Is Advertising Art or Science?

No, it’s not.

We were delighted to be invited to speak at the launch of Eat Your Greens, a compendium clarion call for evidence-based marketing that we contributed to, in Amsterdam.

It was in a church and we were billed as ‘heretics’ because the principle thesis of the book is that marketers have for too long been guided by strongly held beliefs that are based on myths. Since there is no requirement for any formal education in marketing or advertising, an executive will gradually build a grab bag of anecdotes and framing metaphors that often have little relation to how brand communication actually works. These are used to argue in endless meeting rooms, as opinions jostle with egos, edging out evidence.

One way to understand the polarized dynamics of the advertising industry is through the lens of one of its most canonical — and naive — binaries. Is advertising an art or a science? This debate continues to rage endlessly in the trade press, on Twitter and in the aforementioned meetings.

The art argument is most usually expressed in the words of Bill Bernbach, traced back to a memo he wrote at in 1947, in which he rails against advertising ‘technicians’.

“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

What did Bernbach mean and what was he trying to achieve? When art was cleaved from science and placed in the rarified air of galleries, it became a question of power and authorship.

Who decides what is art and who gets to make it?

Our modern conception, to borrow from Tolstoy, is about self-expression, the transmission of a personal feeling to another person through media. By this modern definition, we can immediately dismiss advertising as art, because advertising can never be self-expression. Advertising is ghostwriting for brands.

However, if things were that simple that wouldn’t be interesting.

Consciously or not, Bernbach was quoting Aristotle, who wrote the first treatise on persuasion, the Ars Rhetorica — [literally from the Latin] “the art of rhetoric [persuasive speech]”. Things are complicated because ‘art’ in Latin meant something worthy of systemic study, more akin to ‘technique’ today…