Save Art, before it’s too late
Art has always been the form of expression for this civilization, right from the ages when men learned to hunt and etched out stories on the rough edges of cave rocks, eternally transpiring a deed into a story.
Science has been a fairly recent tool, with greater impacts seen in the last couple of centuries. And even when we are staring through the soul of the finest scientific innovations, we are often fixated on the artistic narrative of the product. Whether you are looking at the Mesoamerican Pyramids or the insides of the Sistine Chapel, you are questioning the art of it more than the science. The Mesoamerican Pyramids are radically different from the rest of the pyramids from the Mayan dynasty, mainly because of the greatness and the usage of a rare volcanic rock. But it is the beauty in the symmetry of the pyramid that catches our attention.
You can debate, that the first breed of scientists may have been artists themselves.
Why this absurd prologue? Because I have to create art and help people understand how to unlock rare art that meets business ends, as my job. And it is becoming more and more imperative, that we save art and teach the art of art, before art becomes centralized and is the tool for only a handful few. I was born in a family of advertisers, and even on days when I was sick, I simply could not take my head off from advertising. When I am not at work, I am questioning the work I did recently. To be ever-intrusive and ever-inquisitive is a part of every advertiser’s job. And just like that, my day breaks with me being excited about my job, the day ends with me being irritated to see most people appreciate something which isn’t exactly art.
When Bill Bernbach (1911–82), a crazy advertising genius, whom I respect and learn from, even to this day, wrote to his then-employers at Grey Worldwide that he wants out because he saw the death of art in the organization, he was like you and me. Hungry for art, not much for attention. You can say, that back in his day, art was the only probe, in the lack of real data. But this was also the decade of wars, of colonial liberations. The last thing that would cross your mind when a warhawk is about to crash on your head, is how great the ad across the road looks like. Good art was destined to stupefy you, and help the warhawk split you into many halves.
And so, in 1947, he wrote a letter that highlighted,
“There are a lot great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately, they talk the best game. … They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”
The Art of Persuasion is Advertising. Advertising makes you buy things that you may not otherwise. I am no one to tell you this, because you’ve already seen Fight Club a hundred times. And so when you go out and persuade someone to give in to his desires or a mirage that you’ve built in his head, wouldn’t you want to do it in the best way possible? That leaves an impression and at the same time, speaks in a hundred fluent languages for him to understand and reciprocate? Or would you do it in the way a system tells you to do? If you really want to chase someone’s thoughts, you have to let go of the greater norms and focus on a singular objective, which we call USP, or what Hitler called Lebensraum.
Great art will always find a way to talk to you, sans duplication and set-in-stone interpretation.
Good art is barely replicated or implied, it is always original and mostly interpreted by the one who is interacting with it. There isn’t another Monalisa that is as bedazzling as the original. Van Gogh didn’t explain what he really channelized in his head when he conceived The Starry Night. Sometimes, art is like a mild push, for the person to learn how to ride a bike. And experiencing art is a coming-to-terms with your own wisdom, not necessarily winking back at an instructional parade.
Coming to terms with art is something that the world surrounding creativity and its few good men and women, is losing out on. It’s almost like losing out patience with the good ol’ fashion of reading books: Tolkien, Kafka, Tagore. And finding a sense of rejuvenation in terribly architectured 15-second amateur videos running on teenage brain cells. The greater lot is finding hardcover pages hard to flip, as mobile phones are becoming more convenient to trust. Good art heals you, when you go through an extremely unfair day. It makes you wiser.
Here’s cueing up another great advertiser I follow, Sir John Hegarty. He thinks every form of good art has to be irreverent. Ironic, considering all we do today is obey a few tried and tested methods and a whole lot of jargon.
Years ago, I saw this movie, Amores Perros. Although the original language of the film was Spanish, I tried hard to keep pace with both the visual above and the subtitles below. And when I was done watching the film, I wanted to own a dog. Good art doesn’t need a language, or a determination to sell. All it needs is an intent to cross over a medium (in this case was a TV set) and give you a warm hug or make you laugh.
We all are born with art, with some having stronger intuitions about what’s good or bad. But we are all left-brained and right-brained. So, the decline of art and the rise of replication should agonize all of us.
When advertising started, it didn’t start with an intent to be a creatively disruptive means to do business. Risk-takers and visionary leaders took advertising to the destined lands. Like most mass media, advertising understood how to adapt to times, be culturally appropriate, and change for the good.
Volkswagen has stood the test of times and has delivered unique stories crafted around their cars and services. From the Bernbach led DDB to today’s modern associations with Star Wars and the Super Bowl, Volkswagen made creativity their ultimate weapon in an industry more concerned about horse-power and gear brakes.
When I got into advertising, I wanted to be a part of these movements. An industry that believed in a single piece of eye-catching art that led to brands being born in an instance and industries being disrupted. As an intern, I strived really hard to create opportunities for these possibilities. But thanks to an extremely hostile bunch of leaders who made it a point to ridicule unborn thinkers than to train them, I decided to drift away from the mundane business of brochure writing to a more empowering form of advertising, digital.
