for compensation, either in money or other perks. It has no shortage of critics, and while it had its moment in the sun like the QR code, Klout scores appear to have lost much of their luster in recent years. So if we can’t make those early people show up on command, what can we do? One thing we can do is create environments that are friendly to those people, and hope they show up on their own. This is what a lot of startup marketing seems to be centered around. Get the early adopters on board with press events and highly targeted campaigns, and hope they bring the general population along with them, eventually. Another thing we can do is try and spot where the cultural trends are headed, before they pick up a lot of steam, and hitch our wagon to that movement. If the trends are driven by these “five person” tastemakers, the thinking goes, we’ll get our brand rubbing elbows with them until eventually something rubs off. Though they may not have thought about it this clinically, or cynically, the new Barbie ads from BBDOSF fit this style of thinking. Female empowerment through media is a rising trend, as exemplified by both pop culture phenomenons like The Hunger Games book and movie series, and campaigns from Dove, Always, and others. At the same time, Barbie had been coming under fire for years by feminists for its portrayal of women. So Barbie flips the script on their dolls and reminds everyone it is a toy for girls to imagine hundreds of possible careers through play.
This raises an interesting follow up question: does advertising have a moral responsibility in what they put on the screen? Do advertisers need to concern themselves with the political or social implications of what they produce? Unlike other art, advertising has the unique position of being interruptive and omni-present. While it is easy to turn off a movie or put down a book that you feel is negatively impacting you, advertising is all around you and hard to ignore, by design. It’s on the pages of your magazines. It plays before your YouTube videos. It interrupts your Pandora or Spotify streams. As a result, I believe advertisers must consider the impact their work has when it is consumed over and over again. The decidedly evil propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels famously said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” If you make an ad playing on the insecurities women have about their bodies, they might laugh it off the first time they see it as being untrue. By the 50th time you tell them they are undesirable, they may start believing it. Similarly, critics of advertising’s role in society will point out the medium’s ability to prey on the emotions of people to sell products. Whether it is a fear or insecurity, like the body image example I just gave, or something aspirational, like luxury brands presenting an unrealistically lavish lifestyle as something attainable, many argue that these distort society and create unhealthy expectations. In the former, it crushes women’s self worth. In the later, it promotes rampant consumerism and indebtedness by valuing that (expensive) lifestyle above everything else.
While I do believe advertising should be careful with what messages it sends, let’s not begin flagellating ourselves as an industry just yet. Advertising isn’t unique in regards to women’s body image, or promoting aspirational lifestyles, or any other negative impact. Many of those things are aspects of art and media in general. Gossip magazines use appearance-based schadenfreude to sell magazines with celebrity weight gain, cellulose, and so on. TV shows like Friends convince generations of kids that with coffee shop barista money they can afford to live in a giant Manhattan apartment with only one roommate. And as for advertising manipulating people’s emotions, that’s just what good art does. A Tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, these are all intended to illicit or represent specific emotions within the public.
The trick is balancing advertising’s many masters: the public, the client, and the art. It might sound cynical to point out, but advertising’s first and most important master is the company that is paying them to promote their brand. Still, advertising shouldn’t use “the demands of the client” to try and justify work that is immoral. Doing right by the client and doing right by society are not mutually exclusive propositions. When advertising is done right, it serves the public by informing them about products, brands, and services they otherwise would not have known about. It can also serve an artistic and cultural purpose by being helpful, thought provoking, and, above all else, entertaining. It can even serve a lofty social cause.
Consumers, perhaps more than any time previously in human history, are concerned not just with the quality of the products they buy but also the quality of the company that produces them. People want to buy from companies they feel match their values morally, as well as in brand identity. In other words, consumers and brands are finding each other through their shared stances on moral and ethical issues. For example, Ben and Jerry’s courts the hippie idealists with Jerry Garcia inspired ice cream. This means that, while still being true to the spirit of a brand and the values that the client company has made their identity, advertising can find its moral footing in a way that serves the client’s financial needs, the agency’s moral responsibility, and culture at large.
