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Manchester lifestyle reviews |
![]() Design the Future: advertising's mission?Reviewed by Simon Belt June 2011
Through a clever advertising move, Manchester's anonymous yet celebrity poster and flyer campaigner, employed the effective talents of Manchester's blogger Fat Roland to help him get a big audience for his Poster Exhibition - 2 June for 3 days only. Micah Purnell used this exhibition to come clean about who was behind a series of intriguing posters and flyers around the city, focussed on the now trendy Northern Quarter, well sort of come clean anyway.
Fat Roland invited his wide network of friends and fellow bloggers with some clever copy like 'For three years, an anonymous poster designer plastered Manchester with 67,000 fly posters and flyers, including the well known Peter Saville spoofs that turned the head of the media', informing his audience that there was a phenomena they were being invited to take part in. It's interesting that one of Manchester's most prolific and celebrated bloggers was selected to promote a primarily image based craft and exhibition - a theme I find most revealing.
Having walked around Manchester's Northern Quarter looking for suitable venues to host some of Manchester Salon's public discussions, I'd noticed some of the posters on show at the exhibition and wondered what was behind the campaign, but by the time I checked out the next venue the moment had passed. The exhibition displayed the posters from the recent campaign which formally subverts the idea of advertising, in truth more an edgy style than subversive in content, with options to buy limited edition copies at reduced rates, if purchased on the night of the private and pre-public viewing. However, when looking at the posters again in preparation for this exhibition, and particularly Micah's pamphlet 'Hot Air Balloons', I started to make the connections and understand the motivation and rationale behind the campaign.
Well I was rather hoping for some revelations that could help me withstand the bombardment from the 3000 ads we are supposedly exposed to each day. In the section on How to Analyse an Advert, I began to wonder exactly how influenced by advertising images I really was and think that I'm perhaps less influenced by images and more by words and discussion. Using the example Micah draws on of Vodafone's advertising campaign in the summer of 2009, which promoted their abolishing mobile fone roaming charges; he tries to explain the importance of images alongside words in triggering a conversation in the viewer's mind. This section was really quite interesting in its appreciation of context and how immediate conversations relate to broader social and historical ideas
At this stage of reading the pamphlet, and looking at his advertising campaign to date as a teaser to a full on conversation, you might expect a more strident engagement against the industry or with his audience, and to some extent it comes with the following quote:
The thing that's problematic for me is that having started out with a rather contemptuous view of ordinary people as passive victims of clever advertisers who are themselves somehow immune from their colleagues, yet talking about the importance of words, conversations and social context, Micah, like so many designers who know best for us, defensively avoids trying to change what they think the industry is or having an active conversation with the audience he wishes to save from himself and his colleagues. Simply deciding on our behalf that we shouldn't be subjected to adverts for consumer products and services which may or may not be of use to us, and replacing them with his message of awareness raising from the divine voice to those yet to be enlightened is not only defensive and contemptuous, but simply doesn't help develop an active conversation.
Incidentally, for those in the advertising industry who've bought into the Mac dream reading this review, some websites produced using Apple's web authoring software on the iMac have been a series of images stuck together making it impossible for those website visitors who have some visual impairments to understand what the websites are about. To search engines also, sites developed like that say 'All fur coat and no knickers', rather like those trying to use short sentence advertising to have an enriching public conversation.
There was one of Micah's posters which I did like and fitted the title of the exhibition Design The Future, and that was the one with a graphic of multiple connections and the text 'If you don't design the future, someone else will'.
A telling comment made during the evening was 'You either get it or you don't' which I thought rather summed up Micah's approach very well - a no dialogue, detached view of the world of ideas where some people know what's right and the rest of us just don't. Micah's message is that there are those who rise above the contempt embodied in his industry, and there are those that just can't - he targets his message at those that just can't. By replacing adverts for consumer goods and services he's decided we don't need, with nudges to change our behaviour, he aligns himself with our politically correct masters nudging us to better behaviour with campaigns like minimum pricing for alcohol because they know what's best for us but can't convince us through a conversation with us.
Editor's Note: Whilst we're on the subject of the relationship between art and politics, the Manchester Salon is organised a discussion entitled 'Valuing the Arts' looking at 'how the arts sector can ensure quality in the midst of dramatic budget cuts' in June. |