On my non designer family, on advertising, and other random things.
When I was a kid, I generally had no idea how sneaky advertising has crept up to the daily grind of the household. My earliest memory of an ad was the jolibee commercial in the 80’s; featuring a little girl who got left behind by her parents, looking for her doll named “Jennifer”. The scene ends with a warm bag of a Jolibee meal to assuage her fears, her parents give her a hug, and that was that. There was the frilly comfort of the 80s hair, the warmth of the horrible fashion mistakes that we took refuge on. And yes, the family featured on the ad was aspirational – the kid lived in a mansion, the car that pulled over the drive way was a box type mercedes. The ad was very emotive, and yes, the ad agency Jimeno Basic were very effective in eliciting brand recall. Especially with that little girls heart broken face. Their brand messaging has changed over the years, shifting from the elitist / aspirational ideals to a mass market approach, mimicking globalization giant Mcdonalds. There was always a jolibee jingle that followed through to cap things off.
We come from a non-advertising/ non-designer family. My great grand father apparently was an australian chemist who introduced soap to the pithy islands. My grandmother was a strong market woman, who was driven into a cinderella story when she fell in love with a man above her social stature. My father was, like my grandpa, a real estate enthusiast, motivated by the shiny feeling of new business ventures under his sleeve. We have lots of aunts and uncles sprinkled around america; before we know it, i’ve started to realize that the side of the family is the most exotic to date – half portugese nephews and nieces, half hawaiian kids, half whatever kids. I don’t even want to constrain them with labels any more. They simply… just … are.. interesting folks.
my mother, on the other hand, came from a string of doctors and nurses. they had the whole spanish thing going on – an intrusive belief in superior aura. They’ve had a long list of maids, helpers, maids designated to do very focused household tasks. My grand mother slathered on lipstick and thick wads of powder. She had high voices and worldly artifacts in their home, and a long list of colorful drama suited to daytime television. My uncles and aunts were a diverse bunch -nurses, an army man, a fertilizer specialist, a veterinarian – with their host of issues and quirks. Dare i say this, but i’ve always felt that the spaces in between us has grown larger over the years.
I’ve always had the impression that the hispanic in me was always concerned with putting up facades, saving one’s own grace; bereft of sincerity. Or, in other words, it was manufactured sincerity. Or maybe this was the filipino hispanic way. or maybe it was just my family.
Putting these cultural mores aside, i think it’s clear by now, that nobody really took the field of advertising that seriously. It was not something that was discussed. By the mere fact that it was closely associated with the arts (by people who can’t delineate the difference between arts and design) it was something that was dismissed with unruly fervor. A lot of countries have done this in the 90s / 2000’s – but I fought through some sort of awakening when I decided to abandon Export Management and trade it in to be an arts major.
I never thought I’d end up in advertising. Really. I took odd clubs in highschool writing and drawing for the school newspaper; my dreams were to become a lawyer or an artist somehow, living by the beach… and most of my exposure of what we deemed as art was limited to library books and cd covers. I remember looking at the nirvana (in utero) cd cover, as well as the oasis cover (definitely maybe) and thought “wow, that’s really rad. I wonder what this is called?!” – then somebody blurted out the magic words, that it was graphic design. And of course, the whole discussion becomes a bit more convoluted from thereon forward, realizing that graphic design plays a role in this well orchestrated magic called advertising. To me there was nothing more brilliant than seeing a piece of artwork – a poster, a cd cover, a starbucks napkin, a tea box – that solicited feelings.
Yes, I think that’s it. That’s what endears me about advertising: The ability to solicit feelings.
In fact, what’s so much more surprising about this discussion is that the facts back it up. The most effective advertising campains success [] are generally based on those which have minimal or NO rational content at all.
You think after all these years of Darwins’ evolution we would have grown into mature, rational human beings, but apparently not. We’re still the same, raw emotive human beings – with a ton of changing media outlets that deliver messages, that illicit feelings and responses.
There’s been so much material out there that discuss these things, specifically the outrage caused by having too much of it – a situation called advertising overload []. There’s not much we can do about it as consumers – ads will forever be part of our lives. They pay the bills, afterall. They make things free and affordable by grasping our psyches, and hooking us in. But as advertisers, the tricky bit is to be a bit more clever than the rest, to penetrate lives into seamless experiences that deliver brand beliefs.
Essentially, we need ads that we therefore want to be part of, not opt out of.
This is an important point that we need to drill in our heads, considering people’s general distrust towards media -and media mimicking consumer behavior and vice versa. The medium and the message has been blurred, and there’s so much information and loss of sincerity along the way.
It’s the same high brow mentality that is driven by top down advertising models that come up with elusive ‘big ideas’ somehow magically trickling down to the side lines. It’s the same old story we get when we have award hungry people rallying for advertisements claiming all the glory for molding an argument.
It’s a troublesome, exhausting, nauseating environment when you see so many people trying to rub shoulders against people just to get what they want. ( I’d like to expound, but I think it’s best to leave these scenes up to the imagination)
Okay, so here’s the cheese. I stumbled upon the advertising by fate, and I would like to keep it that way. Advertising needs value-driven campaigns. We need to give back. We need to actualize our names as ‘creatives’ and think of people’s motivations, and goals.
Advertising won’t probably give me the same high experience in that jolibee commercial in the 80s. Potentially, it can be all that and more, it’s just up to us to stop bickering, and start thinking of the bigger picture. Nuances are important, but nothing is accomplished without a solid framework. this is how advertising could be relevant, if not, up to date with technology – because we offer that emotive sense of pleasure better than any one else.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Kafka
And, oh, yes, it feels way too good when it’s done right.