Anatomy of Humbug

advertising is most easily understood as a series of gestures intended to create a relationship.

The ways in which we interact, the words we choose to say or not to say, the way in which we say them, the ways we look and stand and sit, the clothes we wear, the gestures we make (for instance, offering to pay for lunch, asking for help), are all as we have seen ‘communication’ and all are continually constructing, maintaining, or changing our relationship.

At this level, advertising isn’t rocket science, and those advertisers who behave as if it were, who try to be too clever and are too anxious about getting it wrong, generally handicap themselves by producing campaigns that are inconsistent, timid, over-analysed and under-resourced.

Then, the so-called ‘availability heuristic’, written about by Daniel Kahneman and others, states that things we think of first or can picture most vividly are assumed to be most common and important. Applied to brands, this implies that people assume the brand that comes to mind first is likely to be the biggest and most popular.

The role of advertising is not so much to increase sales, as to increase saleability.

We believe that if you’re going to invite yourself into someone’s living room for thirty seconds, you have a duty not to bore them or insult them by shouting at them. On the other hand, if you can make them smile, or show them something interesting or enjoyable – if you’re a charming guest – then they may like you a bit better, and then they may be a little more likely to buy your product.’

The role of advertising was to reinforce and nurture preferences for a particular brand, and these preferences were largely based on emotional and non-verbal cues.

What I mean by a myth is a story that encodes, in a memorable form, deep beliefs about the way things are.