Effective Advertising Makes Human Connections

adweek.com: "The Magazine Publishers of America awarded TBWA\Chiat\Day the $100,000 Grand Prize Kelly Award for its Apple iPod 'Silhouette' campaign that shows people dancing with iPods against brightly colored backgrounds.
'It demonstrated to people that you don't have to spend a lot of time talking about features to get people to make a human connection with your product,' said Mike Hughes, president of The Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., and a Kelly judge."

Advertisements work by linking an otherwise "meaningless" object to a human need or desire. An iPod "means" nothing - it's just a device for storing music. Baked beans "mean" nothing - they're just cheap and wholesome foodstuff. Shampoo "means" nothing. Cars "mean" nothing.

Judith Williamson in Decoding Advertisements (Amazon UK link | Amazon USA link | Amazon Canada link) describes advertisements as using a "referent system" of signifiers, borrowing signs from the "real world" such as sex, love, power, and grafting them on to otherwise meaningless objects.

So shampoos are sold as being as good, as satisfying as sex. Baked beans offer cheap and instantaneous family happiness. Cars offer a feeling of power, freedom, envy from neighbours, admiration from beautiful women, and security for your children.

It is those things we crave, not the products. But the products offer us easy access to them.

A witty punchline, or a well art-directed advertisement are not enough without that human connection, and it only comes with human understanding.

Abraham Maslow devised a hierarchy of human needs in which humans are motivated firstly by the need to remove certain deficiencies from our lives, then the need to grow.

The deficiency needs are

1. Physiological needs (hunger, thirst, comfort etc)
2. Safety and security
3. The need to belong, to love and be loved
4. Self-esteem (achieve something, be good at something, be approved of etc)

We tackle each of these needs in turn, satisfying one before we can attend to the next.

Then come the "growth needs". These are:

5. Cognitive (we need to know, to understand, to explore)
6. Aesthetic needs (the need for symmetry, order and beauty)
7. Self-actualisation (to realise our own potential)
8. Self transcendence (to connect to something beyond ourselves - to help others to realise their own potential)

Advertising works by addressing these needs. They either point out the deficiencies in our lives (advertisements for debt consolidation, life insurance, home and personal security devices relate to the first two needs; car advertisements to the second two) or they offer us a glimpse of personal growth. The latter is rarer and more difficult. Microsoft address the cognitive need in much of their consumer advertising, but it often comes across as preachy.

But with our consumerist society becoming savvy to the workings of advertising, and our base physiological needs almost sated, advertising will increasingly need to find ways to appeal to our desire for personal growth if it is to continue working. This will require the development of evermore sophisticated visual communication and, with it, evermore sophisticated curricula.