Role of Design in Advertising

Although advertising creativity externally resembles art — recognized and admired by both advertising enthusiasts and professionals in the field — it does not fit within the bounds of art; moreover, it has a distinctly different nature.

Collins, in his book "New Maxi-Marketing", wrote: "Simply letting your imagination run wild, dreaming of the nonexistent, playing with graphic acrobatics or verbal gymnastics — does not mean engaging in creativity."

Levinson, in notes on the sociology and anthropology of advertising, said: "All advertising is built on mechanisms and techniques developed in the realm of art. We readily classify advertising as part of the artistic sphere, and we are equally convinced that it does not belong to that sphere entirely. Advertising contains components that do not conform to the rules governing artistic phenomena."

Which particular characteristics distinguish the field of advertising creativity from "pure art": The first characteristic is an entirely unabashed self-interest typical of advertising creativity, unlike art. Analogies between advertising and art seem logical when one wants to emphasize that the nature of creating advertising is close to art — there are no exact recipes, and intuition plays a large role in creating structure, composition, color, imagery, and music. All of these are tools of art. And this is where the analogy ends. Unlike an artist guided by an intuitive sense of form or beauty, an advertiser creates something intended to influence others. It is this influence, this power, that advertisers so like, as they seek to commission a website or a video that will seize consumers' minds.

Advertising is not necessarily the art of deception, but it is certainly the art of persuasion and engagement.

The second characteristic of advertising is the desire to appeal to the majority, the necessity of resorting to tried-and-tested means of influencing potential consumers. The difficulty in creating advertising lies in the impossibility of using new, as-yet unknown images. After all, anything newly created is still unknown and cannot enjoy mass demand. Therefore one has to resort to universally accessible language, imagery, and actions familiar to everyone. This feature of advertising implies a rejection of radically new images, and favors those that are understandable and accepted by a mass audience and that, by not distracting the viewer with their novelty, do not pull attention away from the essence of the advertising message — such as the images Salvador Dalí created for the Chupa Chups company. Creating such images is the creative pinnacle for an advertiser.