Project 27: Insights Into a Production-centred Study on Art Direction and Love

The thesis Strategic Aesthetics in Advertising Campaigns: Implications for Art Direction Education addressed problems of uncertainty in the formalization of production-related knowledge in advertising art direction. One of the triggers for the research was the development of creative advertising postgraduate programs at QUT Creative Industries Faculty. In 2003 I was employed to oversee these, partly because of my professional background in advertising. Students expected to learn, amongst other things, principles of advertising production (i.e. ideas generation, electronic and print media, copywriting and art direction), but, as the thesis discussed, decision-making in art direction practices is, in many cases, intuitive, being reliant on an expertise gained through industry practice. Many aspects of advertising production knowledge are tacit, so the thesis was interested in the formalization of explicit knowledge for pedagogical purposes. However, to theorize about art direction was not the initial intention of the project. This research was originally interested in the notion of ‘love’ in advertising.

Naïve in many ways, the initial question for the PhD was: what does love look like? This question was posed because ‘love’ appeared to be an important aspect in advertising. During the early 2000s I saw what seemed to be an increase in the number of advertisements that used ‘love’, either as part of a catchphrase or a theme. The book Lovemarks (Roberts 2002) followed up its popularity, with an online resource that invited members of the public to nominate ‘lovable’ brands. Studying the ‘look’ of love seemed as if it could become an aesthetic inquiry that was relevant to the industry. At various stages the project was concerned with enhancing art directors’ professional standing and in creating supportive structures that could help validate aesthetic decisions within industry practices. From a professional development stance, studying a ‘look’, or an ‘aesthetic situation’ (a term discussed in the thesis) could help practitioners form a better understanding of the malleability of the love-notion in content production.

Soon, though, it became apparent that if the research was to study ‘the look of love’ in advertising, ‘ways of knowing’ in art direction would also needed investigating. During the initial stages of development of the PhD there were two major tendencies in research practices at QUT-Creative Industries Faculty: research framed within cultural studies, and practice-led research. The resources available to guide methodological procedures within these scholarly frameworks were, in a way, in my view, unfit to address a research question that aimed to inform art direction practices. I failed to understand how methodologies of critical or cultural interest could enhance art direction knowledge because I felt, during initial reading, that these approaches detached creative products from production, and art direction was a production activity. In the case of practice-led research methods, which were popular in research undertaken in visual arts, inquiries were generated during art practice, and this seemed to require a level of introspection during production that I felt was alien to the way in which advertising art direction was typically practiced. That is, producing content in a way that is detached from a self-centred journey, sometimes under tight deadlines. It is possible that the avoidance of adhering to cultural studies or practice-led research was unfounded, or merely the result of first impressions. The research was not interested in informing the cultural place of art direction practices or their outputs. Here there was no interest in criticizing advertising outputs or the consequences of these outputs. Also, the research was not interested in the phenomenological aspects of production; how internal conversations with the self could help understand the complexities of being an art director. Instead, the project was interested in creating an opportunity for the knowledge of the advertising producer to help frame research questions and methodologies. Art direction seemed to also need an intellectual and systematic ground that allowed scholarly investigation in order to further knowledge in this area. I felt this research needed to find its own ‘way of knowing’, in this case, about the love notion.

Therefore, in this study, to aid the learning of art direction meant, beyond the structural articulation of established theory, to find ways to learn through analysis. In a classroom, when discussing advertising images from an art direction perspective, the ideal situation is to be able to discuss methodologies and theories that are as relevant as possible to everyday practices. For this reason, this project was interested in the investigation of a methodology for art direction research. Consequently the project shifted from thinking about the answer to the initial question (what does love look like?), to thinking about the meaning of the question, and the methodological implications of an investigation into answering such a question. The methodology would apply to other themes, not just to the love theme, as ways of knowing in art direction.

With this focus, the empirical part of the thesis offered a comprehensive study of the love theme in advertising. It established a methodology of visual analysis. The methodology of visual analysis was in many ways similar to conventional content analysis, but I framed it within a structure offered in visual anthropology to enable the exploration of problems that were relevant to production. I was also able to operationalize, to an extent, the propositional theory of the thesis: strategic aesthetics. The thesis showed the result of the visual analysis of the love theme. This part of the study became instrumental to the study of knowledge and of ways of knowing. So this thesis showed the outcome of an investigation about ways of knowing in art direction, to aid the design of art direction curricula in higher education.