The year was 2012, and my father, who was an advertising veteran by the time I turned 23, asked me what exactly was I doing? Amusing, a person trained rigorously by traditional advertising could not grasp the initial phase of social media and media innovation. After a few hits and misses, I conceptualized a campaign that changed the way advertisers saw the algorithm of Twitter. And at the age of 24, I was already in the books of One Club. It was also the first Indian digital agency to receive recognition in One Show’s history. I thought that digital was my calling, and was here to change the game for the redundant and repetitive formula of mainline advertising.
Between 2013–16, I consciously hooked myself to the works of Stink Digital, Unit9 and Dentsu Webchutney. Digital was an expanding playground, and it was soon becoming the alter-ego of good art forms. Webchutney disrupted the whole digital world when it announced a website that only works when you switch off the internet, Unit9 made Star Wars a multi-screen possibility, while I was working on a platform game idea for Pepsi India. The first kinds of digital pitches used to be based on crazy ideas. Once I walked into a pitch for a stock android mobile phone that converted a consumer’s website experience into a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. The consumer, like Alice, falls into a rabbit hole, chasing a digital rabbit, as he interacts with characters like Hatter and the Caterpillar who are our developers, crazy about android ideas; in a world that he’s never explored before — that of the developers. It was a strange idea to explain to my bosses, but it got us the client.
My father passed away in the middle of all of this, and I took a break from advertising for 2 months. When I rejoined work, I was told to head into a meeting, in order to negotiate my raise. I was confident that it would be extremely rewarding for a junior writer who worked his way through the bleakest of his days to win awards. What I was handed was a 10% raise and was told to be punctual from the next year on, in order to earn bigger rewards. I felt like crushing my heart, but my love for the art of digital advertising told me to stay and fight it out.
The thing about heartbreaks in advertising is unsung. When I finally got my chance to shine for one of the most coveted agencies in the country, an agency I eyed to work for, since I was a rookie, things turned upside down. The agency was doing extremely poor business across the country, something that was hidden away during the interviews. And at the same time, the mother brand affiliation meant that top guns were the agency’s priority, not the ones who actually fight odds to deliver art. When the time came to crush the mob due to money constraints, they started with the ones lowest down in the ladder. With a make-shift notice period, handed over by the agency, I was told to be on the lookout for my own and if the situation permits, I will be re-absorbed by the usurpers. I was already fighting odds back then, my work and family being split. I had to be at the hospital by 4 and attend to my family members, down with malaria.
These were minor bumps, things that didn’t concern or impact me in the way I thought it would.
There was a hunger in me for art to help me find retribution, always. But what happened after 2015 changed my world completely. A total lack of artistic callings and falling prey to the undoings that Bill Bernbach once foreshadowed in his 1947-dated exit letter.
Repetition. It has many faces and names. Doused by the Indian social media indolence and set ablaze by the business-driven and art-handicapped leaders in the business today. As more revenue formats became known to the public and the brand leaders, the less risk they wanted to take, relying heavily on an end objective and not persistent on a unique overall journey. The result was predictable: you see a topic of the day, you force your brand’s communication to mimic it, and then you pay to show people your unoriginal Monalisa like she’s ready to start the next Renaissance.
Unfortunately, that’s what hundreds of other business leaders are thinking of too. There’s a gaming company, called Naughty Dog, and it creates new games in a gap of 4–5 years. They train their body and soul, and sometimes way too much, to make games that will stand the test of times. The result? Masterpieces like Uncharted and The Last Of Us. Each of those titles has a cumulative score of 90% on the internet. If they were to choose the path of EA Games and come up with a new FIFA or Madden every year, imagine how dried and mechanical the creative juices would’ve been at the organization.
Social Media is not a medium to adapt and replicate. It is the medium that gave a 24-year-old boy his dream, he twisted with the algorithm and changed it to make something special. It gave him a sense of pride even while the world was coming down on him, back at home. Sometimes, we are surrounded by too many contrasting beliefs, and as creative people, who absorb all influences like a sponge, lose our identity in order to commit to a business-ended art form.
I’m older and mildly wiser now. And since time, my efforts are often thwarted by respawning manifestations of mediocrity. And I have to justify this, not to anybody, but to myself. The ground reality is, we’ve fallen far from the tree.
What this unique form of art used to be, back in the days when tech and web captured its true beauty, has decayed. And as more mindless matter occupies the internet and drives people to the edge of insanity, as more hate bots harness the true worth of political bodies, this art takes a deep hit. And becomes less of art and the technique Bernbach warned us all not to fall for.
Repetitive art can surely begin without intricate detailing, you choose to see what’s around you and spin a brand story. Does it help the brand? Sure, but only for those particular hours. As many artists have proven time and time, real art is timeless. You can take a 2000s mint ad featuring people as sources of light and still re-run it, people will laugh and appreciate the efforts. Even after 20 years and a completely new generation taking up the purchasing factor. When Suarez bit Chiellini in the 2014 Brazil World Cup, Snickers raised eyebrows with an instant creative via their social media, they became immortal. That’s the kind of advertising we were taught to chase, to capture the audience’s attention, not pre-conceived to drive end results only.
The question is, how many ideas will be sacrificed for the greater good of nothing? How many new trending formats will ruin the killer instinct of a platform thinker? How many budgetary constraints will ensure that your retainer fee is met with absurdly mediocre work?
If there’s any repetition that I’m willing to sign up for, it will be, “Make art great again.”
