Advertisements are representations designed to affect and inform a market through knowledge of its needs and wants, over a form of mediated channels that result in an exchange of values.
A fifteenth-century definition of “advertisement” as “the turning of the mind to anything: attention, observation, heed” still seems appropriate for the twenty-first century when gaining attention for one’s products has become exceedingly difficult with keen competition in most product categories, mature product lifecycles, and little product differentiation.
In the fifteenth century, advertisements were used in the creation of shop signs, the billboards of the time. Since few people were able to read, symbols and signs represented the product,
service, skill, or craft within the store. Advertisements were in the form of announcements such as stagecoach schedules or classified ads seeking an exchange of information. Media consisted of outdoor advertisements which were posted in city centers, personal selling from wagons, and crafted signage of the day used by merchants to announce the products they were selling.
At the onset of the twenty-first century, an age bursting with new technologies and almost unlimited choice, products seek differentiation and so (>) branding has become an essential form of signage to connect the product more firmly with the consumer. The difference between products is no longer inherent in the product and its attributes, but in the benefits that accrue for the consumers when they purchase the product. Representations in the form of symbols, signs, icons, and imagery attempt to attract the targeted consumer through a prism of the individual’s own culture, and their linguistic, social, and personal identity. An advertisement is usually developed under the auspices of a marketing department and a creative team. The marketing group investigates and researches the market and develops a
statistical and lifestyle profile of the potential target market, of the competition and the product’s “unique selling proposition” (> USP). This is then presented to the members of the creative team in the form of a creative platform. Typically, creative design fosters and maintains the connection between product and (>) brand, and advertisement and consumer. The goal is for the consumer to recall, immediately and in detail, the brand and its perceived attributes when presented with an advertisement. Members of the creative team, known in the industry as “creatives,” will use design methodologies such as (>) semiotics to convey meaning through sign or (>) symbol. However, aspirational
styles of advertising lead to new signifiers as the consumer becomes part of the designed experience. Visual imagery with little text is needed for the advertisements in a Corona (>) campaign, for instance, in which the viewer looks through a window to a sun-drenched beach and two beach chairs facing the ocean. The only sign of a product is at one side where two frosted beers await the beachgoers. The brand invites the viewer to step in, pull up a chair, and be part of the experience.
Advertisements are part of the branding process and are seldom designed to stand alone; rather, they are intended to become part of a continuing conversation with the listener, viewer, or reader as they are going about their everyday lives (> Corporate Identity). The most important aspect of this process is identifying with the target market (> Target Group) and designing a media network that continues to sustain the consumer experience. With the exponential increase in numbers of people and products over the centuries, new (>) information industries have grown to collect market data that can then be analyzed and used in advertising design. The ability to know “the market” for a product has become complex, requiring research that not only reveals where consumers live, but why and how they live—that is their (>) values and (>) lifestyles. Today, fragmentation of audience and media due to an increasingly technological and mobile society has opened new avenues in (>) market research. Database management, along with other sciences as vast as economics and history and as diverse as anthropology and neuroscience, has emerged and joined the fields of demography, ethnography, and psychology, among others, to help one define target markets and understand their needs and wants. Since the 1990s, companies have been using a new form of brand research, Coolhunting, to seek out emerging (>) trends. The original goal was to make observations and predictions about fashion or design from the street in order to enhance a brand’s “coolness” or “buzz.” Companies have also begun to employ young undercover scouts from among their target demographics to provide intelligence, test products among selected segments and persuade adoption through peer networks. Most recently, companies have begun data mining blogs and using them as “tuning forks” to analyze the electronic musings and desires of millions. These new hunters are becoming the source, the medium, and the representation of brand communications, all of which can now change in a nanosecond.
