In December 2018, I read a book that helped me understand many things in my life that have always confused me. A book that helped me appreciate the people around me. A book that gave me a new understanding of history and culture. A book that helped me see and articulate something in my professional life that I couldn't explain until that moment: what was going on with advertising?
The book is called The Master and His Emissary and its author, Iain McGilchrist, is a psychiatrist and neuropsychologist, but he began his professional life teaching English literature at Oxford University. Frustrated by the over-analysis of great works of art, he decided to devote the rest of his life to understanding the brain and how it perceives, responds to and shapes culture.
The left brain/right brain theory is making a comeback
Early in the books, the author explains that the brain is asymmetrical and divided, and asks why this might be so. The idea that the right and left brain can do different things has long been dismissed. McGilchrist, however, cleverly reframes the question and does not ask what the two hemispheres do, but instead asks how do they do it? He finds something very remarkable. It's not that each half of the brain does different things, but that the two halves of the brain do things differently; they have different views of the world - different priorities of attention.
It's useful to describe how this works in birds: the left brain of a bird has a narrow goal-directed focus. This is what helps it identify, categorize, and select food grains from their context; the right brain is wide and vigilant in its attention at all times, open to novelty, contradiction, and ambiguity, and continues to scan the environment to protect itself from predators.
The same is true for humans. While the right brain is wide and alert, seeing everything in context and presenting the world to us as it really is, the left brain tries to categorize and represent things and control the world through flat, abstract and linear models. For example, within the same person, the right brain draws a three-dimensional picture of the whole flower with stem and leaves; while the left brain draws only the flower, as a flattened symbol, an absent representation of just the "most important part" as it sees it.
But the differences do not end there. The left brain is impulsive, dogmatic, and tries to manipulate its environment with tools, the main one being language. It likes to control things and is more likely to get angry when things don't go its way (anger spills over into the left hemisphere). He likes things that can be repeated and are uniform. He can only enjoy music with a basic rhythm. However, because the left hemisphere depends on the right hemisphere to see the world as it really is, he is also quite paranoid and without a right brain he can get caught in his own hall of mirrors. The right brain, ever wide and alert in its attention, sees the world as a series of relationships and connections. It is alert to the living world, understanding people and the implicit communication of their gestures, their intonations and their accents.
The right brain to make sense of depth and lived time is what helps us appreciate metaphor and humor (we see something from two different perspectives) and music (harmony is the aural equivalent of visual depth). We need both centers of consciousness (complementary and contradictory) if we are to thrive and make great creative leaps.
But that's where the shoe pinches. The two hemispheres are connected by something called the corpus callosum. This bundle of fibers acts as a bridge between the two hemispheres, but it turns out that its main purpose is to dampen one brain or the other at a time. It happens that the left brain has a greater dampening effect on the right side than the right on the left. The left brain tends to overwhelm its neighbor and can become overly dominant both in individuals and in society as a whole.
You can trace this in culture throughout history, from the ancient Greeks to the present day. In left-brain dominant periods, society becomes brittle, angry, polarized, sees things in binary terms, feels like something is true or false, nothing in between.
We're living through a left-brain period
To illustrate, let's take two different periods. After a period of flatness that lasted about a thousand years, something amazing happened in 15th century Florence: suddenly depth reappeared in art. A whole way of looking at the world appeared: perspective and empathy in art (empathy accompanies depth), liberal reference to other things, a heightened sensitivity to time and place, a sense of flow. We know this period as the Renaissance, which gradually spread north across Europe.
Right brain image. "The School of Athens" by Raphael, 1511. A moment in time captured with a strong sense of time and place, each character as an identifiable personality.
Then came the Reformation, which bears many of the hallmarks of today's world and which sought to strip things back to "authenticity". Figures (saints), metaphor, and ornamentation were removed and the Word of God was preferred. A way of looking at the world emerged that gave priority to left-brain preferences. Today we are in just such a left-brain period, and it is especially pronounced in advertising, which both reflects and leads the culture.
Left-brain dominance in 1590, when the Reformation was in full swing. In a dramatic reversal of approach, the painting now lacks depth; the painting is divided into different scenes, so that there is no sense of a single idea. The characters are not depicted in naturalistic proportions.
Lemon is a challenge to the right brain
In the book Lemon, I describe these cultural shifts through the art of several eras to help us see what is happening in today's culture.
The book sheds light on a distinct change in advertising style that first appeared in 2006. How might we characterize this shift? We have seen a move away from whole-brain advertising (people, characters, metaphors, distinct time and place), to advertising that is significantly flatter, more dependent on words, that is devitalised, more abstract, out of time and place, more instructive, more literal and rhythmic. Gone, for the most part, are the figures of advertising's heyday; people are now reduced to objects or props in the service of a one-sided "me to you" message.
If it was just a matter of changing tastes, then it wouldn't matter much. But as I show in the book, the relatively flat left-brain features we see dominating advertising today make people feel flat, while the right-brain features - depth, humanity, reciprocity, a sense of time and place - create strong emotional responses. This is important because, as I show later in the book, emotional responses to brand advertising help explain subsequent movements in market share. To make a profit, you have to entertain. And over the period in question - since 2006 - advertising effectiveness has declined, as the IPA study showed.
Right-brain ads that people enjoy, can identify with and respond emotionally to have declined since the early 21st century, and in their place we've seen a rise in ads that are built on words, speed and emotional inactivity. In other words, they lack warmth or charm.
So what has caused this shift in advertising style? It's not one thing, of course, but several. We have experienced, among other things, the digital revolution. In that period, there have been significant changes in the number of advertising platforms available that offer short-term feedback metrics that favour a particular style of working, stealing priority from long-term brand building. The digital world has accelerated everything and timeframes for creatives have shortened. This was also a period of consolidation, mergers and acquisitions and the rise of network agencies, which generally created enormous cost pressures on their agencies, removing value from them and encouraging specialisation (weighing more heavily on narrow left-brain focus). Then there's global advertising, which is required to work in all markets, and ultimately won't work anywhere because it doesn't use local culture, reference time or place, or show a scene unfolding through dialogue. The type of person who works in advertising and media today is also very different from the modern mainstream. It has a more analytical, "professional" and organized mindset, displacing the craft and spontaneity we once valued and celebrated. We can go further by saying that the industry no longer shows as much interest in the work itself; any marketing conference today seems more interested in the idea of the thing than in the thing itself, a recurring theme of the dominant period of left-brain history.
As Rory Sutherland noted in Campaign:
"Going to a marketing conference these days feels a bit like a man who has signed up to attend a poetry festival, only to find that most of the talks are about bookbinding."
Brand-building advertising leads to better results in the long run
So what can we do about it? Any remedy should put work front and center, and fortunately we know more than ever what type of creative works well. The trick is to appeal to the right brain, which is responsible for four of the five types of attention that psychologists generally agree on (the only type of attention the left brain deals with is narrow, goal-directed attention). This means focusing on characters, dialogue, interstitial space, depth, a distinct sense of time and place, experiencing time or unfolding a scene, referring to other things (pastiche or parody), music with melody and harmony, and stimulating the right brain's natural interest in unusual things. These are the things that attract and hold attention, that bring an emotional response, that make an ad striking and memorable, and that get people talking about your brand. That's a recipe for doing a great job of building a brand that elicits an emotional response and ensures market share growth. And if they're important on TV, they're essential in the online environment.
Source: insight.cz, Orlando Wood
