Round 1
After a few years of watching advertising, thinking advertising, and working in advertising, I began to wonder… Is marketing taught in graphic design school? Are the basic marketing fundamentals of how to create a message discussed amongst graphic designers?
If you have ever taken a course or worked in marketing I am sure you know the communication process. If not it is put simply as a message received, decoded, encoded, and sourced or sent. There is of course more jargon to add but let’s keep this short.
My question arises from this very process. I see ads [constantly] that represent creativity but lack a message. An example of this not to hark on any one company is the following picture:
Great picture, interesting perspective but where is the message? I am stuck in the decoding phase and can’t get out! Well at least until I read the fine print. So question one is do you read the fine print?
A marketing ad should create a decoded message in your brain within seconds. Maybe this ad wanted to draw you in with creativity alone? But instead I just flip the page and moved on.
Marketing ads should place their top content in the middle of the ad. This is where our eyes go first. It should create a message within a few seconds, and deliver readable content that links to a direct source of information (i.e. landing page, sales package, those pesky free brochures, etc). The message should be so clear that it alone could be placed in any advertising medium and create successful exposure.
This is where I am a bit lost… I see great creativity, eye catching ads, but no content backing it. This only decreases the reader retention and increases wasted marketing dollars. Take a look at this ad and let me know what you think? Does it play into creativity and meet marketing objectives?
Dave Bain's Blog 
2 comments
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September 22, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Davin Greenwell
Having never been to a formal design school I cannot comment on what is taught. But I do see a lot of “design” that is heavy on graphics and low on messaging. Ultimately graphic design is a discipline of visual communication – many graphic designers in Canada understand this, but there is variance of course. Some come to it purely from a technical expertise approach where they want to show off what they know how to do – we’ve all been there, and we know it’s a pretty far cry from doing market research, formulating a creative strategy to connect and motivate them, and rolling it out into various media; graphic design is the delivery arm of this process. So perhaps graphic design is not always to blame, but rather the marketing and advertising process could be weak or misguided in many cases.
It doesn’t help that some widely accessible design tutorials teach that the first step to making a logo is sketching 30 different visual ideas and then proceeds to turn some of them into vectors. This kind of process ignores well-established creative and business models which, although more work, hit the target more often than not. Gotta aim that canon before you shoot – am I right?
September 22, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Davin Greenwell
All that said, I have worked with many excellent graphic design houses that have solid processes for market research and brand strategy. I would rate these graphic design agencies at the more professional, higher end-end of the graphic design spectrum, and as a result, they tend to attract more sophisticated clients.
In fact, many times when you’re seeing poorly conceived or weird messaging in an advertisement, what you’re seeing is the owner of a company subcontracting a graphic designer to roll out some design they have in their head. Quite often these efforts reflect the ego of the entrepreneur in question more than the product, or (better yet) the desires of the target market for the product in question. Many entrepreneurs are guilty of hasty generalizations and believe what works for them will work for everyone. This is, of course, a logical fallacy.
Sorry for writing a novel in your comments area. Good questions.