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A Spanish journalist researching a book emailed me some questions about advertising, and this is how I responded:
1) Does advertising work at a subconscious or conscious level?
Both, but mostly subconscious (in general I don’t like to separate the two). First it stimulates the nervous system to trigger an emotional response. Ads seek to bypass the rational mind through the use of symbols that generate quick, emotional reactions. They appeal entirely to the irrational. I like to think of advertising as corporations dreaming your mind. (See Blink and Everything Bad is Good for You.)
2) Does the ad seek to identify with the consumer or is it the opposite way round?
Ads are there to build mindshare. They usually have nothing to do with the product, but rather with the corporate brand and its logo. This is to boost the value of the brand’s stock value. The ad tries to wink and flatter the consumer by pretending to identify with his or her needs. This is especially evident with commercials targeting young people who are skeptical of advertising; the narrator uses a droll, cynical voice to say, “yeah, we know this bullshit, and you know its bullshit, but buy our product anyway.” This is because ads are there to solve a problem: to sell you something you don’t need. Logically, if you needed something, it wouldn’t be necessary for an ad to tell you about it. You would look for it on your own. (See How to Get A Head in Advertising.)
Ads also are used to create culture. For example, Nike’s innovative marketing strategy was designed to build the idea of “sport,” and to associate its brand with that concept. Other brands, such as Levis, devise ads to be cultural experiences so that you associate the brand with a certain lifestyle.
3) Are there different classifications of people that ad men/women target for certain products?
Absolutely. It’s called demographics, and in many cases advertisers are like anthropologists. They do ethnographic studies and psychological profiling. In the case of cool hunting, marketers have cultural spies who search for cultural trends that can be quickly turned around and regurgitated as useless, disposable, obsolete products. (See The Merchants of Cool.)
4) What do you think is the future of advertising?
Product placement; peer-to-peer marketing; customized algorithms that track your interests from Web surfing and consumer patterns (kind of like the retinal scanning seen in Spielberg’s Minority Report); targeted psychotropic mind blasts (as depicted in Altered Carbon); infant marketing through covert educational materials and PBS (see Branded and Born to Buy); corporate sponsorship of school curriculum; increasing presence of screens in public environments; ads distributed through phones; fake ads disguised as graffiti and culture jams; increasing privatization of public goods and services by naming stadiums, freeways and national parks (see Snow Crash).
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