NEON ADVERTISING IS 105 YEARS THIS YEAR. ADVERTISING IN A WIDE MEANING ALREADY ARE LESS THAN THOUSAND YEARS OLD. ENCHANTING, NOT ALWAYS OPEN, ATTENTIVE LACONIC, ATTEMPTING ATTENDANCE, ATTENDANT ATTENDANCE ATTENDANT, ADVERTISEMENT HAS ALREADY BECOME AN ART, SCIENCE, PROPAGANDA AND PROFITABLE BUSINESS.
There was no advertising in ancient antique muses: the god Hermes, shod in winged sandals, was responsible for trade, and the supply of wine and olives in those days did not yet need additional stimulation. But even then, heralds began to appear in the city squares, notifying the demos about the initiatives of the leaders, as well as sports, religious and other festivals. Minstrels and troubadours of the Middle Ages added private tournament announcements to the repertoire, glorifying the valor of knights and the virtues that served as the reason for their exploits of beautiful ladies. Lady Godiva's performance performance (Coventry, 1040), which left its mark on history, can also be considered to some extent a self-propaganda of a social position. But the real advertisement unfolded a little later, with the development of the media.
With the advent of the printing press of Johannes Guttenberg in European monasteries, the first advertisements appeared. The first recorded by historians (London, 1472) was posted on church gates and reported the sale of prayer books. For quite some time, only books served as objects of European advertising, but this could not go on forever. Having received a royal license to open the first information bureau and create the first newspaper La Gazette (Paris, 1631), Theofrast Renodot is considered the official father of both advertising and journalism. Articles were written to him by Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, ads from poor Parisians were accepted for free.
Less than a hundred years later, Vedomosti, published in Russia on the initiative of Peter the Great, published an article touting the “resort of martial waters,” which are good for health and therefore visited by people of the upper class.
The 19th century, which spawned railroad communication, telegraph, photography, an internal combustion engine and much more, was proclaimed the next evolutionary stage in the development of advertising. Newspaper announcements of new proprietary products were now provided with photographs for credibility. Exalting the goods in front of competitors, the composers of the texts (including Edgar Alan Poe himself) did not spare the red word, and at the beginning of the next century Herbert Wells essentially expressed the object of the subject: "Advertising is a legitimate lie." Curious is the further development of the story with the participation of Wells and advertising.
When the radio came into vogue (from the 1920s it was occupied by advertising as a new and promising medium), the American director Orson Welles, the namesake of the famous English science fiction writer and friend Lenin, decided to put it on War of the Worlds on CBS.
On Halloween 1938, the artists of the Mercury Theater on the Air approached the task extremely creatively. Information about the Martians who landed in New Jersey was transmitted in the format of news and reports "from the place of events", all advertisements were taken off the air for reliability, actor Kenny Delmar imitated President Roosevelt's appeal to the nation. The result, as you know, was the multimillion-dollar panic of the population, subsequent lawsuits against the radio station about moral and material damage, and ... one of the first "tomato sponsors". The Campbell soup company, which calculated the degree of the program’s impact on radio listeners, paid for Mercury Theater on the Air broadcasts one and a half years in advance.
ARTISTIC VALUE
An advertising poster of the same Campbell soup brand in 1962 made the name and fortune of the American painter Andy Warhol. This was not the first artist to whom advertising gave a chance to earn a living and gain world recognition. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Niko Pirosmani, Alphonse Mucha, Leo Bakst, Vladimir Mayakovsky - advertising provided them, and they, in turn, made it art. At the beginning of the 20th century, techno-inventors were added to the list of beneficiaries of advertising.
In 1908, the Wright brothers' airplane in the sky over Manhattan carried a poster on the wing of a new Broadway musical. The attention of passers-by to air advertising was additionally attracted by specially hired newspaper boys pointing up.
High speed and altitude, below which it was already dangerous to lower the plane, made advertising unreadable. At that time, balloons and airships were considered more productive advertising carriers. However, in the 1920s, a new tow signs technology appeared in the USA - banners attached to the tail of an airplane. In 1922, British pilot Jack Savage proposed the use of colored smoke bombs for "heavenly calligraphy." His idea in the same year was realized by a colleague, Royal Air Force captain Cyril Turner. On November 28, 1922, at 3 km above Times Square in New York, he wrote: "Hello, USA. Call Vanderbilt 7200." In the 1930s, airplanes actively painted the sky over the entire territory of the North American states, from the east coast to the west. Pepsiko was especially successful in this kind of advertising, which, incidentally, continues its Skywriting campaign to this day.
