Celebrating the agency

You’ve said advertising isn't really about advertising any more. How can delivering or curating the arts help to please different companies' target audiences?

Affiliating yourself to an area of the arts, in a thoughtful, relevant way can be crucial to forge an emotional bond, a shared sensibility, and thus create loyalty, affection, trust and all of those other qualities that are so elusive in a world of one-click shopping. Never in the history of human selling have businesses had so much information about their customers and their habits. Never before in the history of human buying have customers had so much choice about who to buy from, and such effortless technological tools for browsing whenever and wherever they are.

The famous, iconic Chupa Chups logo was designed in 1969 by Salvador Dalí. Arts have always been partnered with business from craftspeople who sold their handiwork at the market in ancient villages, through painters commissioned by the Medicis, to the way the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais ended up providing the original, and still most famous, poster for Pear’s Soap. When Picasso designed costumes for the ballet in Leicester Square, he was doing it because it was inspirational work, and good business for him and the ballet company.

Today, distribution systems change, the relationship between the arts and what we used to call “advertising” is, naturally, changing too. The old networks through which artists’ work used to reach the public via business – network TV advertisements, ads in glossy magazines – were set up because they were lucrative business models and now they’re evolving because technology has provided so many more options.
 
Digital is dismantling this culture of media “gatekeepers” who control access to the public and charge brands big fees simply to distribute their creative work. The ability to reach people directly and inexpensively means that brands have increasingly taken up the slack from old advertising channels to become publishers themselves. They can spend on the work, rather than getting it out there. Look at how many fashion brands have sponsored exhibitions, commissioned short films and even opened their own arts institutions in recent years. They realise that the image of their brand and expectations of their audience mean they have to maintain a relationship with art to maintain their status. In a way, it’s back to the Medici model.
 
Consumer brands have always used communications to sell their wares to the mainstream, but increasingly business-to-business brands are joining them. How can the arts help businesses connect for possibly the first time?

Art has cultural cachet. It has instant impact. It has the recognition factor. It has emotional traction. It disarms our prejudices and makes us rethink our assumptions. So it follows that art and artistic approaches can break new ground and facilitate new kinds of relationships. The arts naturally bringing about a sense of co-operation rather than competition – an established example being the way different corporate sponsors so often all back a single event or institution. In the digital age, where smart partnerships are crucial to new businesses not missing the boat, art can help bring businesses together with each other, ideally through mutual interaction with their audiences.

This is an extract. You can read the full interview on artworksjournal.com or by clicking here Celebrating the agency