Tag: Paul Feldwick

💎 On the importance of a spectacle in advertising

We want above all, throughout this brief historical overview, to draw attention to an aspect of advertising which is too often forgotten today: a certain openness, an innocence which we find in the earliest forms of advertising. It comes just as much from a liking for spectacle, for playing with words, for putting on a performance, as it does from a desire to sell. These two things are intimately bound together: the actual sale is only one element in the acting out of a shared event, which is infinitely richer than the simple two-way relationship of seller and buyer…

Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick

💎 How advertisings quest for professionalism led it to disregard some of its successful factors

The quest for professionalism was understandable, some aspects of it necessary and even admirable: a lot in advertising’s past had its disgraceful side. But along with the genuinely shoddy and dishonest practices, the new technical/ rational world of advertising also attempted to disown and deny qualities that have always been central to successful selling and brand creation — qualities of playfulness, subversion, popular appeal, ambiguity, the pleasures of the childish and the illogical, the carnival world of satire, eroticism, talking animals and general nonsense — everything that the emerging professional/managerial culture despised and rejected.

Excerpt from: Why Does The Pedlar Sing?: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising by Paul Feldwick