So, a couple of weeks ago, I’m pretty sure I might have given a sadz to some corners of the creative community in my post analyzing the new iPad Pro ad. I pointed out that, while advertising is about creativity, it’s not only about creativity because we do ultimately have something to sell at the end. We have to be expressive and compelling and edgy and eye-catching and effective, because that’s what makes us advertising and not just art.
It comes down to a matter of expression vs. communication. With art, you’re expressing a message, sending it out into the world in a form that’s meaningful for you and hoping others will get out of it what you put into it. And if they don’t — if they’re looking at your painting and debating the meaning of your use of blue, while the painting is actually about the giant squid and the blue is because it’s, y’know, water — at least they’re consuming it and thinking about it and talking about it, which is the goal.
With advertising, you’re communicating a message, trying to convey it as accurately as possible to a specific audience because you want them to give you something — buy your product, give you their email address, even just feel a certain way about your brand, but you’re asking them to do a thing for you. And in that situation, it is important that the audience interpret the message as you intended it, because your grocery budget depends on them getting the message and doing the thing.
That’s a distinction we don’t usually bother to think about, and usually don’t have to, because the two concepts usually don’t come into conflict in our everyday work. Until they do. So if you are, like I am, a big ol’ dork, I invite you to join me in an exploration of how communication works (and how, when its doesn’t, it doesn’t).
Encoding and decoding
One of the most accepted models of communication is the encoding/decoding model, which emerged as a response to humans’ noted lack of psychic abilities. Because we can’t (yet) beam thoughts straight from our brain into someone else’s brain, encoding/decoding characterizes a message as something that’s encoded by the speaker, delivered, and then decoded by the audience. This is somewhat hampered by the fact that there’s a human being with a human brain at each end, and those brains are not always great at phrasing things as we’d like them understood and interpreting them as others intended.
Having a fallible human brain at each end of the communication path means the speaker has to put in work to phrase their message in a way the audience will understand, and the audience has to put in work to understand what the speaker is trying to say. And that work isn’t always 50/50. The congregation at a church, for instance, generally feels they have a lot riding on the impact of the message and is willing to work hard to interpret it. At, say, an art exhibit, or a play, it’s more even — the artist is motivated to get their message across, and the audience is motivated to understand it, so they’ll both put in their share of work to encode and/or decode messages as accurately as possible in the interest of enjoying the event.
But what about when you’re trying to sell someone something? (And by “sell” here, I mean sell them on your message, whether it’s an attempt to close a literal sale or just get someone to feel the way you want them to feel.) Your audience is under no obligation to put any work whatsoever into decoding your message. Oh, you want me to burn brain calories to comprehend your message so you can talk me into giving you money? I’ll pass. In that situation, you’re going to have to put in extra work on your end to encode it in a way they can understand without doing much work at all on their end.
Bring in ‘da funk, leave ‘da noise
(Oh, God, I really am that old, aren’t I.)
Doing that — putting in extra work so our audience doesn’t have to — is part of our everyday life as ad professionals, whether we realize it or not. The whole “sell the hole” thing? Yeah, it’s a cliche, but it’s still the thing we do: sell the benefits of the product or whatever rather than the features. Instead of just handing out product details and making our audience do the work of connecting the features to the benefits and deciding they want to give us money, we take the extra step and go straight to the benefits. Instead of telling them how they should feel about the brand, we use language and imagery and sound to just make them feel that way without them having to apply brainpower to it.
We also try to avoid noise. Obviously, we try to avoid physical noise, like literal auditory noise or anything that might make our creative hard to see properly. But we also try to avoid semantic noise, which is all the non-physical stuff that might interfere with the audience interpreting the message as intended. This can take a number of forms.
- Language differences, whether it’s literally speaking a different language or using ambiguous expressions, jargon, obscure metaphors, conflicting imagery, and so on.
- Cultural differences, where people might interpret the same words or images differently because of their cultural/personal/socioeconomic/etc. circumstances.
- Present context, where social or political concerns can arise that bring a whole different meaning to something that was originally fairly innocuous. (Was I working on a campaign for a product called “Isis” at exactly the wrong time in global history? Yes, yes I was.)
We don’t generally put a lot of thought into eliminating semantic noise specifically — it’s just what we do as part of our job. Of course we’re going to get our English-language ad transcreated for a Spanish-speaking audience. Of course we’re going to find imagery that’s meaningful to the viewer. Of course our holiday campaigns in 2020 were going to look a lot different from the ones we did in 2019. The only time we really think consciously about semantic noise, honestly, is when we’ve already stepped in it and our target audience is pissed off.
And hey, since we’re on the subject…
The iPad ad
I’m not trying to harp on the iPad Pro ad here, because it’s hardly the only ad ever to fall into this trap — it’s just the most recent. With that ad, Apple’s in-house team was trying to convey that all those instruments of the arts were being compressed and incorporated into the capabilities of the new iPad, and not that they were being violently destroyed and replaced by technology. The majority opinion appears to be that they whiffed. Audiences were unhappy.
But that opinion wasn’t unanimous. Some industry people rolled their eyes at the majority response and said that clearly, the ad was about compressing and incorporating the creative tools, and people who were upset by it are just interpreting it wrong. Which… no, the upset people were interpreting it in a way other than Apple intended, which is different. And they were under no obligation to give Apple the benefit of the doubt — the ad was an ad, and the audience’s role was fulfilled when they agreed to watch the ad and give Apple a chance to sell to them. All the rest of the work is on Team Apple, who were responsible for encoding it for the audience’s benefit, maybe looking from an outside perspective at all that gushing paint and saying, “Hey, does anyone remember the elevator scene in The Shining?”
And it’s interesting to note that Team Apple appears to have caught onto it immediately, thus their statement that the ad missed the mark and they were trying to say something different from what they ended up saying —marketing VP Tor Myhren was doing extra work to encode the message more clearly because he knew he couldn’t expect the audience to do any extra decoding work (at all, but particularly now that Apple had unintentionally cheesed them off).
Please don’t hate me, I treasure your artistic sensibilities
The aforementioned eye-rolling ad people weren’t incorrect in saying that we’re supposed to take chances and push the envelope of creativity, and we can’t go around being afraid to offend people. But if we’re going to do that, we need to do it because it’s part of the strategy, not because we were trying to say an inoffensive thing and screwed it up. If you get your target consumers talking, but what they’re talking about is how they much that hate you and your new iPad and your stupid hat and your mom, you’ve kind of negated the point of advertising in the first place. Sure, expression might have happened, but communication was… mis.
And the cool thing about our industry is that we get to do the expression and the communication. Bringing our personal creativity and thought and history and influences to the job makes us better at what we do. And we get to use art and creativity in our work and get a paycheck for it, which is pretty sweet. The trade-off is that we have to put in a little more work than your average artist has to do to convey our message as intended, because our audience is going to be putting in a little less work to interpret it as intended.
Thanks for joining me on this quasi-deep dive into a topic I probably put more thought into than necessary, but again: big ol’ dork. You can now move forward comfortable in the knowledge that you’ll never again have to worry about saying the wrong thing, ever, at all.*
*Results may vary. Caperton Gillett Creative makes no warrant as to the effectiveness of this communication strategy. Conditions may apply. Contact your local copywriting blogger for details.