Seeing is believing?

Today I’d like to talk about something that cuts to the very heart of what the ad game is all about, namely perception, or rather the creation and management of…

Now when I saw the Dubai ‘Centre of Now’ ad on TV some time ago, my initial reaction was ‘That’s good…’ ‘The Center of Now’ is a line with ‘cohunes’, it’s bold, it’s brave, it’s aggressive, and it’s exactly what Dubai needs post it’s 2007 financial apocalypse melt-down.

With every brand there are two things at play: the physical, functional, measurable, hard, objective reality of the thing/product/service/experience, and the subjective, malleable, emotionally-fuelled, subject-to-change, commonly-held perception of the thing/product/service/experience.

Advertising as an industry, profession, craft, science and art form is essentially based upon the difference between these two.

This advert tells us that Dubai is the ‘Centre of Now’. This is a very powerful proposition. This is a very competitive (how often do we forget the importance of that) proposition. This is a proposition that goes head-to-head with London, and New York, and Singapore, and Shanghai, and every other city in the world that seeks to be primus inter pares…

Now what is most interesting about this campaign is that it is a classic example of a campaign that seeks to create a new reality by the act of the creation of a new perception. This is essentially what advertising is all about, and it is based upon the premise that reality and perception are both inter-related and mutually influencing. Just as the reality of a thing determines the perception of that thing, so to does the perception of a thing determine the reality of that thing.

This is why creative departments in an ad agency are so called, not because they are populated by art school graduates with dreadlocks and frustrated, hard-drinking, poet-comedians, but rather because their function, their reason d’etre, is to create perceptions.

N.B. for a far better exposition of this point, please watch Dicaprio’s Inception several times.

Furthermore, this is why the section on the creative brief that says ‘desired consumer perception’ is so utterly utterly important – much more so that the section that most suits tend to focus on which says ‘Deliverables’, and it’s close relation, ‘Mandatories’.

I’m going to say this all over again because it is just that important. There is what a thing is, and there is what people think the thing is. If you change what they think it is, you will change what it is.

Therefore the key decision in advertising, and this is actually the real job definition of a suit, is to decide what you want people to think about your brand, in other words, how do you wish them to perceive it? This, as always, is a business decision. Therefore the way to answer this question is to ask what the business needs people to think about the brand in order for the business to meet it’s objectives.

The great joy of advertising is that once you have decided what perception of your brand you wish to create, you have the entire spectrum of language and art and music and culture and experience with which to create it – that’s what a ‘creative’ is supposed to do, which is why the obsession with photoshop and illustrator is such a dangerous thing, as execution can and never will make up for or replace conception.

Which brings us back to Dubai. The ‘reality’ of Dubai is that ‘things are rough’. Business is down, properties aren’t selling, prices are flat, your rich neighbor-cousin is insisting that you name your tallest building after him, and so on.

But this campaign shows that Dubai is willing to come out swinging, that it will not ‘go down’ without a fight. Therefore it declares ‘We are the Centre of Now’, and keeps declaring it in the knowledge that if they can just convince enough people that it is a fact, it will become a fact…

‘The Greatest’ created the perception first, and he created the perception as much in the minds of his opponents as within the minds of his audience and fans. Once he had created the perception, especially in the minds of his opponents, the reality was bound to follow. It’s not magic, it’s just the way the world works, and that’s advertising…