Advertising and law

The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.
                        - Oliver Wendell Holmes

It's time to stop asking whether advertising is an art or a science. It's neither. But if you're looking for a useful analogy, I like law.

Law, like advertising, is a set of practical codes designed to influence behavior, not describe an apodictic truth like the nature of physical reality or an artistic vision. The "truths" sought by law and by advertising are relative and dependent upon consensus.  There is no single, independent standard of success, immune to social opinion. Not even ROI. Rather, there is a fuzzy hubbub of standards many of which are really no more than codified social opinion.

Do these analogies matter outside of barroom arguments? Maybe not a lot. But they are worthy of some present consideration because analogies with art and science tend to mask the fact that advertising success, like legal precedent, is a social, consensus-based phenomenon. Today, as the industry struggles to evolve into an era defined by internal team-building, interagency collaborations, one-off project teams, consumer-generated content and other social phenomena, certain assumptions which have been dragged over from idealized, obsolete notions of art and science (e.g. There must be a correct answer to every question. "Great" advertising is an objective category and must be the work of individual genius.) only limit our thinking about what's possible and encourage unseemly nostalgic grumbling.

Besides, an analogy with lawyers is disconcertingly flattering.

Comments

[josh]

Another interesting analogy is that law is all about stories told round a particular construct. So, for instance, if I want some recompense for that fact that Jeffre drove over my foot, I need to tell a story that proves 4 things: that Jeffre had a legal Duty not to run over my foot, that he Breached that duty (that he did drive over my foot), and that it Caused some Injury. The facts of various situations will always be unique, but to tell an effective story (i.e., where you win your case), you need Duty, Breach, Causation and Injury.

Which reminds one of ad-land discussions. "A good ad must have a clear story..." "An effective ad has to have a call to action..." etc, etc. Or campaign debates. "If we're not on the web it won't be cool." "Print is dead."

But communications isn't like the law in this respect. There are no mandated constituent parts.

[Jeffre Jackson]

Yes. If you think of them all as genres of storytelling, the strictness of the stylistic rules increases as you go from art to advertising to law to science. Another reason why law is the most appropriate analogy for advertisers aspiring to greater rigor. Art is a step backwards and science is too far a stretch.

As a lawyer who became a planner, do you miss having mandated constituent parts?

And I'm sorry about your foot.

[josh]

OK, that's either really freaky or I forgot I told you.

I actually got out of law because of the mandated codes. Some people love that aspect of storytelling, and revel in the creativity of convincing people that a certain event actually fits some legal definition. But I found it stifling. Which is not to say that advertising can't be stifling as well.

I actually think that Planning leans a bit outside of that, which is why I was attracted to it.