The Chinese sage Lao Tzu warned people to make their own choices and not pursue the material objects everyone else was pursuing:
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Unfortunately, letting go of one thing and choosing another is difficult if the elephant wraps his trunk around the "precious thing" and refuses to let go. The elephant was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious. The elephant will pursue its evolutionary goals even when greater happiness can be found elsewhere. If everyone is chasing the same limited amount of prestige, then all are stuck in a zero-sum game, an eternal arms race, a world in which rising wealth does not bring rising happiness. The pursuit of luxury goods is a happiness trap; it is a dead end that people race toward in the mistaken belief that it will make them happy.
Advertising has lost its power to put a new brand name into the mind. Advertising has no credibility with consumers, who are increasingly skeptical of its claims and whenever possible are inclined to reject its messages.
To be effective, advertising doesn’t need creativity. It needs credibility.
When a communication technique loses its functional purpose, it turns into an art form.
The goal of traditional advertising is to not to make the product famous. The goal of traditional advertising is to make the advertising famous. Instead of creating sales value, traditional advertising attempts to create talk value.
Advertising expenditures are often like legal expenditures. Both can be negative indicators. A company with big legal bills is not necessarily a company on the way up.
The true function of advertising is to reinforce an existing perception in the mind.
The best advertising programs have an “I knew that before, but I’m glad you reminded me” quality. “A diamond is forever,” DeBeers’ long-running campaign, is in that category. Rather than being information-laden, the best advertising programs are usually emotion-laden (the cheerleading analogy).
- Al Ries
How do you measure the value of a candle? You can't measure its value by light output, since the candle has lost its function as JC of lighting a room. The years that followed Thomas Alva invention of the incandescent lamp might have been called "the fall of the candle and the rise of the lightbulb."
Yet every night all over America millions of candles are burning. No romantic dinner is complete without candles on the table. Individual candles are sold for $20 or $30 each, much more than a lightbulb. Unlike an electric bulb, the value of a candle has no relationship to its light output. Like the fireplace and the sailing ship, the candle has lost its function and turned into art.
Every form of artwork has its passionate defenders. They will strenuously argue over the value of an individual piece of artwork because there isn't an objective way to measure its value.
Before the age of photography, painting was used to communicate the liknesses of kings and queens, princes and princesses, throughout a kingdom. Paintings also let the next generation know what previous generations looked like. Before the age of photography, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other famous artists invariably painted in a realistic style.
Painting is just as popular today as it was in Rembrandt's time. Only today painting is an art form almost totally divorced from reality. As photography gradually assumed the visual communication role, painting turned abstract and became art.
An inflated price is one of the indicators that a discipline has become an art form. When your great-great-grandfather had his portrait painted for posterity by the local artist, he probably paid for the work by the hour, at a modest hourly rate. Now that painting is an art form, the sky's the limit.
A decade ago Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh went to a Japanese buyer for $82.5 million. If Dr. Gachet had wanted to let his descendants know what he looked like, he could have had a photograph made and saved someone quite a few dollars.
Art has no function; therefore art has no limit on what it is worth. Art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Interestingly enough, that price depends primarily on the publicity a painting has received in the media, not on the amount of advertising run by Sotheby's or Christie's. Sculpture was once used to create icons or gods. Now that most people no longer believe in stone, brass, or wood gods, sculpture has become an art form. No park in America would be complete without a generous assortment of metal or stone objects, but few people worship them. Sculpture is now art.
Like sculpture, painting, and poetry, advertising is taking the same path. "Advertising," said Marshall McLuhan, "is the greatest art form of the twentieth century"
Not only pundits like McLuhan but also top-level advertising people working in the trenches are making the art connection. Mark Fenske, a highly regarded advertising copywriter known for his work on Nike and other brands, says, "It may be the most powerful art form on earth." Advertising legend George Lois entitled his magnum opus, The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass Communications.
Major museums around the world house permanent collections of advertisements. Absolut vodka posters are framed and hung on walls like paintings. An exhibition of Ivory soap ads is on display at the Smithsonian; Coke commercials are in the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art owns a collection of TV spots.
Walk into the offices of virtually any advertising agency in the world and look at the walls. You would think you're in an art museum—wall after wall of advertisements set in impressive mattes and expensively framed.
Hold the phone, you might be thinking. Agencies are just exhibiting samples of their work. Maybe so, but lawyers don't frame copies of their finest briefs. Nor do doctors exhibit pictures of their most brilliant surgeries. We have never visited any advertising agency and seen framed sales charts for the agency's clients.
Advertising is dead!
When a communication technique loses its functional purpose, it turns into an art form.
- Philip Slater