Where applicable, advertisers use (>) need or motivational platforms to design and extend appeals and execution techniques in the development of advertisements. Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” is the best known of these platforms. It is depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the four lower levels are grouped together as “deficiency needs” associated with physiological needs, while the top level is termed “growth needs” associated with psychological needs. While deficiency needs must be met, growth needs are continually shaping behavior. The basic concept is that the higher needs in this hierarchy, such as the needs associated with social recognition, self esteem, and actualization, only come into focus once all the needs that are lower down the pyramid, such as physiological and safety needs, are mainly or entirely satisfied. In affluent societies, promotional appeals are mostly based on social and self-esteem needs, which emphasize luxury and recognition by others. The goal of an advertisement is to design persuasive choices that involve either emotional and/or rational approaches. Creatives use different hierarchical forms to help design the appeals and the structure of an advertisement. The first is the Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB) planning model. This is a four-part grid formed by two intersecting axes that examines product and consumer relationships. From here, creatives try to determine the promotional platform defined by the dimensions of thinking and feeling and the level of involvement required from the consumer in purchase decisions. Cars, new homes, and other complex products are defined as high involvement/thinking products that require an informative strategy compared with lower involvement/emotional products such as food, clothing, and confectionary.
Value attributes given to products are often embedded within the development of a copy platform. People use objects to set themselves apart from others (> Added Value). Examples are luxury fashions or automobiles that promise to confer a special status and class with ownership. The Virgin brand has been endowed with the personality traits of its owner, Richard Branson—adventurous, individualistic, and nonconforming. Volkswagen attempts to humanize and personalize their Rabbit brand with campaigns such as the birds and bees “Multiply” commercial and, of course, the classic Beetle ads. Indeed, personalization is the buzzword of the twenty-first century. Companies often choose celebrities to be their spokespeople—to represent the brand and to imbue the products of that brand with the qualities seen to be intrinsic to that projected character. The two most important determinants of celebrity success are, firstly, the basic promise that the product/ brand will benefit from its association with that celebrity, and, secondly, the relevance and credibility of the celebrity. A second planning model used by designers when converting the strategy and the “unique differential” or “big idea” into an actual advertisement is called the Creative Pyramid. This helps focus on copy and art and its ability to move consumers through cognitive or “thinking” stages to affective or “feeling” stages of advertising. Whether the medium is print or electronic, the same structure is used within the visual and copy field; the advertisement seeks to gain interest, create desire, and close with an action such as a sale.
The creative process is not finished until a medium is chosen to carry the message to the end user or consumer. Advertisements are called commercials on television and radio and are defined by their time—fifteen, thirty, or sixty seconds. Other media such as newspapers and magazines have longer lives but lack the multimedia advantages of broadcast. Billboards and transit advertisements are designed as support media within advertising campaigns and all of the above are considered non-personal media. Direct personal forms are mail, telephone, in-person representation, and forms of digital interaction such as e-mail and rich media channels among others. More recently, a proliferation of advertisements has crossed the editorial boundaries drawn between commercial and factual advertising. They come disguised in editorial formats such as video news releases, infomercials, advertorials, docudramas, and various forms of product placement in television and films. Advertisements designed for one of these informative approaches, usually “how to” or testimonial appeals, may be part of an advertising campaign. Originally processed by viewers as fact or coincidence rather than as part of a persuasive discourse, a brand or product line may arouse negative feelings of incredulity and indignation when the deceit is exposed. Advertainment channels, which are specifically produced, multimedia, product presentations, have become popular to extend a commercial’s life onto a corporate web site. These are clearly designed as advertising and do not provoke the ire of consumers to the same extent that formats such as infomercials, video news releases, and product placements do. Truthfulness in brand and advertising messages are of overriding importance in building relationships with and gaining the trust of the consumer market (> Credibility). Corporate advertisements in the form of cause and advocacy appeals are on the rise to empower consumers to vote for their values in a sustainable brand relationship.
The type of medium selected is not only important within the (>) communications process but in dressing the advertisement in different vestments to suit the occasion. The mood, ambiance, and temporal properties of each medium are given careful attention, as are the reader, viewer, or listener profiles. For instance, the inability to reach a selected market could be the result of using media channels that are too congested. Television runs commercials one after another, with little time to process meaning, and so a potentially award-winning advertisement can fail to be decoded appropriately. Marshall McLuhan held that “the medium is the message”; that is, that content follows form, so the form in which one receives the message affects one’s interpretation of it.
In conclusion, the key goals of any advertisement are the transmission of the message from the source to the target market; the identification of that target market with the values attributed to the advertised product, service, or idea; and the purchase or espousal of that product, service, or idea. The successful design of any advertisement, from the initial research stage to the selection and design of the medium, thus depends on how well the marketers understand the values of the communities they are targeting and how well the creatives are able to translate these values into a form that engages them.
> CORPORATE IDENTITY, Strategic Design
