“i would not want to argue with you or aristoteles – nor would i want to unwrap the old “advertising is a lie or not” discussions (that has always been nonsense). sorry for expressing myself not clear enough.

from my point of view “giving meanings” is truly s.th. that advertising can do extremely well.
if i look back at the eighties and early nineties culture – wow! … the world exploded in semiotics and meaning. product designers were tracing the origins of an innocent espresso maker down to the otoman kingdom – architects were transforming water kettles into singing bird houses. everything was turned into meaning and signs of every kind were taken extremely seriously – especially so in the youths cultures.
everything had a meaning – everything wanted to have meaning. everything needed to have cultural significance of some kind or another. – postmodernism was the philosophy that went with it. and advertising did the best job ever in its short history.

sure advertising is great at creating meanings.
yet i also think the market has to really want this.

market communication has lost its innocence.
it is losing its innocence again and again – and it is finding it again and again – because just like fashion it moves in changing tides.
after meanings came authenticity – after authenticity came brand – after one-voice brand comes many voices narratives…. – why not?

it was actually you grant who triggered that thought. i like it.
hope i could make myself halfway understood.
if not – please accept my apologies – and in any case my best wishes for christmas and new years.”

Jens, I have heard creatives and other agency people say things like the function of the ad is to create attention…and this is why I think some ads are all about the anomalous. But I object to the notion that advertising should be seen as an exercise in lies. This is the intellectual’s most common mistake. And the way out of this trap, in my opinion, is to see that advertising is, to use the famous classical distinction, is not about “logic,” its about rhetoric. This means it is not about logical proposition that are true or false, its about arguments that are more or less persuasive. But that’s just me (and Aristotle). (“Me and Aristotle,” watch for it at your local book store!) And I am not crazy about the notion that ads create narratives (not meanings). Narratives are bound by the laws of story telling, and advertising is much more about the deployment of meanings, sometimes in the form of stories, but often not. Thanks, Grant

Todd W. Thanks for your post. It is, for me, a perfect symptom of the crisis in the agency world, a crisis that stems from a loss of nerve, and/or a failure to understand what ads are, how ads work, and the value that the advertising agency makes for the brand, the client and the consumer. And once nerve goes and understand fails, there really is no way to defend the agency against its many competitors and that growing world of skepticism. Creative, save thy self. Thanks, Grant

The fact is, agencies don’t “make” anything. They provide little or no value, so coming up with a new value prop is going to be quite difficult. They don’t make “meanings”. Meaning is created by a combination of product and customer. Google is your best example. The meaning of Google is based wholly on its product and customer intereaciton with it, not advertising. A good ad can communicate that meaning to someone who hasn’t experienced it, but can’t create the meaning all on its own. We saw that in the dot-com era where new, untested comanies flushed their VC funding down the advertising crapper when they had no product or customers to generate any foundational meaning to be communicated.

agreed, grant.

“making meanings” – that’s what it is – at best – but here advertising also has to share the merit with the likes of pr, event marketing etc.

the prime function of advertising – as in “ads” – nowadays is to cause attention. that’s it. – creating meanings like in the heydays – well maybe some can tell marvellous stories…

but do these stories give meaning to products and services?…
or do they work more as an indirect indicator of an overall quality – following a logic like “he who entertains me can most probably also satisfy my needs”?

my feeling tells me that great marketing right now is much more like “…this olympic discipline where you compete in ten different fields..” (…) than delivering that famous “consistent” message.

that means: a lot of room for different narratives – because, let’s face it – your audience does not take you seriously anyway – they do not want to be told the truth, they do not want to be lied at – they want to be entertained.

and if you happen to have some air time and claim to be a first class brand – clients will expect first class entertainment. nothing less and nothing more.

Jens