Advertising art direction is typically an industry-based occupation. With the industrialization of production, and because of technological advancement and ongoing innovation of media, we have seen a growth in the diversification of art direction activities. The classification of industries and occupations provided by the United Nations give a sense of this diversification. Beginning in the nineteen fifties, the United Nations opened discussions to holistically classify industry activities and occupations. The aim of these classifications was to help nations regulate and promote industrial activities in a systematized way. They were meant as a guide for regionally measuring and improving economic performance. There are two outputs from this work in which advertising production activities are considered: the International Standard of Industry Classification (ISIC) and the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) (United Nations Statistics Division). The latest ISIC version (ISIC Rev.4), published in 2008, does not nominate specific activities in the development of advertising images, but one can assume art direction is an economic activity under ‘creative services’ and ‘production of advertising material’. See ISIC classification below:

This classification seems to distinguish activities of ‘production’ (i.e. ‘production of commercial messages…’ in excluded activities) from ‘creation’ (i.e. ‘creating and placing advertising…’). These ‘creative’ and ‘production’ aspects of art direction activities form a major part of the observations made by the 28 art directors reviewed in The Art Direction Book (British Design and Art Direction 1996). In terms of art direction, ‘creating’ can mean processes of idea generation, and generation and manipulation of aesthetics, including drawing, typographic manipulation, communication, etc. Because art directors are responsible for creative outputs, art direction activities include the management and supervision of ‘production’. This includes, for example, the selection of talent and other creative professionals involved in the production of content. ‘Production’ in ISIC’s classification seems to mean activities in the making of final products for mediums such as television, radio and film. Taking ISIC’s classification into account, art direction activities can include ‘creating’ and ‘producing’ ads for newspapers, periodicals, television, internet and other media; as well as ‘creating’ billboards, panels, bulletins and frames, window dressing, showroom design, car and bus carding, aerial advertising, stands and displays.

This classification is somewhat unclear for the purpose of mapping advertising art direction knowledge. In ISIC’s classification ‘production of commercial messages for radio, television and film’ are activities excluded from advertising services. This classification also excludes ‘advertising photography’ from advertising activities. Advertising agencies outsource the ‘production’ of moving commercial messages and photography, so a reason for this exclusion could be that ‘production’ businesses run separately from advertising agencies. However, advertising agencies also outsource ‘the creation of stands and other display structures and sites’, and this has been included as an advertising activity.

ISIC’s classification also excludes graphic design as an advertising activity. These exclusions are important for understanding the dynamics of art direction as an occupation. Arguably, a great deal of advertising creative content is graphic (i.e. a logotype). A logotype is an example of a graphic design output. It is developed to advertise a company’s name by means of branding. Graphic design, as a result, plays an important part in art direction. Photography, graphic design and production design take part in the production of advertising messages that contain photographic images, graphics, or a moving image. This speaks of an overlap in visual knowledge between those occupations that are visually-based and advertising art direction. In terms of the economic activities of these professionals, photographers can lend their photographic practices to advertising as well as to editorial industries, or art projects, as can graphic designers. Production designers (and/or film art directors) can produce television commercials, but also documentaries or feature films. Graphic design, photography and production design are occupations detached from, but available to, a variety of industries. Businesses set-up to perform any of these activities can be independent from the main arm of industry. The knowledge that exists, in these cases, relates closely to the ‘media’ they use (i.e. graphic devices or cameras). Advertising art direction on the other hand is an industry-based activity where knowledge moves across media platforms in response to medium-specific needs within integrated projects.

In this research, the word ‘production’ was used to label a combination of activities that included content generation and production management and supervision. In this sense, one part of art direction activities is to ensure messages are technically and rhetorically adequate for each medium, in every case. Art direction activities can include liaison with production managers within media owning companies to ensure production is technically viable. The managerial quality of art direction practices in advertising is given by activities that involve the selection and guidance of creative personnel during production (e.g. graphic designers, photographers, production designers, etc.) and by liaison activities with non-creative personnel specialized in media.