TRADE ENGINE, FASHION STARTER
Aircraft designers, chemists, engineers brought in the latest scientific developments for advertising, and the most successful businessmen in this direction over the years made advertising itself a science. Having patented neon signs in 1910, the Parisian Georges Claude for all subsequent times determined the night look of world capitals and their architectural dominants, such as the Gustav Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. In turn, David Ogilvy, Leo Barnett and Raymond Rubikam, who succeeded in creating specialized advertising agencies (the first simply profitably reselling pre-purchased newspaper strips) laid the foundations for the advertising business, formulated rules and standards. Thanks to their success in promoting new products, it became clear to any manufacturer that there was nothing to do in his business without advertising.
Following the radio, having experienced an addiction to advertising, television has become a field for new experiments. The world's first 10-second promotional video of the American company Bulova Watch was broadcast in July 1941, and the advent of the term soap operas owed the story to the advertising sponsors Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. The term "spam" came into use with the filing of the comic troupe "Flying Circus Monty Python", which worked on the Air Force in the 1970s, and the most expensive video clip in history appeared in 1984. It was shot by Ridley Scott, costing 900 thousand dollars and one and a half minutes advertised the Apple Macintosh computer.
Exhausted by commercial breaks, the viewer fled to the cinema, but there, in the dark, he was also soon found. The most striking example of the so-called product placement in the cinema is the film “Man and Woman” by Claude Lelouche, who in 1968 was promoting two Ford models for the European market at once. However, the James Bond series began to do this much earlier, with the release of the film "Doctor Know" in 1962. A watch, a brand of a sewing atelier, a car, for the advertising of which the owner of Aston Martin Lagonda, David Brown, for a long time paid. But all this was, so to speak, horizontal development. Real vertical ad progress began in the 1980s.
Exhibition "Design 007: The 50th anniversary of the James Bond style "will be held for the first time in Dubai from November 14, 2016 to February 13, 2017. The exhibition will feature iconic gadgets, rare costumes and props that have been involved in the cult blockbuster series. Visitors will enjoy a journey through ten sections of the bondian: from “Doctors Know” to “007: Spectrum.” The ANNEX extension of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper was chosen as the main site.
SHOWS OF COATS OF ARMS, HEIRS OF POSTER
Tracking the history of logos of well-known brands now is a particular pleasure. The roots of these emblems and monograms go back to the deep Middle Ages - the era of the emergence of workshop production. Calling customers (not always literate), a blacksmith hung a horseshoe over the entrance, a sausage - gilded ham, a baker - a pretzel decorated with a crown, hinting at the "royal" quality of the goods. The first city signs contained other elements of knightly and aristocratic heraldry, symbolizing the honesty of the master or belonging to the suppliers of the imperial house. These traditions have changed over time, but their trace on the logos of companies operating in the luxury segment today seems quite appropriate.
BENTLEY. The letter "B", framed by wings, is a tribute to the founder of the brand Walter Owen Bentley and the time when he worked. Then the wings on the car emblems symbolized the power of engines and speed comparable to flying. In addition, in the first half of the twentieth century, the paths of automobile and aircraft design were often intertwined, in particular, Bentley, with his engine for the Spitfire fighter, provided significant assistance to the Royal Air Force during World War II.
LOUIS VUITTON. The LV monogram was created by the son of the founder of the brand Louis Vuitton for purely utilitarian purposes: to label customer luggage so that it would not be confused on the road. In Paris, a motley brown-beige pattern was immediately dubbed the “chessboard”. After many years, Louis Vuitton bags and suitcases are also difficult to confuse with other luggage, despite the abundance of fakes.
FERRARI. The black stallion on the Ferrari emblem is the coat of arms of the Italian count Francesco Baracca, a pilot hero of the First World War. Barakka decorated his plane with a family coat of arms, and he died at the helm. By this time, Enzo Ferrari cars with a one and a half liter 12-cylinder engines were already leading in European races. Once the car designer and the mother of the hero pilot met, and Signora Baracca suggested that he use the family coat of arms as a car emblem, believing that he would bring Enzo luck.
ROLEX. The crown on the logo of the Swiss watch brand, founded in 1905 by two Germans in London, convincingly illustrates the genesis of the signboards of the European guilds and the company's slogan: “Kings in any undertaking”. The first wristwatch, the first waterproof case, the first automatic winding - all these innovations anticipated the prestige of owning a class A precision watch, usually assigned to marine timepieces.
LAMBORGHINI. The bull on the Lamborghini emblem symbolizes not only the zodiac sign of the founder of the company Ferruccio Lamborghini, but also his passion for bullfighting. The name of the famous Spanish bull in the 1970s, which withstood 28 hits of the matador's sword, is now immortalized in the model Lamborghini Murciélago.
