CREATIVITY AND ADVERTISING

Falmouth University, 2014

ANDREW MCSTAY@digi-ad

SCHOOL OF CREATIVE STUDIES AND MEDIA BANGOR UNIVERSITY, UK

o Centrality of creativityo Industry perspectiveso Philosophical/aesthetic/psychological contexto Combinatorial perspectiveso Towards an embodied sensational accounto Creativity and mediao Empathic mediao Briefing

#CreativityAndAffect #MediaNotBlankVehicles #EmpathicMedia

Industry perspectives.Creativity…

o Often an agency’s calling cardo Clients: seeking growth, fortune, intangible brand assets,

awareness, action and to persuade

Industry perspectives.Creativity entails…

o Jeremy Bullmore, the “Mad Inventor” (contrasted with “Time-and-Motion Man”).

o John Hegarty, ‘adjust the viewer’s perspectives in some way, either attitudinal or visual’ … ‘breaking something down and putting something new in its place’… ‘Write less, say more’

o David Ogilvy, ‘the work I have to do between now and Tuesday’.o Stanley Resor, ‘everything else is plumbing’ o Leo Burnett ‘If you insist in being different just for the sake of being

different, you can always come down in the morning with a sock in your mouth’.

o Raymond Rubicam, ‘resist the usual’o William Bernbach, ‘research kills creative ideas’… ‘both parties might

as well enjoy the process’o Paul Arden, ‘rely less on safe decisions that go only to familiar places’o Dave Trott, ‘that creative briefs harm the creative process’

Combinatorial perspectives

o Semiotic approaches (most often critical)o Bisociation (industry): the distinction between the routine

skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’ and the creative act that operates on more than one plane’ (Koestler, 1970 [1964]: 35).

o Creativity in advertising: divergence and convergence

#CombinatorialCreativity

Bisociative (industry perspective)

Critical (semiotics)

Transformational creativity

• Not just playing with existing elements, but redefining how practice is done and entailing a new structure and paradigm.

• Arguably, only seen twice in advertising: – 1960s, Bernbach, DDB (new working practices, levels of

humour, playfulness, layouts, sophistication, or what we can now define in terms of playful and reflective ‘meta-communication’ [talking with rather than at])

– Behavioural, empathic and technological dimensions: represents not only bisociation of computer science, profiling and personalising experiences of advertising (heterogeneity), but more centrally involves the creation of a new order, structure and paradigm in which advertising is done.

#BeyondCombinations #CreativityasRedescription

Embodied creativity

o Not “what we do we think”, but “how do we feel?”

o Persuasion – sensation – affecto Combinatory analyses pass over

in silence situated and experiential dimensions of advertising

o Towards affect (non-cognitive, visceral and more inclusive of the body)o Also opens up multi-sensory

persuasion rather than hegemony of the visual

o Not just speculative – check out Royal Mail DM services

An affective approach recognises ‘qualia’ Qualia… quality advertising… positive affective

distinctiveness

For the diligent and interested: read up on John Seale and ‘qualia’

Events (terminology)(Or fancy ways of talking about ‘being in the world’)

• Beyond (but including) combinatorial creativity Advertising: not merely a symbolic industry, but an

affective industry– comprised of a specific character – a sense of temporal immediacy disclosed in sense-awareness.

• That which stimulates before we intellectually process

#CreativityAsAffectiveEvent

A renewal of aesthetics

• affective experience, interaction, embodiment, co-creation, emotional faculties and felt experiences of contemporary creative advertising.

• John Dewey: – ‘An experience has a unity that gives it that name, that meal, that

storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience’ (2005 [1934]: 38 [emphasis in original]).

• Or as Gaston Bachelard puts it, – a poetic or creative image ‘has touched the depths before it stirs

the surface’ (1994 [1958]): xxiii).

It should be said of all art that, in relation to the percepts or visions they give us, artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound.

(Giles Deleuze, 2011 [1994]: 175)

Machinic advertising

• “Audiences” are not spectators, they are productive parts of events

• Ads are not texts to be ‘read’ from a distance, but agencies produce ‘bodies’ that interact and perform

• The materiality and phenomenology of involvement: kinaesthetics, participation, interaction and engagement

Being a bad semiotics student

• Dissecting from a distance• Beyond representation• By taking advertising out of its context we offer it up to

passive analysis that has little interest in the sensational dynamics of the field from which an image (and it is nearly always visual) is drawn.

