Advertrends by Dirty Theory

I analyze trends in advertising, typography and visual communications based on semiotics, philosophy and my experience in communications.

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Salzburger Insurance and Banking company making a bold move, trying to change the game, advertising jobs for young people with humor, suggesting that banking is revolutionary. Slogan #sogehtzukunft translates roughly to #thatshowfutureworks. I wonder if they can deliver on their promise... . The visual - painterly pictorial language - is one I identified here a few years ago and has beenused by Burger King, Van der Bellen and Metallica’s Blackened Records, among others (scroll down for a reminder)

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High fashion, low fashion: Same thing. New collection, old idea. Same song, different product. Lipault, André: 2017. Nespresso: 2014. Eric Bompard: 2013, 2014. I call it “flooding” when the product color is the same as the color of the image. Spotted the trend three years ago. It’s still thriving. 

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Eric Bompard just started their second wave of OOH (Out of Home) advertising in Paris. The principle is as simple as it is efficient. The color from the fashion item that is displayed floods the landscape behind the model. The event is essentially visual, but as you can see it makes for very striking posters. If there is a message that’s being symbolically conveyed here, it is probably that wearing Bompard changes the world around you. I’ve looked at earlier campaigns as well. The principle was present in some of them (see above). The pictures were much more realistic and thus much less striking - after all, there is nothing striking about someone in a pink pullover in front of a pink wall…

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Just as a reminded...before the new ones come.

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If it wasn’t an advert for cashemire sweaters, I might suppose that it’s just a coincidence, maybe even a trend, perhaps I’d also suggest that UNIQLO was inspired by Eric Bompard. But if it’s the exact same (kind of) product that is communicated based on the same device - matching colors of sweater and background - there can hardly be any doubt: it’s imitation. UNIQLO - or their agency - are clearly imitating Eric Bompard’s way to present their products in a campaign which I discussed here recently.

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First identified this trend over 2 years ago. Now it’s all over the place. I call it “flooding”: the product color floods the rest of the image, i.e. gives it its color.

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Media Transfer is old (as the two examples of drippings applied to an online banner ad and a menu bar show). What’s new in the two examples from the streets of Vienna, is the use of a smartphone home screen aesthetics with apps to advertise physical worldish things, a coffee shop and a trade fair for franchisers. Do I like it? Well, I find the one on the SUV looks good. The ad blends in. It’s “in situ”, adapted to the environment. After all, the windows are black mirrors just as much as our smartphone screens. The coffeeshop ad on the other hand is awkward and definitely not a good fit for Vienna’s cityscape. But that’s not the question. What’s undeniable is that both are unexpected and thus catch our eyes more than a franchise trade fair or a donut shop usually would (disclosure: personally, I only like steaming mini donuts dripping with grease, I find normal sized donuts too sweet).

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The first gif: Johan Bull for the New Yorker, 1925 

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The painterly poster style reaches political posters - and I cannot deny its appeal. Most campaign posters look like the party didn’t have money for graphic design - let alone creative. But these two cought my eye - and the others I googled afterwards confirmed my first impression. What’s great is that the painterliness and the feeling of individuality it is linked to, because it looks like someone did it by hand, is here well used metaphorically: the painterly cross of course depicts your vote and as such, it confers an energy and even sexiness to voting which it is not usally associated with it. The use of typeface in the others is quite bold. The fact that the wanna be president doesn’t look into the camera could conventionally be seen as avoding to face us but it here seems to confer a feeling of thoughtfulness and authenticity quite uncommon in ads. How’s the canditate really? I don’t know. In two minutes on his website I couldn’t even figure out what party - if any - he’s part of, but what I see is that there’s a communciations team at work here that understood that the way you visually deliver your message is part of the message. If you use conventional (and even cheap-looking visuals) like some of the other candidates, you can claim all the innovativeness you want. It doesn’t  look believable. I don’t know about this guy’s political program - I can’t vote in Austria - but his campaign conveys some sense of style, authenticity and difference.

https://www.vanderbellen.at/

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You know I’ve been interested in the return of painterly tendencies in advertising since I launched my tumblr (and actually before that) and have since shown many examples. It would be incomplete if I never spoke about how Guerlain made painting part of the identity of one of their products, namely La petite Robe noire. The artsy feel of the brushstroke has been conferring energy to the perfume since the very official launch in 2012 (with a classical visual like the one on the top being all over Paris). The visuals are nearly infinite and there certainly is more to come. It has soon become very playful and fun and other brands, like Hermès went in the very same direction, using a lot of drawings and mixing them with photos. Needless to say that we are here miles away from the ever boring style to advertise luxury which still dominates billboards and magazines - and which is exemplified by such visuals as those of the Shalimar ad from 2011, both in terms of esprit and form.

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Here’s a new, very original use of well, I’d like to say “splitfaces”, but what makes them surprising just is that it’s not just faces. These are the ads of the the trade fair for livestyle and design products called “Wohnen und Interieur” and opening in Vienna this weekend.

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Remember how Jackson Pollock invented dripping? Well, it’s obviously b…sh… . It’s just that action painters made dripping “autonomous” (art must be free and all). I’ve been collecting photos of drippings for a while - I mean active drippings, drippings that contribute to pictures that also show something iconically, rather than just standing for themselves.

What makes drippings so striking to us? I think it’s simply that using dripping in pictures about bloody events is a way to show what you say.

