I was in a meeting the other day and I found myself weakly defending a concept that I had just presented—actually I rolled over quite easily because as soon as someone had challenged my thinking I knew they were right. The problem was that I had tried to use statistics to create a logic thread that I thought would move people to act. I’ve been doing what I do for longer than I would like to admit, so I should have known better. People are emotional beings and if the emotional component of a piece of communication is secondary, then chances are it won’t work all that well. And then I smiled to myself and thought of a painting.
If you’ve ever been to the New York MOMA there’s a Jackson Pollack piece just inside the entrance that will stop you in your tracks. Abstract expressionism isn’t really my thing. I’m an art director and a designer, I like hard lines and clearly defined messages. But the Pollack piece transcends, and not only does it transcend taste, but age, ethnicity, economic status, walk of life and probably every other metric you can imagine. I’ve seen people stand in front of the painting and tear up. I’ve watched people lose themselves in the moment and drop stuff from their hands. The painting is that powerful.
Occasionally I’ll reference the painting to remind a client or someone that I’m working with—or in this case myself, that we can’t break down communication into a science. Yes, we can apply science to a piece of communication, but science alone will not give us the answer or even a formula to create the answer. At the end of the day advertising, or just about any other communication for that matter, is still an art.
And here’s proof. If you analyzed the Pollack painting you could describe what you see in a scientific manner. It’s 43% white, 29% black, 11% blue, 8% yellow, 4% red... and continue until you made it to 100%. Once you’ve cataloged the color usage you could measure the canvas—width, height, even the depth if you have an inclination for detail (Make sure to include the bee and the nails stuck in the painting then.). And upon finishing, your information wouldn’t tell you a damn thing about that painting. Not one thing—OK, one important thing. If you doubt this then I challenge you to come up with a painting using the same percentages of color, on the same size canvas (because you have all the information you need to make a great painting right?) that not only is worthy of being called art, but is so powerful that it launches a whole new genre and hangs in a museum for generations to come.
Now if that doesn’t convince everyone on the planet that you can’t break down art into a science (or a formula), then I would like to put the few dissenters in a lab with the complete catalog of elements from the human body. Their task would be simple: create an animated human form. Science has given them the ingredients, and we all know the finish line so getting there should be easy, right?
Applying this argument to advertising and design means when someone tells me that a response button has to be a certain color, in a certain position at a certain size, or that a logo has to be up for a certain amount of time and it has to appear within a certain number of seconds from the beginning of a spot, then I’m not so certain that’s the case. We’re not doing a paint by number here. We’re making art. Because as much as science (or numbers, or analytics, or whatever you would like to call them) can close the gap between science and art there’s still going to be a gap. And then you’re just going to have to take my hand and trust me as we leap together over it.