Somehow (read: wasting time on Wikipedia), I recently stumbled across Time’s list of the 100 Most Important People of the (20th) Century. Although such lists are, by definition, pretty ridiculous, it was pretty interesting to read about people with whom we’re all familiar (Hitler) right next to less well-known names (Philo Farnsworth or Amadeo Giannini, anyone?).
But one of the entries in particular stood out to me: Leo Burnett. Burnett, if you aren’t familiar, was the founder of one of the largest ad companies in the world, appropriately named Leo Burnett Worldwide, which is headquartered right here in lovely downtown Chicago.
During his career, he created icons like the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger and, in the process, revolutionized the entire field of advertising. Without exaggeration, he was truly a creative genius.
Yet I couldn’t help but wonder how much of his success was really due to creative talent, as being a successful artist and being an influential communicator are two wholly different things. Was his true talent in creating images, or in recognizing that the time had come when creating images was a viable marketing tool? While there can be no doubt that images have always had, and always will have, a special power over the human mind, it is doubtful that they could have really been successfully mass-marketed without the technology of the late industrialized world.
So if a person possessed his mind in the Victorian age, would we know her name? Setting aside the obvious–that of course she would almost certainly not be a business success at that time–we can still fairly conclude that it is unlikely. We need to recognize that creativity alone isn’t enough; talent does not exist in a vacuum, and the media of any time and place are centrally important factors in determining the success of communicators of all stripes.
Stuart Ewen, who wrote the Time piece, recognizes therein that many of Burnett’s methods and icons are a bit anachronistic by today’s standards. Yet Ewen suggests that this is due to the consumer zeitgeist–we are all just too jaded to embrace such simplistic imagery. While that I agree with that point, I want to add that there’s a broader lesson to take from all this. As Marshall McLuhan first recognized, the audience, communicator, and message are all secondary to the structure of communication. In this context, it’s clear that Burnett was so successful not simply because he created memorable images, but because he lived and worked in a period when technology (esp. mass media) made creating memorable images viable, valuable, and revolutionary.
The world we live in today isn’t really like that. Although I suggested that images hold a special place in the human mind, it seems that our emerging media don’t easily lend themselves to the top-down manufacture of such images. While Burnett lived in a time when specific institutions (CBS, NBC, ABC) where massively influential in shaping our images of the world, we live in a fractured media environment. Seats of influence are more widely distributed, making it more difficult to create singular images.
While I disagree with the thesis that social media represent anything resembling a democratization of influence, I do believe that they constitute a fundamentally different architecture of communication. And this new structure is creating an opening for the next Leo Burnett. This person will have to combine creative genius with a truly revolutionary understanding of the nature of our new communication. She will recognize, unlike her contemporaries, how to exploit our media to alter our behavior. Maybe she’ll see that the key to doing so is to create images in a new, revolutionary way; or maybe she’ll recognize that creating images is neither appropriate nor effective in our new media ecology. Perhaps she’ll ‘fix’ advertising, but maybe she’ll abandon it. It’s conceivable that she’s already out there, solving this riddle as we speak, but we won’t recognize it until years from now.
But one thing seems clear: she won’t be Leo Burnett, because his genius was one of a time and place that has become obsolete.
Philo Farnsworth strikes me as a sort of inspiration for Philip J. Fry/Hubert Farnsworth
this was, of course, blindingly obvious. and yet I chose to write it down anyway.
I actually didn’t catch that. Are you guessing that this is the case or is it, in fact, the case?
I’m still just guessing that it is the case. I am embarrassed that I chose to reveal how little I know about Philo Farnsworth by pointing out something that would have been obvious to anyone who has ever seen Futurama.
But now I do, in fact, know that this is the case. wikipedia told me so.
“”Yet I couldn’t help but wonder how much of his success was really due to creative talent, as being a successful artist and being an influential communicator are two wholly different things. Was his true talent in creating images, or in recognizing that the time had come when creating images was a viable marketing tool?”"
i dont really think these things are different so much. I might go so far to say that they are in fact the exact same thing. many things that are created by artists arent really created by them so much, those artists are just taking thing they know and putting them in places that they find clever/amusing/advantageous. Its recognizing where things should go. like the motherboard design coasters that are by me. its just mixing one idea into another. this is just an example of using a social medium, rather than your average piece of paper.
Jesse,
I kinda want to punch you write now, because you just demonstrated that you already knew something that has taken me a lot of thought and work to understand. The idea of a ’social medium’ is so obvious, and something that I was so completely blinded to that I feel like an idiot now that you’ve pointed it out.
You dick.
Seriously though, I wonder if what you’re saying suggests that there may be any difference at all between ‘professionals’ and ‘artists’.
I may have to write about this once I can wrap my mind around it.
if you punch me, ill kick your ass in the face.
hard.