Advertising has almost become the crutch of urban society whereby absence of which would leave a vacuum in our lives. We witness innumerable advertisements daily, each of them having a direct or an indirect impact and influence on our thought process and our lifestyle. Evolution of media over the years teamed with liberalization has lead to the development of strong individual ideas and perceptions about media itself.
People don’t blindly believe what they see anymore. What we question and analyze (maybe even over-analyze) about the media today was unheard of a decade ago. Several media theories have emerged discussing how the role and importance of advertisements have changed over time. The bottom line is that people today are well-equipped to think for themselves and form clear-cut opinions about everything around them. Since advertisements target a large audience, their understanding is open-ended. Interpretation of each is left completely (and almost without choice) to each person’s beliefs, values, biases and judgement. This liberal thought process has led to drastically conflicting viewpoints wherein the producer (of the ad) is left almost helpless against the newly formed beliefs of society.
Yet while there is a media boom, it has brought with it several negative implications. The primary function of advertisement, traditionally, is to introduce a wide range of consumer goods to the public and thereby support the free-market economy. But that is clearly not its only role anymore. Today, the meaning of advertisement has changed. It is an umbrella term whereby it performs a number of promotional functions. Advertisements assume certain characteristics which are less directly connected to selling. Advertisers try to manipulate people into buying a way of life as well as goods. It aims to create not just a want, but a need for the product. To accomplish this, several advertisers go to the extent of creating an illusion of the real world to the masses, depicting what the ‘ideal’ world should be like and creating a want for things the consumer might not even need. And the consumer, despite his/her better judgement gets influenced by these media messages and ends up purchasing products/services shown as a ‘must have’. So a lot of the advertisements are fooling people by creating unnecessary ‘wants’.
India, a country still widely run by its traditions, has also somewhat matched up to the global society, not being far behind in the media revolution. Nevertheless, we have our share of advertisements that live up to the statement ‘truth in advertising is a misnomer’.
Each brand, in an attempt to beat competition, comes up with new creative solutions to reach the top. While creativity has brilliant results, it has also led to advertisements creating an ‘illusion’. This illusion deals with the media portraying the world unrealistically. A lot of advertisements are ‘larger than life’. While some may argue that this strategy is needed to sell the product, it crosses the fine line of having the ‘big picture’ to being unreal. Advertisements now a days show almost irrational and unethical images which create wrong notions among the audience resulting in confusion of reality.
The media today is very crowded and a million messages are thrown at people each day. Successful advertising involves breaking the clutter otherwise the advertisement is just like a ship at sea in the night. Thus, advertising is complex, requires a lot of understanding and of course experience. With an annual growth of 6% in the advertising world for the last three years and a yearly budget of Rs. 10,000 crore, the competition in India has reached a new level. Each brand, in an attempt to beat this competition, comes up with new creative solutions to reach the top. This results in a plethora of advertisements flooding the five primary media forms, i.e. print, television, radio, internet and outdoor.
Like the clichéd two sides to a coin, there is good and bad advertising among the millions out there. And it is not a very difficult task to distinguish between the two.
An analysis of the good and bad advertisements aids in understanding which elements make a good advertisement and which ones make a bad advertisement. It also says how the advertising agency thinks and functions while making a particular advertisement. It involves studying everything, right from the models used to endorse the product to the tagline used to the size (print) or duration (TVC) of the advertisement.
“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself” David M. Ogilvy
“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself” David M. Ogilvy
Good advertising is not open to interpretation. It means the same thing to whoever reads it, anywhere in the world. If it is good it is good. If it works it works.
Advertising is a tease. How good or bad it is depends on the knowledge you have of it and it is practised at ad agencies, clients and the marketplace. It is like the snake in the Garden of Eden, who sold the apple to Eve to entice Adam to eat the forbidden fruit! So how good was the advertising strategy of the serpent to be able to sell his apple, despite the consequences? I say this just as David Ogilvy in his book Ogilvy on Advertising said I do not regard advertising as an entertainment, but as a medium of information. When I write an ad, I don't want you to tell me that it is creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. Unfortunately, today's advertising has gotten to be more entertaining, and thus it is often hard to tell what companies are advertising.
Good ad
Brand: Monster.com
Product: Online job search engine
Agency: J Walter Thompson
Medium: TVC
Country: India
A good advertisement is one which has a sound message, helps build brand recall, creative flair and is well produced. A good advertisement can be judged on the basis of highlighting the features of the product, clearly defining the target audience, following the company’s segmentation and how catchy it is. With a rise in the number of advertising agencies in India, companies like Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson, LOWE-Lintas, the creative work we witness is immense.