#DissectingFromaDistance

Failure of semiotics

o Does not take into account capacity for affect o Does not take into account the context of advertising because it utterly fails to address the role of media

(indeed, it willfully ignores it [see for example Judith Willamson,1978)

Affordances and media ecologies

• Affordances = properties (what some allows you to do with it)– How might might media be understood, harnessed, reformulated

and used a means of sensational expression? (Not just ‘social media’, but Google Earth and other less obvious media)

• Historically, all good creatives know their media• Creatives as hackers

#MediaEcologicalCreativity

Media ecologies (an interest in interconnection and how things link together to form wholes greater than the sum of their parts)

o Transformationo Re-packaging applicationso Creating non-standard media objectso Repurposing o Interconnections/ecologieso Hacking of media-use assumptions

#MediaNotBlankVehicles #MediaEcologicalCreativity

o Coca Cola Hilltop 2.0 (Google, Johannes Leonardo and Grow Interactive)

o Subservient Chicken (now a mockumentary)

o Also see: Melotweet for Evian

VW Video #foxatplanetaterra

• Less about interruption as with traditional advertising commercial

• More about co-creative events (human>human; human>machine; machine>machine)

• ‘Transductive’ character: that quality that retrospectively is seen to emerge at different phases, points and levels within the event, and bind all of these together.

#CreativityasAffectiveEvent #BeyondCombinations

Practical points(with some apologies for excess philosophy!)

o Combinatorial perspectives work to an extent, but redefinition better

o Affect, events, place, qualia, quality, sensations, uniqueness

o Media matters o Re-definition/repurposing/hacking of assuptionso Media ecologies

Towards the task for today: What affordances and opportunities are granted by empathic media?

o Empathy: o the capacity to sense, interpret and act on the emotional state of

others, what is significant for others, to make use of people’s intentions and expressions

o Thus, empathic media entail:o the capacity for near and remote machines to pick up on the

emotional state of people, their intentions, their expressions and actions, along with behavioural cues, and act on them.

o Empathic advertising: execution of highly relevant advertising targeted by what people are doing in their living rooms, or elsewhere, in view of empathic media.

#EmpathicMedia

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Methods and Systems for Presenting an Advertisement Associated with an Ambient Action of a User (US Patent & Trademark Office, 2012 )

Analytical tools include motion capture and analysis technologies, gesture recognition technologies, facial recognition technologies, voice recognition technologies, and acoustic source localization technologies. These will be employed to detect actions including movements, motions, gestures, mannerisms of people in a room, location of people, proximity of people to others, persons’ physical attributes (for example size, build, skin color, hair length, facial features), one or more voice attributes (for example tone, pitch, inflection, language, accent, amplification) associated with persons’ voices, physical surroundings (for example one or more physical objects proximate to and/or held by people), and/or any other suitable information associated with people present. Pets, products, brands, decorative style, objects (for example photographs and pictures) and other animate or non-animate objects are also to be scanned and profiled.

The set-top box will determined with people present are adults or children by means of the physical attributes of the user, determine the identity of the user (based on the physical and/or voice attributes of profiled persons), determine a user's mood (based on the user's tone of voice, mannerisms, demeanor, and so on). Should more than one person be in the room, the set-top box will analyse the received data to obtain information associated with each user individually and/or the group of users as a whole. So, for example, if the system detects a user is stressed then it may deliver advertisements for relaxation products. Likewise, if a domestic argument or disagreement is taking place, the system may deliver advertisements for marriage or relationship counseling.

(McStay, 2014/forthcoming)

Task!

MA Students: by 1pm please prepare structured thoughts/mini-presentation on the implications of empathic media for creative advertising and creative advertisers.

Some questions:o What opportunities are afforded by empathic media? o Do they represent a threat to industry?o How should creative advertising respond to such high

levels of behavioural targeting and heterogeneous experience?

o Please develop other questions and answers of your own.

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