Changing aesthetics in marketing.
Kant spoke of two different kinds of beauty:
Free beauty or non-conceptual beauty which “presupposes no concept of what the object out to be.” This is the beauty of natural objects. They are beautiful to look at.
Dependent beauty which “presupposes knowledge of the purpose which determined what the thing is to be, and consequently a concept of its perfection.”
Simplifying this horribly, I think of this as a beauty of things versus a beauty of ideas. It is a beauty of paintings versus a beauty of mathematical proofs.
In many ways, this is the debate I saw taking place within agencies over the last ten years. On the one hand, traditional creative teams were trained to appreciate and deliver beauty in execution. They admired the beauty of things, very literally in annuals and awards books.
On the other hand, many who grew up in the interactive departments and in strategy departments, came came to the table with an appreciation of beautiful solutions. For them, it was the elegance or cleverness of how a marketing problem could be solved.
At its best, this tension could be resolved in a best of both worlds scenario, unfortunately it typically devolved into figurative and literal walls created between the groups.
It feels to me that this situation appears to be changing for the better. That Nike+ won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is a triumph of a beautiful solution over beautiful things. I think there’s (finally) a growing acknowledgment that we (as marketers) are here to create elegant solutions to business problems rather than elegant things. That this could be a revelation for marketers is a shame. If you asked anyone on the street, our industry wouldn’t be high on the list of places that provide beautiful things.
UPDATE: Gareth’s been thinking about the same thing…great minds and all that. I love when this happens.