It is an advertisement with a difference, crisp and to the point. It is a superb idea and very well executed. It has an important element of humour which immediately grabs your attention. The advertisement grabs your attention from the first shot and intrigues the viewer to know the end. Again an unused concept brilliantly utilized to show that, as opposed to the other job finding websites, Monster.com promises to find you not just a job, but the ‘right job’. This is also the USP of the product. The message is crystal clear and they use a mascot, a monster like their name, to show their physical absence in reality as it is a website. They clearly target professionals in all fields and do not limit themselves to any one particular job type. In terms of creativity the advertisement is par excellence and one of a kind. While some may argue that the features of the product are well defined if not with excessive clarity, they divulge just the right amount of details to get their target audience interested to actually log on to the internet and know more. Monster.com along with J. Walter Thompson has maintained their image of originality and creative talent at its best.
Bad ad
Brand: Fair and Lovely
Product: Fairness cream
Agency: Lowe
Medium: TVC
Country: India
One of the most controversial advertisements on Indian television, Fair & Lovely has always been the target for negative publicity, with the Indian masses roaring against its unethical claim – being fair is being superior. India being a primarily dark-skinned populated country, the whites are seen as ‘better off’. This dissatisfaction of having a tanned complexion, and the advertisements showing that fairness leads you to success and superiority, has to led to Indians having a low self-esteem and image. Advertisements like Fair & Lovely further give fuel to this mindset surpassing all ethics and morality.
The shots when the girl had dark complexion is shown through grey and white dull filters. Connoting that life seems dim depending on your skin colour. It was only once she used the fairness cream and sent her audition tape, did she get noticed. The advertisement claims she got noticed because of her bright looks. The filters immediately change to vibrant tones of pink and blue indicating that one you become fair, your life also changes for the better. The woman landed the fabulous job because of her fair skin, which indirectly says that, if you don’t have fair skin you won’t get a good job. So the pre-requisite for getting a good job is not your skill or ability, but your skin colour. The advertisement is also implying that women have low self-esteem with regard to their colour and need something as superficial as a fairness cream to give them confidence to apply for and get a good job. This is almost as good as saying, having dark skin, which majority Indians have, equals being unsuccessful, having low-self esteem and a dull, uninteresting life. While being fair implies success, and an eventful life.
The brand is inducing in people the belief that being the dark skinned race that we are is equivalent to being inferior and being fair means being superior. The people who selected the girl for the job were men. Doesn’t this say that men judge women, at least a large part, by their looks? Would they have selected her if she wasn’t so fair? Questions like these are open-ended and can be used against the brand. Their tag line reads ‘making life brighter’; a highly superficial statement clearly stating using Fair & Lovely will make your life better. Being fair hence successful means being praised and called worthy by your family. What about the millions out there who are dark? They should lose all hope for getting a good job and never being the apple of their family’s eye just for the simple reason they have dark skin. This advertisement creates a most futile assumption about fair skin and makes the millions watching it think they are inferior to their fair neighbour. The advertisement creates an illusion stating that they won’t be accepted (in society/ a good job) or successful unless they use Fair & Lovely. It’s as good as saying that there is no place in this world for dusky skin, and this plain wrong and unethical.
These are just 2 examples of the way advertising can be so pure in its meaning and so misleading and ethically wrong. Ken Garland's manifesto states very clearly and simply what I, and every other designer around the globe wants to scream out and sums up our concern as a community in this document. The line between design and commercial work is so blurred, that we lose the real essence of design. Its design that makes up advertising and not advertising that makes up design. How we use wasteful amounts of energy and talent to sell trivial products where as a creative community it is out responsibility to put our abilities to better and more productive use. I think the manifesto is a self-explanatory piece of work and very clearly states its agenda.
First Things First 2000
a design manifesto
manifesto published jointly by 33 signatories in:
Adbusters, the AIGA journal, Blueprint, Emigre, Eye, Form, Items
fall 1999 / spring 2000
foreword
by Chris Dixon, Adbusters
introduction
by Rick Poynor
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession's time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.
We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
signed:
Jonathan Barnbrook
Nick Bell
Andrew Blauvelt
Hans Bockting
Irma Boom
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Max Bruinsma
Siân Cook
Linda van Deursen
Chris Dixon
William Drenttel
Gert Dumbar
Simon Esterson
Vince Frost
Ken Garland
Milton Glaser
Jessica Helfand
Steven Heller
Andrew Howard
Tibor Kalman
Jeffery Keedy
Zuzana Licko
Ellen Lupton
Katherine McCoy
Armand Mevis
J. Abbott Miller
Rick Poynor
Lucienne Roberts
Erik Spiekermann
Jan van Toorn
Teal Triggs
Rudy VanderLans
Bob Wilkinson
and many more
Links and MUST read:
A good advertisement is one which has a sound message, helps build brand recall, creative flair and is well produced. A good advertisement can be judged on the basis of highlighting the features of the product, clearly defining the target audience, following the company’s segmentation and how catchy it is. With a rise in the number of advertising agencies in India, companies like Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson, LOWE-Lintas, the creative work we witness is immense.