To aid definitions of knowledge about art direction as an occupation and to help understand the professional standing and recognition of advertising art directors, the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) provided by the United Nations might be updated. An update for design occupations is included in ‘Updating the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) Draft ISCO-08 Group Definitions: Occupations in Design’ (2011). Here the description given to ‘graphic and multimedia designers’ is as follows:

This occupation bridges the gap between business and creative arts. Graphic and multimedia design is portrayed here as an all-encompassing classification of visual commercial practices, which include aspects of the aesthetic manipulation of content for film, print, games, audio and digital media. At a glance, the label ‘graphic and multimedia design’ could be interchangeable with the label ‘art direction’ -the key word being ‘multimedia’. Graphic and multimedia design here encompass aspects of production design, games design, interactive design, editorial or publication design, advertising design and communication design, as well as managerial aspects of art direction, like negotiating solutions with client and production staff, and supervising production. This classification excludes other design activities such as interior design, product design, industrial design, fashion design, costume design, jewellery design and architecture design. A difference between this classification and the way advertising art direction was understood in the thesis is that these areas of design, which have been excluded from graphic and multimedia design, play an important part in art direction practices. For example, design of interiors can be strategically used for branding purposes; costume and jewellery design are used in photographic images and commercials for persuasive purposes within advertising. To clarify this point further the thesis offers a discussion about differences between visual practices, including design, art, visual communication and advertising art direction. This highlights the importance of classification to understanding complexity of visual practices.

Advertising art direction is distinctive because of the commercial imperatives imposed by the advertising industry. In this research, art directing included activities that can contribute to, or compromise, a brand image and its advertising communication objectives. The study of advertising art direction includes the study of activities and occupations that are required in the production of print and outdoors media content, as well as in the production of television and radio commercials, and in digital media production. It includes knowledge from graphic design, advertising photography and signpainting and any other creative and artistic activity and occupation employed in the production of specific advertising campaigns. These activities can change according to specific projects, and can change over time with the emergence of new technologies, media and trends. Advertising art direction is a complex practice.

Because the thesis aimed to contribute with forms of systematized knowledge transfer in the area of art direction, it provided a background to art direction education, and also to developments in the formalization of knowledge in this area. At the beginning of the 1900s, in disciplines other than visual ones, moral issues permeated initiatives to academically formalize advertising education. In the United States the importation of applied psychology into advertising was promoted by Walter Dill Scott. He is credited as having started the first course in Psychology in advertising in the US in 1904. Reportedly, he engaged in numerous debates to encourage psychology and social sciences to become the academic basis for advertising education (Schultze 1984). Difficulties in academically embracing advertising education after this became a motivation for industry associations and advertising agencies to organize forms of instruction. Some degree of acceptance was eventually given to advertising in private business schools and in journalism programs in public schools—the former with a focus on the managerial and strategic aspects of advertising, and the latter with a focus on acquisition of skills in copywriting, layout design and media sales—in relation to the editing of newspapers, as relevant to the publishing industry in general (ibid).

Today many art directors’ formal education comes from programs such as graphic design or visual communication (Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design 2008). In the midst of limited recognition of art direction as a discipline in higher education, students learn about production and the management of image production for advertising in programs that are associated with, but not fully dedicated to, art direction, or in programs dedicated to art direction and which often do not have university status. To exemplify this, the following table shows art direction components in some English-speaking educational institutions that offer art direction as a learning outcome:

Despite art direction courses being offered within various higher education and professional programs, there is resistance to widely consider art direction as a fully-fledged academic discipline. Instead it is seen as a trade, taught and learnt through practice. In The Education of an Art Director (Heller and Vienne 2006), Steven Heller says: ‘[b]ecoming an art director does not require years of art director school, even if one existed. It does, however, demand a smattering of many competencies derived from varied educational and work experiences’ (p. xvii). Based on this notion, editors of this book embark on a journey to discover what art directors from various industries say about education in art direction, and what they think makes an art director. Three out of thirty-eight guests in The education of an art director are formal educators, all three advocate schooling. Two of these three authors are of the opinion that art direction ought to be taught in a way in which visual skills override names or titles, for graduates to become ‘visual decathletes’ (Corcoran and Dowd 2006, p. 4).

