Projection, from Art to Advertising

-the consumer’s way in-

Part of the reason art from about 1400 onwards can be so impressive and fun to experience is because it developed many of the techniques used in modern advertising. The point of the work is often to communicate a specific feeling, idea or lesson (usually religious in nature, but definitely not always). To do this, the artist tries to make the viewer empathise with the characters. To do this, you can try to make them look realistic, but it may be even more effective to make the characters look like the same sort of people as the viewers. This is why Caravaggio depicted his biblical stories acted out by southern European people in 1600s clothing – this is the equivalent of having Jesus and his gang of apostles in hoodies. This is also why Jesus is white: because the audiences of the paintings were too. They were far more likely to empathise with a white man dying for you, a white Italian/French person, when in reality Jesus would have looked to them quite terrifying, more like one of the Sultan’s Mosalmen camped outside the walls of Byzantium.

Today, advertisers use the same trick. There’s a character who you empathise with. They’re in your situation. They buy a product, it makes them happy and complete – it would do the same for you too.

It’s also a bit like that pivotal moment in Roald Dahl’s BFG, or to take a less obscure example, Inception. Once you realise that part of the artificial dream is true (the person in the advert is like you / there is a girl called Sophie sitting on your windowsill / your father is an emotionally distant businessman on his deathbed) then you will be prepared to believe that it’s all true (that you need to buy the product / send the army to attack the bad giants / dissolve your father’s business).

In order to get the advert over and done with in today’s vanishingly small attention spans, while maximising its persuasive power, advertisers need to deploy the full range of clever details and hooks to help you ‘identify with’ their character.

By targeting the ‘majority’ 80% or so of its potential market, advertisers and politicians can overlook, or at worst exclude, the ‘dissimilar’, hard-to-define, diverse 20%. This means that if you’re not included in the narrative of the advertising or the nation, you have a problem. You might follow your natural human inclination to be a part of the ‘in’ group, and conform to the narrative, fitting yourself in somehow – if you’re a gay man in a homophobic society you might marry a woman and suppress your other sexual desires, for example. You choose to trade the advantages of being ‘you’ for the advantages of being accepted and supported by society.

Instead of attempting to conform with the majority you may disengage, or resist. When this happens to enough people, and when they can talk to each other and organise, a new minority group will crystallise. This minority ‘community’ has its own norms and will probably be just as exclusionary to its own ‘minority-minorities’.

My point here is that there will always be minorities as long as there are social narratives, because (even though the most successful narratives are the ones that the most people can relate to), no single narrative can include everybody. The only difference to society is in whether the majority’s narrative can accommodate diversity or not. Unless diversity is actively tolerated, respected and cherished to some degree, the whole ‘majority’ society can go stale and rigid for want of new ideas.

Branding is always targeted at someone. Very few campaigns do not appeal to, and therefore push, one set of values more than others.

I fully acknowledge the benefits of advertising in promoting products, but brands have become symbiotic with our identities. We give money to the brand by buying the product, and in return we ‘buy into’ the brand – we identify ourselves with it, implying ‘I am Mr. Muscle, and I love the jobs you hate’, ‘I drink PepsiMax so I am cool like David Beckham’ or maybe ‘my Omega watch is just like James Bond’s so I’m a dysfunctional womaniser’.

Individual personalities are becoming things that are imposed as a set of choices: you compose your public identity partly from the global brands you affiliate with. Your friends get told that you ‘like’ Diet Coke and Batman on Facebook. Your newsfeed is filtered to be more relevant to your ‘preferences’ as surmised from the statistics of your behaviour online. What are the implications of this? Will people be motivated to actually find out about themselves and each other, or will they just wear brands on their cyber-lapel like political badges and leave it at that? The filter bubble phenomenon has been well-documented both in theory and practise.

What if the only people you ever encountered were people you could be fairly sure were just like you? Nobody you ever met would need much effort for you to understand, because you can reasonably assume they’re thinking the same things as you. They vote the same way, and they can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t. You don’t have any friends outside your group – why would you? They’re all idiots. Republicans. Democrats. French. Chinese. Fat Americans. Terrorist infidels.

Welcome to the Web 2.0, where the Social Network is the new class system.

Personally, I predict a counter-trend here. Less will really change than you might think. Those of us with a hankering for argument and alternative viewpoints will always hunger for a bit of randomness in social encounters. This randomness will probably come with strings attached, but whyever would you want dangerous wilderness when you can live all your life in a well-managed Walled Garden?