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For my money, we’ve learned a lot thinking about promising in advertising. We’ve learned that you while you can’t promise something you can’t deliver, a lot of companies try to circumvent reality by promising almost nothing, insinuating anything and everything, promising something deeply vague, or adopting an ironic stance toward the whole promising practice in general. From a viewer’s perspective, that’s a whole lot of of sneakiness, and it leads to an ongoing state of consumer anxiety.

I’d like to talk briefly today about how we as designers, advertisers, and corporations, can address this problem, and why we should want to.

We consumers are jaded. That is part and parcel of living now, in the culture we live in. We’ve been lied to enough that we aren’t willing to accept that. If that’s the case, we should note, there’s no reason to think that the practices of promising something minimal, irrelevant, vague, or indefinitely deferred can go on forever with our blessing either. On the contrary, the ironic stance we’re adopting toward these promises (and their counterpart wild insinuations) seems to evidence that this paradigm is falling apart even more quickly than the last.

In short, I think the writing’s on the wall: The “lifestyle” insinuation advertising and bad promises that were meant to address the outright lies of first-generation advertising are being subsumed by a kind of third-generation advertising, one that responds to a more jaded, ironic consumer. Self-aware, hip and ironic advertising is the new "doctors recommending smoking."

But it’s much, much worse for companies. And here’s why: Ever since advertising stopped being able to outright lie to us, advertisers have assumed that the correct strategy is to make the the kinds of promises that they make progressively more oblique or minimal. They have done this, I want to argue, at the cost of brand loyalty. To today’s consumer, brand loyalty is laughable – a thing of the past. This phenomena is, I suggest, entirely a failure of advertising.

Orpheus and Eurydice, Christian Kratzenstein-Stub (1783-1816)

Consumers want to love their things. That’s what makes them consumers. But they feel like they can’t. For years, companies have tried — and now I’m not mincing words — to trick people into trusting them. Naturally, people have adapted. (That’s what we do.) So the tricks have become more and more elaborate.

On the last day of 2008, then, DLB wants to leave you with this: All canonical advertising and branding wisdom operates on premises that don’t work anymore. Somehow, somewhere back in the early days of second-gen advertising, some proto-advertising agent clearly convinced someone powerful that they way to make money was to invest in creating an aura that would sell a product. While that has been (let’s say) successful for some time, the end is in sight. With the heavy adoption of the internet, and the ability for consumers to self-publish, auras can’t sell products anymore.

Instead, looking to the future, companies need to focus on building trust through product quality and transparent communication with their customer base. (Obama understands this.) At least in our current technological situation, trust is going to have to get built in the way it did before advertising: making and keeping meaningful promises. Which means that if the advertising industry is going to continue to thrive, it’s time for it to reconsider its deepest operative premises.

Thanks for reading. See you next year!

Last week I ended by noting that it seems counter-intuitive that you can promise almost nothing, insinuate anything, or promise something deeply vague with an advertisement more easily than you can promise something you can’t deliver. Today I’d like to ask why this is counter-intuitive. My argument below is that it does because, as a culture, we’ve started to develop an ironic stance toward the role of promise making in advertising altogether. I’ll also argue that this doesn’t put us on very firm footing as consumers.

As I noted last week, promises are a firmly entrenched aspect of our morality. They are, in the form of contracts, oaths, vows, and treaties, the guarantor of social cooperation. It is no suprise, then, when faced with a media climate of insidious strategies (vagueness, minimal promises, insinuation) to undermine the value of the promise model, consumers "buck."

For me, one of the deepest and scariest parts of coping as a human being living in our modern media climate is becoming jaded. Because we’re being lied to, and because when that stops working, we get even worse treatment. It is easy to become detached, to just simply stop taking promising seriously. This trend, I think, is terrible news for us as consumers, who after all dictate what works and doesn’t in branding and advertising.

Why? Well, what happens when consumers stop expecting advertising and brands to make meaningful promises? By definition, advertising becomes unintelligible. And this is happening right now, or else it has already happened. I think about it a lot, and I don’t know why or how some advertising works on me exactly, at least not at a deep level. What I do know, though, is that the advertisers know that I’m trapped in this ambigious relationship to advertising, and that they’ve started advertising to that. I’ll give my favorite example.

No doubt you have seen this Pizza Hut commercial. The plot goes something like this: Many people sit down to dinner in a fine italian restaurant. They are brought out heaping plates of pasta and (literally, macaroni and bacon – the mind reels) and glasses of presumably fine wine. They eat, they enjoy life. At the end of dinner, it is revealed to them that they have been eating… Pizza Hut! They are shocked. Awed. Their lives have changed, for the better. Finally, gourmet cuisine at a price they can afford and from a brand they can find in any city in the United States.

Accompanying audio: "Pizza Hut delivered the pasta!" Look how shocked this "real" person is. She totally thought that was pasta from this fancy restaurant.

This advertisment campaign makes wild, crazy promises. These are promises that everybody knows Pizza Hut can’t keep. But, the media-aware citizen explains, these promises are self-aware: they’re not lies, they’re ironic. No one with any sense would believe that Pizza Hut pastas are indistinguishable from fine restaurant cuisine. And of course no one does. But it’s too late: the advertising already happened. We accept the story ironically, but we still accept it.

Promises entail promissory obligations. That is to say, what it means to promise to do something is to create — apparently out of thin air — the obligation to do it.

On Wednesday, I talked about the advertising strategy of committing a company to a minimal obligation, or one that’s already in place. Today I’m going to look briefly at two related types of canonical advertising promises: namely, vague promises and insinuations.

Note: No longer a tenable advertising strategy for Coca Cola.

