What is the "aesthetic appeal" of advertising? Consider this:
During recent years, in certain circles, the surest way to silence a would-be critic of advertising has been to cite its artistic achievements. Whatever we may think of the products or the sponsors, this argument runs, we have to admit that those creative types in the agencies are clever, sometimes even brilliant. The only influence-far from sinister-they have exercised has been to enliven our cultural atmosphere with staccato visual and verbal rhythms of the commercial vernacular.
Since the late nineteenth century, advertising has given people who like to write, draw, or shoot ?lm the opportunity to get paid regularly (maybe even well) for it. The industry has attracted many extraordinarily talented people. These artists and writers have served, in a sense, as emissar- ies between social universes, the agency-client world and the wider population; art and big business; museums and commercial culture. They have worked various boundaries, sometimes creatively re-connecting aesthetics and everyday life, more often conforming out of the necessity of agency organi- zation. Whatever their accomplishments, they deserve more than a passing glance.
Like advertising, poetry's purpose is to influence an audience; to affect its perceptions and sensibili-ties; perhaps even to change its mind. Poetry's intent is to convince and seduce. In the service of that intent, it employs without guilt or fear of criticism all the arcane tools of distortion that the literary mind can devise. Keats does not offer a truthful engineering description of his Gre- cian urn. He offers, instead a lyrical, exaggerated, distorted, and palpably false description. And he is thoroughly applauded for it, as are all other artists, in whatever medium, who do pre- cisely the same thing successfully.
Commerce takes essentially the same liberties with reality as the artists, except that commerce calls its creations advertising.
As with art, the purpose is to influence the audience by creating illusions, symbols, and implications that promise more than pure functionality.
Is certain advertising art? Is all advertising art? None of it?