It’s an “effet de réel”, makes it feel more real - and thus more engaging. The fact is that a dripping is a Peircian “index” par excellence. So spilling and dripping red paint makes it look like a picture that’s a trace of what it depicts, blood in this case.

I just chose a couple of pics for now. There are two directions here: the dripping as trace of violence and the dripping as trace of sadness (which are not mutually exclusive).

What got this post going is the first one. It’s not really dripping, it’s more splashing. I think it’s a good work. I like the idea of overcoming the blood through flowers. It’s a work by Imran Qumreshi. It’s also the poster for his “The Roofgarden Comission” exhibition at the MoMa, where he did on the roofgarden floor exactly what his miniature shows. The miniature itself is called “Blessings upon the land of my love” (2011) and he started working on it when he learned that his old home in Pakistan had been bombed. Seeing the blood in the market inspired this series. I like how he’s being positive in spite of the violence.

The second picture is from the Chinese arist Sheng Qi. It’s called “Diving” (2008) and it’s one of Qi’s better works. All of Qi’s works are completly overflowing with drippings. And some show tanks and loudspeakers and the Red Square and soldiers. These works really seem to try very hard to make us understand that the dripping paint stands for, well, the blood spilled by the regime in China. All his works look like this one, even if the motifs change. It feels a bit too systematic to me. I guess that’s the Chinese art that sells in the west.

The third picture is a watercolor by Igor Josifov, an artist who does mainly performances. The work is called “Emotional Purification” (2011). Following Maria Abramovic’s approach, Josifov is looking for spiritual experiences in his art. And even though he, too, comes from a war-striken country (Macedonia), his painting is more about melancoly than violence. Rather than blood, I believe we see (make-believe) traces of tears here. The fourth picture is a photo I took in Pantin, not far from where I live in Paris. There’s a lot of huge street art in Pantin, but this is just a little drawing on a wall. I like it. I think it has all the emotion and it’s nice how the dripping of the text above flows over it. Btw. I just learned in an essay by Arthur Danto about Jackson Pollock that early steet-artists had assistants to erase the drippings as they did their graffiti. It supposedly conflicted with the status as artists they were struggling to aquire…Now, things seem to have been inverted.

What does all this have to do with ads? Well, it’s just that dripping is now so present in advertising. I choose two of the more meaningful “reprises”. The first is of the brand Cazal. It goes really well with Josifov. Right? I think the dripping there is about, well, art. Adobe Illustrator doesn’t (really) drip, only handmade work does. The second is of the web conference TNW and it’s a banner ad. Even though it seems somewhat absurd that an internet conference should advertise with drippping, which is so…well…material, the dripping matches the slogan about activism pretty well. After all, writing on the wall is typical of people trying to make a point in public.

Last, but not least, to close the loop, I wanted to show you a detail from a miniature from the Kotah school (XVIIIth century). Isn’t it fantastic how the artist contrasts the splash with the detailled execution (no pun intented) of the rest of the painting? It’s like he had held the miniature head over his leaf. It’s so radical I can hardly breathe when I look at it. There is hardly any European painter in the XVIII century who uses traces in such a radical way… I don’t know if Qureshi knows it. But I’m sure he would like it.

[yoannmichaux]

86% of sex workers are mothers. We need a law to regulate our work. AMMAR (Argentina’s Sex Workers’ Association) Outdoor Ads by Ogilvy & Mather

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This is “in situ” ads at its best. Definitely inspired by such work as done in France by the artist Ernest Pignon Ernest since the 1960. Interestingly, his work is also in exactly the same spirit as the work shown here. Ernest reacted to a law forbidding abortion by placing a woman who died during an illegal abortion at ground levelHowever, using the corner and thus the unfolding in time of the image, as people walk by is not something I have seen with Pignon-Ernest. I know it, however, from Medieval sculpture. One example is from the Cathedral in Strasbourg:Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theheartindifferentkeys/2177753595/

As seen from the front (right figure), the prince seems quite charming. But as soon as you move from the center to the left, you will see the ugly snakes and reptiles creeping up his back. Here’s one from Nuremberg, more scary even:

This kind of “in situ” images seem to have been created for the place where they are being displayed and play with our perception, usually attracting our attention to that which we do not see (first). It is a way to make us experience surprise, like movies or oral tellings, where one thing is told or shown after another. This effect can (and has) also be obtained with single still pictures on a plane, but this is much harder.

The earlier repost with the fish(erboats) has a somewhat similar effect.

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Isn’t this the most brilliant trash icon design ever? Google for better ones. I didn’t find anything quite like it. The “other” waste is here pictured by ... a squiggle (as seen in Vienna).

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The Other Manifesto because someone had to do it. Written by Klaus & Shatila. Designed by Mathieu.

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Inversion.

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News from the Paris appropriation front. 8 visuals, 1 proof that style matters, and one verbal classic. There would be a lot to say about why some of these are, quite obviously, so much cooler than others. And I suspect Peirce could have a word or two to say about it. But I don’t have the time and place to demonstrate this here… (Wow, this just made me feel like Fermat). Oh, about the authors: most of these are, I suppose, by a guy who calls himself Clet. One (guess which…) is by a shabby imitator (but I must say I like it. It’s more…expressionistic than…conceptually playful). And some of the others might just have been made by people who had a funny sticker. As for the last one, it’s not in Paris. It’s by Eddie Collas - but I’m not sure if he appropriated the STOP sign or just said the sentence… It’s also the only one of these pictures which I didn’t take with my own bare hands… I suggest you print it out and hang it on the wall of your workplace.