VERSACE. According to the Greek myth, the Gorgon Medusa was a monster with snake hair, capable of turning into a stone anyone who meets her gaze. Another interpretation described Medusa as a fatal beauty. Placing it on the logo of his company, couturier Gianni Versace wanted to emphasize the power of art, its attractiveness and historical roots dating back to antiquity. "A lover of Medusa will not be able to escape from her," the designer once prophetically declared.
ROLLS-ROYCE. The famous car emblem was born thanks to the novel of Lord John Douglas Montague with his secretary Eleanor Thornton. Promoting the Rolls-Royce brand in the market, Lord Montague proposed to make his fellow sculptor Charles Sykes a fashionable radiator figure at that time. Sykes worked in the style of ardeco, Mrs. Thornton posed - as a result, a winged figure arose, known worldwide as the "Spirit of Ecstasy."
CHANEL. The monogram of the two handbags reminiscent of the lock of a woman’s mirror, C, according to Coco Chanel herself, was inspired by childhood memories. She reproduces the details of the church stained glass window that the girl saw from her window in the Aubazine shelter, where she spent most of her childhood.
ELEVEN MUSEUM
In 1984, the film "Love and Aerobics" by Canadian director Lawrence Dane was released on the world's movie screens, including the USSR. Cinema (frankly, mediocre, in comparison with the contemporary picture “Love and Pigeons”) not only shaped the worldview of Jane Fonda and - for many years - a Moscow television network with the morning music shows of girls in bathing suits over pantyhose, but also did something still. The positive boyfriend of the protagonist, a professional football player, came on dates in a decommissioned army jeep, which should, according to the director's idea, symbolize his simplicity and uncouthness. Almost immediately after the release of the film, the popularity of SUVs (consuming a lot of fuel and practically unnecessary in urban conditions) around the world rapidly increased, which forced automakers to urgently introduce radical changes to the model range. It is not only about the success of indirect advertising in creating a new type of car. She, advertising, involuntarily and completely by chance, managed much more - to reformat the minds of the target audience for a lasting, decades ahead, implementation of another illusion.
In 1988, the movie "Minion of Fate" by the same master of product placement Claude Lelyusha played a similar joke with a mobile phone and, by the way, downshifting. There, retired in favor of African safaris and sailing regattas, the main character, performed by Jean-Paul Belmondo, advises his deputy (and likely successor) to use the then bulky cordless telephone as one of the main tools for business success.
After successful experiments in modeling artificial reality, the advertising gods embarked on a rescue mission. While civilian jeeps and cell phones were fundamentally new products and went through the testing stage on the market, Swiss mechanical watches, whose small-scale production in the 16th century founded fugitive Huguenots on the slopes of the Alps, were already on the verge of extinction in the third quarter of the 20th century. A more accurate and cheaper quartz movement, followed by electronic indications, made heavy manual braces and rollers virtually unnecessary, and in the early 1980s most of the legendary but bankrupt brands were bought at a low price by the Swatch concern.
The massive adoption of cell phones with time displays, stopwatch, calendars and alarms pushed the wristwatch even further into the past. But here advertising intervened, in a short time reformatting expensive Swiss mechanics from a functional business tool into virtually the only jewelry available to men.
The pendulum swung again, microscopic, only elves heard gears spinning, a mysterious tourbillon, which only narrow specialists knew about before the advertising campaign, started. The watch boom of the noughties returned Swiss brands to their former glory and power, and in return they generously rewarded the editions glorifying them.
Today, advertising, the eleventh muse in the pantheon of arts and sciences after the movie, continues to master new technologies for influencing the human mind. This is not even the 25th frame (by the way, it turned out to be a myth), but neurostimulation, based on the examination of the brain by magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography. Probably in the near future, buying a headset with brain-sensors that is so convenient for communication, games and transport control, we will begin to experience the effects of much more efficient and optimally segmented advertising. But even then, most likely, this will not become a cause for serious concern. After all, the main thing for most of us is not the expediency of the purchase, but the pleasure received in the process of acquiring it.
Advertising has always evoked quite conflicting feelings among viewers, but, firstly, this is characteristic of almost any strong artistic act.Secondly, advertisers themselves conditionally divide their products into “pure art” capable of selling, intended for annual display in Cannes, for example. But if advertising suddenly does not begin, we will not recognize our cities, we will no longer be oriented in fashion, gastronomy and medicine, and life will lose its usual system of images. So native Londoners are accustomed to scold the fog, and St. Petersburg - rain. But try to persuade these people to change the climate - and they will lay their bones in defense of their identity.
Text: Dmitry Konstantinov
