Advertising by Design, 3rd Edition

7

DECONSTRUCTING MODEL FORMATS

To create fresh work, you need to know what has already been done. The ability to deconstruct and categorize ads is a useful skill for those who aspire to do creative work. If you study the history of advertising as well as the vast contemporary advertising realm, you will find recurring structures even in the most creative award-winning works. That is because most of advertising is based on similar recurring structures or schemas derived from literary and cinematic storytelling. Many storytellers from different disciplines, such as William Shakespeare and George Lucas, have told archetypal stories. Experts such as Sir James George Frazer, Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud, Bruno Bettelheim, and Carl Jung assert that these stories are rooted in our collective unconscious minds. These archetypes play out again and again in literature, film, theater, and storytelling-based advertising. The digital landscape has changed both advertising and how we spend a good deal of our time, but we're still stuck with human nature.

We need to understand what people are interested in and work back from there.

—Gareth Kay, cofounder, Chapter SF

Can something fresh be created for any channel using existing schemas? If you decide that it can, in this chapter you will find tactical frameworks. Analogs to these would be model formats for television programming (think sitcom, reality TV, game show, talk show, soaps, etc.) or conventional formats in music or poetry. ...