Hive Health

The life of our work tends to be pretty short. The  world consumes concepts at a startling pace. Although often a visual medium for me  it’s a stretch to compare what we do with the art world where images and messages live for decades and even hundreds of years. In this sense then the ad could be considered to be disposable, there to change behaviour and move on. Tomorrow’s chip wrapping? It’s certainly the case that campaigns seem to be changed more and more, whether that be to meet and deliver against a new insight, or because a change of team requires the ‘done by me stamp’ that we see every few years. I always thought that as ideas migrated up past the A4 / 30 second constraints of ad space that we would drive towards more tactical ads, that felt coherent – but that hasn’t really happened yet.

With this in mind I was fascinated to come across people who consider ads not necessarily art, but culturally worthwhile. We build pieces of communication in such as way often we forget their wider importance once they are out of the door, the process of development being often so painful, denial and memory loss are part of the coping mechanism. (If I was braver and not a man, I would draw a lengthier connection between ad conception and childbirth and the rush of endorphins erasing pain memory and await the Comments with equal amounts of guts and fear).

The study of advertising as part of culture is established. A Google minute provides loads of thesis’s exploring the relationships between cultural dimensions and characteristics of advertisements. Dozens of theoretical frameworks have been developed covering identity, individualism-collectivism, femininity-masculinity, industrialization and even parental responsibilities. All getting (for me) more interesting when put to practical use explaining technique, characterization, appearances and portrayals of people. Loads of these research tomes feature statistical analysis that make the creative product look positively scientific rather than a result of its context.

With this geeky bubbling I have been enjoying visiting the Ghostsigns project, a collaborative national effort to capture, collate, discuss and archive all remaining examples of hand painted wall advertising across the UK. Ghostsigns are the typically faded remains of advertising that was once painted by hand onto the brickwork of buildings. If you live in London or New York  I am pretty sure you walk by a few every day.

This made me wondered whether in 50 years people will be collecting up digital communications as part of a similar project. Then the US Library of Congress announced that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In the same way that diaries and private journals started to be considered legitimate cultural data sources in the later part of the last century it seems that this is considered an “unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction” This is big!

*With apologies to Bob Dylan. I saw Bob at Hop Farm Festival last weekend. He was not very good but the title is still a big one to steal.