Sponsored content: to blend or not to blend. Part 4

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc./ LMMiami.com

• As I pointed out in a prior installment of this series of articles, for centuries, if not millennia, the conundrum of advertising has been how to calibrate a kosher level of integration with its vehicles and surroundings.
• How forthcoming should an ad, in the broadest sense of the word, be about its intentions?
• Should it blend in or stand out?
• Advertising, if we loosely define it as the attempt to sell or facilitate the sale of a product or service, has used journalism, art, literature and even religion to do its bidding.
• Velázquez (Spain; 1599-1660), arguably the most accomplished painter of all time in terms of technique, was not strictly an “artist”.
• His job was that of court portraitist and his work was far from purely artistic, let alone ornamental.
• He had a critical responsibility from a political and geopolitical perspective: to find consorts for the crown’s heirs (essential for trade and military alliances) and to project an image of heroism and leadership for the throne among its mostly illiterate subjects.
• His portraits of the heirs and heiresses were critical to seal arranged marriages between royals who had never met in person (traveling from Madrid to, say, Vienna in those days was literally a life-threatening endeavor that could take months, if not years).
• In short, he was an essential part of the propaganda machinery of the monarchy.
• Velázquez would’ve bristled at the very suggestion that he was an “artist”.
• He would’ve considered beneath him to be considered so.
• Sometimes we forget that the notion of “art” and “artist” was a creation of the Romantic movement of the 19th century.
• As Don Draper said: “Romantic love was invented by people like me to sell lipstick.”
• Or something along those lines.
• But back to the last 100 years: during most of the 20th century and part of the 21st, the rule has beeb that a wall must separate the church of editorial content from the state of paid advertising.*
• To this day, sifting through the pages of Cosmo, Forbes or Sports Illustrated still leaves little doubt as to which are ads and which are journalism.
• This might be coming to an end.
• Fast.
• It quickly turning into game of smoke and mirrors now.
• A minefield.
• Editorial and advertising are increasingly becoming one and the same.
• Has advertising lost its credibility?
• Is it so omnipresent that it is considered pollution?
• Paradoxically, advertising art directors still believe that they are at the top of the graphic design food chain.
• They believe that they are in the high art biz.
• To be continued next week.

* Unless you are the government who, we now know, bankrolled loads of Hollywood war-mongering movies and even “communist” painters during the Cold War: How Jackson Pollock and the CIA teamed up to win the Cold War: https://medium.com/@MichaelMcBride/how-jackson-pollock-and-the-cia-teamed-up-to-win-the-cold-war-6734c40f5b14