ArtPage on Advertising

advertising - Efforts to promote public interest in a product or business, as by paid announcements in periodicals, on packages, radio, television, signs, direct-mail, World Wide Web (WWW) sites, etc. And, the business of designing and producing advertisements. Also, advertisements, whether individually (one example is the "banner ad" above) or as a group.

Visual artists who design advertising materials are typically known as graphic designers.

Examples:

Aleksandr M. Rodchenko (Russian), Red Star Cigarettes Ad, 1923, gouache maquette, 9 x 18 inches.

American, Become a Draftsman, Enjoy a Real Job in Industry, advertisement for a correspondence course, October 1937, Modern Mechanix magazine. See draftsman.

American, Scot Tissue Ad, "Ask your doctor what he thinks about standards of cleanliness," 1939.

American, Paramount Pictures, a character portrayed by actor John Travolta holds a bottle of Lone Star Beer in Urban Cowboy, 1980, motion picture. This form of advertising is "product placement": an image or mention of a product or trademark is embedded in entertainment media, such as within a scene in a movie, television show or video game. See costume and theater.

keye/donna/pearlstein, agency; Pytka, production company, This is your brain on drugs, TV commercial, 1986.

American, Apple Computers "Think different" advertising campaign, 1980s.
Images of fourteen posters Apple distributed as part of that campaign: Mohammed Ali 1 and 2, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, Joan Baez, Maria Calas, Dalai Lama, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Jim Hensen, Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Pablo Picasso. See poster.

American, Absolut advertisement, Central park as vodka bottle, 1989.

Chiat/Day/Mojo, agency; Coppos Films, production company, Eveready Energizer "Still going" pink bunny TV commercial, 1989.

Cover of MacWarehouse catalogue, computer ads, c. 1999.

American, Apple iPod, 2004. A poster, and a still from an iPod TV commercial showing a grid of posters for Apple's MP3 player on an exterior wall.

A parody that replaces the silhouette of the iPod user with one of the hooded torture victims of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. It substitutes the original text "iPod" wirh "iRaq." This political / human-rights protest poster was placed in a New York City subway station in June, 2004. This poster can be downloaded from forkscrew.com.

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian communications theorist. Quoted in: Advertising Age, Sept. 3, 1976.

"Publicity and advertising are the major arts today. They shape the consciousness of the people far more than actual art does."
Arthur Miller (1915-), American playwright. Quoted by Deborah Solomon, who interviewed Miller for her article about him, "Goodbye (Again), Norma Jean," New York Times Magazine, September 19, 2004, p. 64.

"... we have absolutely no idea what this constant advertising babble is doing to us. The situation is similar to what we were experiencing at the start of the environmental movement forty years ago, when people just didn't want to believe that three parts per billion of some chemical in the air or water could be toxic and have all kinds of unforeseen consequences down the road. Today we are repeating that same mistake in our mental environment."
Kalle Lasn (contemporary Canadian, born Estonia), a leading figure within the culture jamming movement since the late 1980s. Kalle Lasn publishes a magazine and a web site called Adbusters.

Ad Critic displays Quicktime copies of lots of current television ads, including political ones.
Disect An Ad is an exercise designed to help develop skills needed to analyze and evaluate political campaign advertising.
The Museum of Advertising Icons displays advertising campaigns and icons of today and yesteryear.
A history of presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to the present, from the American Museum of the Moving Image.

Also see advertisement, broadside, design, ephemera, graphics, graphic artist, graphic arts, graphic design, graphic designer, icon, interdisciplinary, logo, mass media, memorabilia, packaging, paint-by-number, poster, propaganda, subliminal message or subliminal advertising, text, video, and visual culture.