Commentary

Advertising as Art or Science?

Is advertising truly the perfect marriage between art and science or does advertising rely more heavily on one than the other? Earlier this week I was having this very discussion with a colleague of mine, and I thought it was interesting enough of a question to pose to the masses.

I am one of that rare breed who actually wanted to get a job in advertising since I was a lad. I was always intrigued by the ability to convince people how to act and react. Advertising is a perfect study in mass manipulation, at least to some extent. To that end, I went to college and studied advertising and was educated by some of the best advertising and marketing people on the “science of advertising.” I was taught that the laws of physics apply to advertising and marketing; that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Advertising was simply the ability to drive the reaction in the direction you wanted it to go.

In advertising, you apply research to the behavior patterns of your target audience, and everyone like them, as well as past experience and information, to develop a rational strategy for how to promote a product or service. Media and Creative are developed that fit into a concept for conveying a message to an audience, and a campaign is run. There is post-analysis into whether your hypotheses were correct and whether the reaction you were looking for was achieved. Online is even further down the path towards science as we apply very structured testing matrices into our campaigns that allow for immediate action and optimization to improve the performance of a campaign. This is Science.

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On the flipside of this argument is the theory that advertising is an extension of traditional art. That there are many agencies that have made a very successful living on developing advertising that is beautiful and grabs the attention of the consumer, whether it be funny, out-of-context, or just plain shocking. The art aspect of the advertising creates a paradigm shift that forces the viewer to think about something they were not expecting. This is Art.

I believe that in the middle of this argument may lie the truth; that the science behind the art drives the reaction that an advertiser is looking to achieve.

Art without Science is pure shock; untargeted and un-contextual. Science without Art is unattractive and lacks the romanticism of so many effective advertising campaigns from the past.

In the middle, among the grey matter, is where truly effective advertising is created. From the coalescence of media and creative comes strategy. Strategy is what drives effective advertising, and Strategy is the true marriage of Art and Science. It is rationalized shock value. It is romanticized messaging. If you are planning creative or media in a vacuum, you cannot truly achieve the desired effect of advertising… to predict and invoke a specific reaction from your target audience.

It is my personal opinion that the current state of advertising online is witnessing a struggle between these two elements. There are “spaghetti” campaigns running, with tonnage buys and CPA inventory, and there are well thought out, targeted campaigns that incorporate technology and research to efficiently convey a message to a user. Some of the recent announcements such as AOL’s decision to stop utilizing pop-ups seems to mark the beginning of a shift towards the latter. A shift towards strategy and away from tonnage. I am looking forward to this becoming the norm in the online world, as it is in the offline world.

What do you think?

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