This is something I touched on briefly during my post on Issues Campaigns, but aligning a brand and an important social movement is a great way to make a mutually beneficial arrangement. Each brand needs to find the right cause for its identity. This can be difficult if the agency and its employees don’t personally match the values of the client. To avoid this complication, the process should be treated the same way media planners pick the right ad buys for each brand’s target audience. You wouldn’t advertise BustedTees in Vogue because it isn’t a good fit. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to align Cabelas or Bass Pro with PETA, no matter how many people at your agency may feel meat is murder. However, because it aligns with the brand’s values, a women’s sporting line can put a prima ballerina of color in their ads and make a splash, win free press for the brand, and promote a positive role model for girls and people of color at the same time. This doesn’t even have to be on politically charged topics like identity politics. Powerade’s “Nico’s Story” normalizes amputees. Nike’s “Find YOUR Greatness: Jogger” encourages healthy living by championing obese people who take that difficult first step toward athleticism. One of my favorite ads is “The Reader” from Bell’s Whiskey, which subtly promotes literacy in addition to their drink. Just because you’re making an ad for alcohol doesn’t mean you can’t have a positive impact on the world.
Lastly, I want to take a moment to talk about the biggest failing of advertising, the lazy ad. These are the pieces that most commonly get flak from critics and consumers alike for how they depict our society. The cute girl bartenders in beer ads. The “genius wife”/”doofus dad” cleaning product ads. They rely on cheap stereotypes and uninspired creative work. They get made because they work. They work because they pander. But they aren’t good ads. And because they aren’t good ads, it’s easy for competitors to out do them and steal their market share.
Basically, this is what separates mediocre creative strategy from great creative strategy. It doesn’t take an exceptional mind to look at the demographics of a product or service, identify some common traits about that group, and make an ad that caters to those traits. Boys like pretty girls. Moms like being told their husbands would be lost without them. Surfers like being laid back. Kids like to pretend they’re older, and middle aged people wish they were younger. This level of observation makes for very similar looking ads that cause every brand that advertises that way to be lost in the noise. Think about any “dull” category like life insurance or banking. How many of those ads stand out in any way? Can you even remember a specific ad for a specific bank? This is where good strategy gets in and finds the way to differentiate the brand, often by digging deeper. Why do middle aged people want to feel young again? Why are surfers chill laid back people? Getting to the root of these questions creates interesting creative opportunities in addressing the underlying motivations of the demographics in a way that goes beyond pandering. What if you made an ad about a single mother who was the boss of her house? If it touched on the core insight that moms feel like the bosses of their house, whether or not they belong to a traditional family, it could reach both the traditional and nontraditional homes in a way that wouldn’t have been possible with just pandering. This kind of strategic thinking not only helps brands not do lazy work, but identify the places that brands can have a positive social impact, interrupt the cultural feedback loop, and make work that turns heads.
Art is made by people, based on their experiences and designed to speak to the experiences of others. That makes art a reflection of culture. But art also influences people with the stories that it tells and the emotions that it triggers. Advertising is absolutely a part of both sides of this paradigm, but seeks to be more the influencer than the influenced. It also has the unique position amongst art/media of being interruptive and omnipresent, which means its impact is not to be taken lightly. Ads can be good, can do good, and can be both at the same time, but it’s also easy to fall into lazy creative traps by relying on cheap stereotypes and cynical views of the public. Of course, none of this is simple, or likely to get simpler. Advertising is at the center of a heated debate over the role of the arts in society. Do we venerate Clockwork Orange because it is an important piece exploring morality and social conditioning? Do we ban it because it depicts rape, and might inspire violence towards women? Consider this dichotomy: On the topic of war movies, famed french film director François Truffaut believed it is impossible to make an anti-war movie. His thinking was that art can’t help but glorify whatever it makes its subject; war is no exception. TVtropes pithily refers to this phenomenon as “Don’t Do This Cool Thing.” On the same topic, however, Steven Spielberg told Newsweek magazine: “Every movie (about war), good or bad, is an anti-war movie.” In his mind, any work that put war under its microscope would reveal the inhumanity of combat in a way no one could support. With both of these great artists holding diametrically opposed positions, how can we advertisers know whether our TV spots for men’s deodorant will be interpreted as humorous satire, as we intended, or as glorification of the worst in male entitlement? Sometimes, you just have to make the ad, take the artistic and creative risk, and see what happens.