Although art direction has not become an academic discipline, an aim in education to provide learners with relevant skills in the visual realm is a focus of interest across educational levels, at least in Australia. In 2008, Australia saw a 270-page document produced as a result of a two-year effort to understand ways of establishing visual education in primary schools (Davis 2008). This undertaking was motivated by a generalized view based on a survey of the adult Australian population that school education would benefit from: firstly, learning visual thinking to foster creativity; and, secondly, learning visual reading to help Australians in their professions and in life in general. The review argues that visual skills are necessary for everyone to be able to visually read documents and media content, and it shows interest in enhancing the learning of production skills, such as digital production. This review offers an extensive literature review, and it uses case studies and school surveys to help unveil the significance of visual education. It also discusses some gaps in knowledge and some possibilities for future research. The review gives accounts of teaching experiences in the visual area in a variety of countries and reflects on concerns about delivery, possible steps towards planning unified forms of delivery, and considers opportunities for implementation. In a broad sense, this review aims at levelling the importance of numeracy, literacy and oracy with visual learning, labelled in this document as ‘visuacy’. The review highlights the need for research in visual areas such as arts policy-making, the teaching of creativity and visual production. This review escalated the possibility of forming ‘visual decathletes’. Stronger emphasis on visual education from early stages of education would facilitate learning curves toward professionalism in creative industries at later stages of people’s education. It would be reasonable to think that after a period of twelve years (which is the length of schooling in Australia, including primary and secondary programs) children’s experience in reading and producing images would make them expert producers.

It is possible that advancement of knowledge in advertising art direction practices in the industry has occurred using advances in Gestalt theory, visual science, information design, Bauhaus school and discourses related to style movements in general, but the thesis did not found that there is a systematic appropriation of these areas for art direction education within academia, thus it is difficult to gather the quality and extent of theoretical influences, or of influences of consumer response research, on advertising art direction knowledge. At a professional level, an example of research that examines the gap between industry and academia was conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) to establish the extent to which academic models are used by industry practitioners in the area of advertising planning, including creative strategy formulation (Gabriel et al. 2006). Even though this study reports a lack of animosity on behalf of industry members toward academic models, a degree of ignorance of these models has been observed within the industry. Highlights of the downsides some industry members see in applying academic knowledge include:

Industry members agreed that there is value in having models prepared internally, instead of adopting them from academic theory, because approaching advertising projects using independent models guaranteed a competitive edge. Additionally, there was consensus by non-theory-adopters that problems in advertising are better resolved on a project-by-project basis rather than using uniform models that risk innovation in outcomes. On the positive side, opportunities were discussed that would lead to encouraging conversations between industry and academia, such as:

Because industry generates strategic models internally, assimilation of strategic models generated in academia seems unnecessary. To inform industry with regard to art direction practices seems even more difficult, because the assimilation of ‘educated personnel’ in art direction is unlikely, due to insufficiencies in education in the area of art direction. The PhD thesis that this paper refers to aimed to address this problem where possible. It was concerned with attending to practical knowledge in the discussion of theory and visual analysis, to facilitate, at a later stage, conversation between industry and academia.

The advertising industry’s contribution to research to understand art direction has focused on enhancing the impact of images on economic performance. Presbrey states that advertising formed into an industry very rapidly after the invention of the halftone (use of dots to simulate photographic resolution) in the eighteen hundreds, when newspapers, magazines and posters became common. At this time, newspaper publisher Pulitzer established the first newspaper arts department (Presbrey 1968). Since then, we have seen research accounts created to understand the effectiveness of images. Creative practices accompanying the mass printing of newspapers, magazines and posters, and of advertising within these print mediums, needed empirical justification.

According to McLaughlin (1996) ‘there is probably no activity more fully theorized in our culture than advertising’, with accounts from ‘cultural theorists…Feminists, Marxists, psychoanalytic theorists, postmodernists, semioticians, [and] rhetorical theorists’. He acknowledges vernacular theorizing in the form of ‘consumer protection groups and watchdog movements like Adbusters’ (p. 101), but, beyond this, McLaughlin’s study on ‘street smarts’ is interested in the input of industry insiders on the formulation of advertising theory. He suggests advertising professionals routinely reflect on the premises of their work. These professionals contribute feature articles to trade publications, speeches to professional organizations, businesses and colleges, in addition to contributing textbooks. Broadly, the issues these professionals have is mostly concentrated on parity and value in competitive situations, theories of audience and the aesthetic or formal value of advertising.

