Is advertising art or science? Ask a different question.

Is advertising an art or science? This question comes up again and again in adland.

The question is rhetorical. It’s designed to elicit the same answer: it’s both.

The purpose of the question, within the marketing canon, is to create a platform for a practitioner or agency to set out their stall, whatever point the opposition they occupy.

It’s an important question, but a tired one. It presupposes a brutal binary tension that I think beleaguers as much as animates the industry.

What is a better way to think about it? Bear with me.

Three categories of knowledge

An answer I find particularly powerful comes from the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze’s mission as a philosopher was, in part, to find a way out of the impasse from the limitations of rationalist thinking, on one hand, and the rabbit’s warren of post-modern relativism on the other.

Part of his mission was to re-think the theory underlying how rebuild how we come to know ‘reality’ from the bottom up.

Deleuze identified three categories of knowledge, or approaches human beings have created to describe and explain reality:

• Percepts & affects: the creative arts are about creating novel combinations of senses and feelings
• Quantities: the sciences create theories based on fixed points of reference (e.g. numbers, data) and the relationships between them through their measurement
• Concepts: Philosophy clarifies thought and ideas through method and by providing analytical frameworks, creating taxonomies, or demarcating boundaries.

These three approaches are fundamentally different, and incompatible but equal in status. Crucially, while incompatible, they can and do combine in infinite configurations to create our culture and institutions, and influence nature, in a very real sense.

Take music, for example. We know we can be moved emotionally by music, but musical theory and composition is also mathematical: time and noise are quantified, and these are codified in certain musical theories and creative approaches, to achieve physical and emotional responses. Much like creative advertising. (The rest is noise, and noise is also music!)

The lotus of knowledge

Building out from this, Deleuze suggested we think of knowledge like lotus.

The mistake we've made historically has been to think of knowledge like a tree. A body of knowledge begins with a seed, grows strong roots to support a powerful trunk to support the weight its canopy. It’s a very linear and harmonious vision of knowledge: from basic organising principles, bodies of knowledge grow, and grow, incrementally building upon itself one piece at a time in, all branches traceable back to its root. But the tree of knowledge is also weak - if the root or trunk is critically attacked, the entire organism dies.

Deleuze contested this idea of knowledge and culture. Instead, he likened them to another organism - the rhizome. A rhizome, like a lotus, exists mostly beneath the ground. Rhizome organisms are decentralised, spreading out in all directions as a nodal network, searching for the right conditions – the right mix of elements – to form and erupt through the surface.

Similarly, the three forms of knowledge (and power) spread out below the surface, hidden until they break through, giving rise to what we can call, paradigms, dominant ideas, values, institutions or corporations.

Given the right physical, social, cultural, historical, economic or artistic ingredients, different categories of knowledge emerge, in turn, giving form to styles, organisations, societies, politics, businesses, cultures, sub-cultures, etc.

For an example of this theory applied to the real world, political theorists Chabal & Daloz pioneered in the 1990s the concept of the ‘rhizome state’ to describe the nature of post-independence politics in sub-Saharan Africa, something their theory went some way to explaining the causes of the Rwandan genocide. It was a challenge to the limitations of prevailing political development theories of the time.

What’s any of this got to do with advertising?

Deleuze’s ideas are also of huge relevance to many more areas, including advertising.

How? Well ...

First of all, it blasts open the trite either/or question I started out with. Now, we have three elements, not two. This perspective forces us to ask ourselves not is advertising art, science, or philosophy, but how is advertising, or this advertising art, science and philosophy?

This makes it a strategic question.

Secondly, it allows the opening up of far more possibilities and a much richer and exciting discussion about our profession.

Thirdly, he viewpoint accepts that there are irreconcilable tensions at play in what we do. In any major ad campaign, concepts, data and creative expressions vibrate against each other generating heat. The law of entropy tells that us systems tend towards disintegration, so they must be managed. Seen this way, our job as marketers is to minimise that entropy by understanding and harnessing the tensions at play in order to deliver for our clients.

This reason, alone, is why strategists are essential for navigating this new, endless alien territory because the job involves understanding the big picture, understanding how art, science and philosophy can work together to alter the terrain above and below the surface, delivering for our clients.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, this perspective compels us to take a much broader view of what we do. We swim in culture, we assimilate new technologies, we exploit their implications, and there's never been a better time to experiment with these fascinating new combinations.

OK, back to earth ...

In short, Deleuze’s scheme strikes me as being much more helpful in thinking about what the role of the planner actually is and can be.

The role necessitates a mindset that integrates feelings, data and ideas in novel ways to generate heat through compression or tension, in service of our clients.

Deleuze's perspective also helps us overcome the simple, trite, self-serving false opposition that marketers use to set out their own stalls – is advertising science or art? It provides a framework to break out of it the strait jacket.

Advertising is so much more than art or science, so let’s stop limiting ourselves and expand a framework fit for this world.