Insinuation

Insinuation is a classic tool of advertising and quite pervasive. Take for example a soda commercial that features people enjoying their neighborhood, wrenching the caps off of fire hydrants, dancing in the spray, and listening to Cuban music while drinking their soda. (Also, the entire McDonald’s "I’m lovin’ it" campaign.) These campaigns both insinuate that by either eating McDonald’s or by drinking soda you will be a vital person. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. This is acceptable, apparently, because the ads do not promise it.

Note that the advertisement displayed to the right does promise "continuous quality" and indeed equates it directly to trust. Neither one of these moves is tenable in this day and age: the first because "quality" is categorically inapplicable to Coca Cola, and the second because "trust" must be secured with a greater degree of psychological sensitivity in an advertising-jaded world (more about this on Monday).

Vagueness

I couldn’t find my favorite exemplar of vagueness in advertising (or even what product it’s for – a fact which seems to me in itself a testament to the deep ambiguity of the ad). It’s this commercial for chewing gum that features the silhouette of a person dancing to a sort of clubby type song, who then pulls some gum out of his pocket, after which the commercial ends. It is truly a beautiful, almost otherworldly moment of ambiguity. Does anybody know what it is?

Luckily, you don’t have to go far to find a vague promise in a commercial. I found this at Ad Pulp:

Actual advertisement for a McGriddle McDonald’s breakfast sandwich. What exactly is this supposed to be selling me?

The point is this: McDonald’s can’t promise me that this sandwich is made of good ingredients. Or that it’s good for me. Honestly, I think they might be in trouble if they suggested it tastes good. So, at any rate, they end up with a campaign that promises me: "A good woman is like a McGriddles."

While in any normal circumstances, a claim like this is contentless enough to be laughable, a lot of advertisers thought it was a good idea. The reason? It makes a promise it can keep, because the promissory obligation is vague to the point of ostensibly not being an obligation at all.

Status Check

Interestingly, where this leaves us — at the end of our first week — is with a very firm since of the importance of promising in advertising. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but according to all the evidence, you’re better off promising almost nothing, insinuating almost anything, or promising something deeply vague than you are promising anything you can’t deliver. Next week, I’ll take up the question of where this leaves us.

I couldn’t resist sharing this panel:

TV trivia: Fort Awesome is the name of News Radio owner Jimmy James’s mansion:
“a house just like Xanadu, but without a dorky name”.

Design Less Better wishes you and your families a happy holiday today.

In the first ever episode of the television show Mad Men, the creative team at the fictional advertising firm of Sterling Cooper, headed by Creative Director Donald Draper, is faced with the end of an era: medical science has proved that smoking cigarettes is bad for the health, so no longer can cigarette advertisements feature "doctors" propounding the health and lifestyle benefits of, say, Lucky Strikes.

Of course, the reason they can’t just keep doing what they are doing is that to do so would be to make a promise that consumers would understand as unkeepable, which would presumably be more than the brand can withstand. Again, advertising is based on trust, or, to put that another way, at least the illusion of coherence with reality.

The end of an era at Sterling Cooper.

Draper’s brilliant bit of advertising is to promise less from Lucky Strikes. (I bet you thought I’d never get back around to this, didn’t you?) Draper’s plan: Since his client can’t promise that their customers will have a healthier life, promise anything else that’s true.

The moral of the story? Any keepable promise is better than any unkeepable one. If your company can’t promise, e.g. that you’re no longer a gas company, promise that you have clean floors in your bathrooms. Hence, "It’s toasted."

The Lucky Strike executive protests: "But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted."

Draper: "No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strikes’ is toasted."

I ffffound this image somewhat instructive. The toolbar got bigger six times, and then all of a sudden got smaller.

Photoshop evolution

If you’ve read much BlogLESS during the last few months, you’re probably familiar with our branding aphorism. If not, in slogan form it looks like this: Be good. Because if you’re not, and you lie about it, people will find out.

We’ve noted, though, that sometimes it seems like brands continue to be effective despite their truth-telling practices having fuzzy edges. For the next two weeks, we want to look at why we trust brands, advertising and companies. This is, of course, a deep topic, and one that sits right at the heart of what DLB’s all about — design ethics. Today, I’ll slowly set that discussion up.

Franz Kline: Suspended (1953)

Trust, Promising

Brands and advertisements are promises: Drink Coke and you will be vital; invest in Prudential mutual funds and you will have a comfortable retirement; watch 30 Rock and you will laugh. Brands and advertising take this form in order to produce trust precisely because promises have a significant role in producing trust generally. They facilitate all types of social coordination and cooperation. Treaties, contracts, and oaths are other types of promises. In other words, they are what consumers expect.

For the sake of this week, let’s call advertising the art of figuring out which promises a company can make in order to generate consumer desire, and let’s call branding the art of figuring out which promises a company should make in order to generate consumer trust. Advertising deploys promises to sell products, and a brand is a sort of general promise that provides the guidelines for what kinds of particular promises are acceptable on behalf of a given company.

Overview of posts to come

Today I introduced the problem of trust, and insinuated that the problem of trust (branding) emerges from the kinds of promises a company makes. I’m going to use the rest of my year’s worth of blog posts to talk about promising, and I hope to come back around to trust on December 31. On Wednesday, Friday, and Monday, I’ll be talking about the kinds of strategies I’ve noticed that advertisers use to deploy promises, hopefully drawing some general conclusions about the promise-making practice in advertising. Then, on the last day of the great year of 2008, I’ll review what I’ve written so far, attempt to draw some conclusions, and hopefully tie it all back in to the core issue: trust.

Personally, I am very excited about this topic. I hope you’ll keep checking in.