In the aesthetic area, which is the area with which this research was concerned, McLaughlin suggests industry authors have discussed aspects of ‘what makes a good advertisement?’, ‘What makes a good copy?’, or ‘what makes a great campaign’ (p. 107). He criticizes two general aspects of literature generated by industry practitioners. Firstly, he finds that these accounts overuse a defensive and apologetic tone as a result of an effort to counter criticism about the manipulative functions of advertising. Secondly, that these accounts lack, across the board, a critical view of questioning the role of the advertising industry, which they are a part of, in a way that is independent from the pre-established set of ingrained beliefs (i.e. ‘Advertising is necessary, inevitable, fundamental to human interaction, an honest enterprise that makes economic and politic freedom possible’ p.104). In this sense, this PhD was not very different from the industry accounts described by McLaughlin. Although there was no need to be defensive or apologetic in this case, there was also no need to criticize advertising, because it was the systematic transfer of knowledge about art direction practices that concerned us there. The ethics of advertising remained outside the scope of the research.

In the area of art direction, industry professionals have offered accounts that explain ‘how to’ direct art, which describe ways of manipulating ideas and visual devices. The literature review in this thesis, however, showed advertising art directors rarely contribute to scholarly research. The thesis worked toward filling this gap. The account of advertising art direction offered there came from within academia, while taking advantage of the industry experience of the researcher. The interest of art directors in the last decades has been diametrically opposite to that of an interest to rigorously intellectualize, preferring to reflect on, or pragmatically theorize about, images. That is, without implementation of a replicable research methodology. Frank H. Young (1935), former director of the American Academy of Art, and Gossop (1927), each provide examples of early intellectualization about art direction. These accounts reflect the viewpoint of a producer. Rich in explaining practical expertise and philosophies of practice, but short on rigorous substantiation, the preoccupation in these accounts is to provide guidance for the production of images, and gives insight into the role of the visual practitioner within the advertising industry. These approaches draw on reflections based on experience through industry practice. This kind of approach, often born outside scholarly frameworks, repeats on many occasions thereafter (see for example Baker 1959, British Design and Art Direction 1996, Challis 2005, Himpe 2008, Landa 2004, Meeske 2003, Stoklossa 2007).

The import of industry practitioners as educators—people such as me—in alternative academic models that incorporate the visual practices of art directors, such as those at the Creative Industries Faculty, brings with it an interest to shift or reshuffle conventional analytic thinking about images. The thesis speaks about a producers’ perspective on theory and thinking. During the development of the thesis I engaged in thinking about the study of images, in a way that was pertinent to the formulation of theory, which took into consideration the tacit knowledge given by production expertise. For instance, was there a ‘way of seeing’, so far not explored, that shared particular principles among producers? As well as John Berger’s (1977) Ways of Seeing, some current ideas that helped understand images in academic literature seemed to need revision for adoption in art direction education. Because art direction is a media production activity, production knowledge seemed necessary, to have a better understanding of images that were art directed, like, for instance, love-related images in advertising content. The research placed an increased interest in a methodology of visual analysis that could incorporate viewpoints that were likely to form in production. As this research engaged in formally understanding the intellectual value of production knowledge, it also started to envisage solutions to link the knowledge of educator-producers (such as creative professionals employed as lecturers in higher education), with aspects of scholarly tradition.

As a result of this, as ambitious as it may seem, an underlying interest in the thesis was related to the possibility of establishing a scholarly area of study, or a subfield, that allowed furthering knowledge in art direction. QUT Creative Industries Faculty was an influential context for the research, a place where things like creative advertising, fashion and entertainment had an intellectual space. But more importantly, it was influential because it pulled inquiry toward an aim of enhancing educational structures, incorporating the implicit knowledge of content producers in theory and in ways of thinking and knowing.

Defining art direction knowledge and knowledge transfer in art direction unveiled, on one hand, issues related to understanding the place of art direction within disciplinary structures in academic institutions, and on the other hand, issues related to industry needs and everyday practices within advertising:

In general the aim of the thesis became, then, to strengthen the theoretical and analytic discourses producers’ provide about their knowledge in higher education, by contributing with a scholarly understanding of art direction knowledge.

