The art of display advertisement

“Trust me I’m lying”, by Ryan Holiday, is an overview of the (display) advertisement ecosystem. It explains the trickery used to catch the attention of the viewer-buyer. The author himself writes to be a master of these tricks. He has used them also to catch the attention of large groups of people. The book lays down a simple equation: the writers write, photographers publish pictures and media outlets publish to buy your attention and sell it to advertisers.

“The ways of seeing”, by John Berger, is a different description. It describes the relationship between display advertisement and painting. It characterizes the paintings on which display advertisement takes pictorial and symbolical inspiration.

Similarities between painting and display ads. (1/2) “Ways of seeing” J. Berger

Similarities between painting and display ads. (2/2) “Ways of seeing” J. Berger

Why is advertisement credible and successful? John Berger says:

Publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future is endlessly deferred. How then does publicity remain  credible – or credible enough to exert the influence it does? It remains credible because the truthfulness of publicity is judged, not by the real fulfillment of its promises, but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer. Its essential  application is not to reality but to day-dreams.

and

The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous day-dreams.

all this flourishes in the current social and political environment

The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and  then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of  individual happiness  has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.

Letter 5 (excerpt)

“In addition, Rome (if one has not yet been acquainted with it) makes one feel stifled with sadness for the first few days: through the gloomy and lifeless museum-atmosphere that it exhales, through the abundance of its pasts, which are brought forth and laboriously held up (pasts on which a tiny present subsists), through the terrible overvaluing, sustained by scholars and philologists and imitated by the ordinary tourist in Italy, of all these disfigured and decaying Things, which, after all, are essentially nothing more than than accidental remains from another time and from another life that is not and should not be ours. Finally, after weeks of daily resistance, one finds oneself somewhat composed again, even though still a bit confused, and one says to oneself: No, there is not more beauty here than in other places, and all these objects that have been marveled at by  generation after generation, mended and restored by the hands of workmen, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value; — but there is much beauty here, because everywhere there is much beauty. Waters infinitely full of life move along the ancient aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many city squares over white basins of stone and spread out in large, spacious pools and murmur by day and lift up the murmuring to the night, which is vast here and starry and soft with winds. And there are gardens here, unforgettable boulevards, and staircases designed by Michelangelo, staircases constructed on the pattern of downward-gliding waters and, as they descend, widely giving birth to step out of step as if it were wave out of wave. Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.”

R. M. R. “Letters to a young poet”. Random house NY. 1984.

XIV century story

These schools taught arithmetic with the new arabic numerals, which Christian churches and monasteries mistrust-fully opposed, not just because they came from infidels, but equally because of the use of the nought, which, although it signifying nothing could when placed behind another figure multiply it ten-fold. (excerpt from Albert Kapr. “Johan Gutenberg. The man and his invention”. Scolar Press)