The art world is getting wider and more subjective. As for the link with advertising, since its inception in the first half of the twentieth century, these have evolved hand in hand. It has not been until relatively recently when this link appeared as connected to marketing via creativity. Through multiple strategies, marketing manages to give a current approach to advertising through new associations between ideas and concepts. In this research the evolution of the three disciplines is set from definition. With a content analysis of several advertising pieces awarded with industry recognition and with a description of the creative attributes that make an advertising piece a work of art. The results of this research allow us to determine what are the creative attributes of branded content that have remained almost unchanged in recent years; from this, a model can be proposed that defines the most representative creative pattern of these tactics, since they offer entertaining content with varying degrees of emotional appeal based on experiential and functionally promoted media.
Top1. Introduction
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In analogy with this dilemma, we ask ourselves which came first: art or advertising? Throughout history, cultural manifestations have been linked to a series of religious, political, and social components and therefore, the concept of art has been changing. During the prehistoric era, art functioned in an iconographic way, in ancient Greece by representing mythology, and, in the Middle Ages, Roman sculpture; throughout these history periods, art acted as a diffuser element, up to present day when it is linked to the demands of a materialistic and consumerist society. Therefore, art has always existed, although with different form and purpose.
The goal of any company has always been to achieve a good brand image. For this reason, many of them resort to advertising and use communication as a tool to achieve and strengthen their relationship with consumers. Our current society is oversaturated with information where throughout the day we can receive thousands of advertising stimuli which we consume on a regular basis. As a result, to have the greatest possible impact on the viewer, the advertising world must renew, progress, and seek new strategies to stand out from other messages. Relevant, useful, and emotional communication is necessary with which the consumer can get involved (Heredero & Chaves, 2016). Consequently, it is in this highly competitive advertising context, in which the inclusion of references to art in the communication of brands is revealed as a valid formula to add value to the functional characteristics of products (Cavalli, 2007). Art is a powerful means of communication used in numerous advertising campaigns, to have more impact by activating an underlying message that trades in value for a selected product to an exclusive circle around the advertised product.
Art and advertising began their relationship in the first half of the twentieth century, a time of maximum creative explosion and constant experimentation known as Avant Gard. Artists and advertisers were in a common field, and shared craft and vision around their work. Advertising not only taught artists new techniques, but also showed them different possibilities of communication (Pérez Gauli, 1998). The avant-garde artists of the 1900s discovered with the union of art and advertising through posters and boards, a creative alternative, where art entered advertising, and with the era of Pop the phenomenon is reversed, where advertising is introduced into art as an essential part of postmodern culture (Heredero & Chaves, 2016).
It is with the birth of Pop Art when product images and logos become a recurring thematic source of appeal in art (Díaz, 2010). The artists directly transferred the advertising images to the canvases, decontextualizing them, giving them an artistic value, although “depending on the character of the work, the iconographic content has oscillated between cultural criticism, irony or belonging” (Reguera, 2014). Díaz Gutiérrez (2010) indicates that “Pop Art collects advertising images and decontextualizes them as criticism of advertising, the most powerful weapon of consumerism. It seems that the interconnection of advertising with art, has been broken, but it is quite the opposite.” This illustrates a split tradition in art that led to a dissolution of the boundaries between art and advertising, a phenomenon traceable throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, it can be said that nowadays advertisers’ resort to the art world is a constant (Heredero & Chaves, 2016).