It is an advertisement with a difference, crisp and to the point. It is a superb idea and very well executed. It has an important element of humour which immediately grabs your attention. The advertisement grabs your attention from the first shot and intrigues the viewer to know the end. Again an unused concept brilliantly utilized to show that, as opposed to the other job finding websites, Monster.com promises to find you not just a job, but the ‘right job’. This is also the USP of the product. The message is crystal clear and they use a mascot, a monster like their name, to show their physical absence in reality as it is a website. They clearly target professionals in all fields and do not limit themselves to any one particular job type. In terms of creativity the advertisement is par excellence and one of a kind. While some may argue that the features of the product are well defined if not with excessive clarity, they divulge just the right amount of details to get their target audience interested to actually log on to the internet and know more. Monster.com along with J. Walter Thompson has maintained their image of originality and creative talent at its best.
Bad ad
Brand: Fair and Lovely
Product: Fairness cream
Agency: Lowe
Medium: TVC
Country: India
One of the most controversial advertisements on Indian television, Fair & Lovely has always been the target for negative publicity, with the Indian masses roaring against its unethical claim – being fair is being superior. India being a primarily dark-skinned populated country, the whites are seen as ‘better off’. This dissatisfaction of having a tanned complexion, and the advertisements showing that fairness leads you to success and superiority, has to led to Indians having a low self-esteem and image. Advertisements like Fair & Lovely further give fuel to this mindset surpassing all ethics and morality.
The shots when the girl had dark complexion is shown through grey and white dull filters. Connoting that life seems dim depending on your skin colour. It was only once she used the fairness cream and sent her audition tape, did she get noticed. The advertisement claims she got noticed because of her bright looks. The filters immediately change to vibrant tones of pink and blue indicating that one you become fair, your life also changes for the better. The woman landed the fabulous job because of her fair skin, which indirectly says that, if you don’t have fair skin you won’t get a good job. So the pre-requisite for getting a good job is not your skill or ability, but your skin colour. The advertisement is also implying that women have low self-esteem with regard to their colour and need something as superficial as a fairness cream to give them confidence to apply for and get a good job. This is almost as good as saying, having dark skin, which majority Indians have, equals being unsuccessful, having low-self esteem and a dull, uninteresting life. While being fair implies success, and an eventful life.
The brand is inducing in people the belief that being the dark skinned race that we are is equivalent to being inferior and being fair means being superior. The people who selected the girl for the job were men. Doesn’t this say that men judge women, at least a large part, by their looks? Would they have selected her if she wasn’t so fair? Questions like these are open-ended and can be used against the brand. Their tag line reads ‘making life brighter’; a highly superficial statement clearly stating using Fair & Lovely will make your life better. Being fair hence successful means being praised and called worthy by your family. What about the millions out there who are dark? They should lose all hope for getting a good job and never being the apple of their family’s eye just for the simple reason they have dark skin. This advertisement creates a most futile assumption about fair skin and makes the millions watching it think they are inferior to their fair neighbour. The advertisement creates an illusion stating that they won’t be accepted (in society/ a good job) or successful unless they use Fair & Lovely. It’s as good as saying that there is no place in this world for dusky skin, and this plain wrong and unethical.
These are just 2 examples of the way advertising can be so pure in its meaning and so misleading and ethically wrong. Ken Garland's manifesto states very clearly and simply what I, and every other designer around the globe wants to scream out and sums up our concern as a community in this document. The line between design and commercial work is so blurred, that we lose the real essence of design. Its design that makes up advertising and not advertising that makes up design. How we use wasteful amounts of energy and talent to sell trivial products where as a creative community it is out responsibility to put our abilities to better and more productive use. I think the manifesto is a self-explanatory piece of work and very clearly states its agenda.
First Things First 2000
a design manifesto
manifesto published jointly by 33 signatories in:
Adbusters, the AIGA journal, Blueprint, Emigre, Eye, Form, Items
fall 1999 / spring 2000
foreword
by Chris Dixon, Adbusters
introduction
by Rick Poynor
We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.
Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession's time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.
Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.
We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.
In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.
signed:
Jonathan Barnbrook
Nick Bell
Andrew Blauvelt
Hans Bockting
Irma Boom
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Max Bruinsma
Siân Cook
Linda van Deursen
Chris Dixon
William Drenttel
Gert Dumbar
Simon Esterson
Vince Frost
Ken Garland
Milton Glaser
Jessica Helfand
Steven Heller
Andrew Howard
Tibor Kalman
Jeffery Keedy
Zuzana Licko
Ellen Lupton
Katherine McCoy
Armand Mevis
J. Abbott Miller
Rick Poynor
Lucienne Roberts
Erik Spiekermann
Jan van Toorn
Teal Triggs
Rudy VanderLans
Bob Wilkinson
and many more
Links and MUST read:
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