An important aim in the thesis was to provide some parameters for the study of images from a producer’s perspective. The thesis discussed some general methodological implications of a producer’s perspective on the study of images. A paradigmatic shift in the research occurred when questioning conventional forms of analysis toward accommodating what might be the research interest of a visual producer. The interest of the visual producer was seen as twofold: to inform an understanding about images; and, to inform an understanding of image production. Both interests are driven by a producer’s ontological stance. In this sense, the thesis suggested that research projects that producers engage in may have distinctive methodological needs according to project variables. For example, a producer’s investigation can:

It might also be:

Or,

Projects will need to address either of the communication needs:

A cross-tabulation of these generic variables gives us combinations that illustrate the kind of research projects producers may engage in:

Project 27 in this table is a long-term project not requiring practical visual output conducted by an individual to create new advertising content. Other variables in projects may include strategic contexts, the mode of appeal of the project, the pre-emptive concept, the benefit or the proposition, the medium or technology available, and brand heritage and equity enhancement aims. Regardless of whether research is driven by usability or altruistic interests to inform production knowledge, methodologies of interpretation for the investigation of strategic aesthetics ought to address, to some extent, the practicalities of production.

Beyond this, the thesis discussed deeper methodological issues that producers or visual commercial practitioners may confront as they become actively involved in forms of systematized research. Far from being prescriptive, research methodologies need to be refreshed, combined or replaced as research paradigms shift. Scholarly efforts toward the systematization of visual research may be roughly divided into three categories: firstly, project or practice-based, where research questions and discussions are arrived at during a creative process aimed at understanding production and aesthetic problems, understanding outcomes and understanding practice itself; secondly, those analytic approaches informed by methodologies developed in the humanities, where imagery is structurally or formally used to help disentangle intangible constructs of social, historical or cultural interest, in many cases aligned to social justice; thirdly, those consumer-centred approaches aimed at understanding the role of imagery in effective communication (for example, in marketing research and consumer behaviour), where, typically, imagery becomes the data of controlled or quasi-controlled experimental environments. In contemporary visual research, it is common to see these groups overlapping and offering a richer understanding of the study in question. Thus it is also common to see combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodological procedures in contemporary visual research. Paradigms underlying these approaches are either ontologically or epistemologically distant to the paradigm of this study. Practice-led research, commonly endorsed in art practice, rarely acknowledges commercial imperatives or strategic intentions that are prerequisite in commercial visual practices and visual communication. Project-based research, commonly used in design research, often fails to use systematized and replicable ways to contribute to deeper thinking about imagery. Methodologies developed in humanities offer systematic ways of understanding images, but generally have no interest in offering ways to implement this knowledge in image production, or to deepen production knowledge to understanding images. In marketing and consumer behaviour, even if the aims for improving visual persuasion are clear, methodologies often rely on the study of audience responses to images. In this context a methodological approach is needed to better understand the role of production in the analysis of images as well as the role of visual analysis in production.

The shift in analytic methodologies to fit a producers’ paradigm in the PhD project was limited, but the research offered an alternative way of seeing. The thesis articulated an approach to the understanding of images that incorporated production intentionality. In a way, the thesis rejected art direction practices as a ‘smattering of competencies’ that are purely based on production skills, because of an assumption that the knowledge underlying these competencies, even if essential to ontological definitions of art direction, can, beyond this notion, afford renewal in discourses related to the analysis and definition of modern images. The thesis found that there is a way of seeing images that does not objectify, but justifies through the awareness of intentional cause, and not of consequence. This is a part of critical thinking that is worth exploring further, either as part of a process of understanding of the role of production in consumption and its impact on consumer cultures, or as part of a process of understanding the role of production in effective communication. A divide discussed in the thesis between audience-based analysis and producer-based analysis can compare with scientific and philosophical notions of cause and effect. Beyond the thesis, there is a call for integration of studies of cause into studies of effect in the analysis of images, aware that cause in the case of production is complex but apprehensible. It is this apprehensibility that allows us to speak about frameworks and systemized analysis for the formalization of art direction education.