Visual Power

What would you say are the world’s greatest inventions? Tops on my list would be language and the camera.

Language, because without it, we would be grunting at each other. We wouldn’t be able to read, argue, sms, sembang or blog. Without the wonders of the spoken word and written form, lawyers would to have to fish for a living.

The camera, for obvious reasons. No tv. No Desperate Housewives and Grammys. Oprah Winfrey wouldn’t have a job. Newspapers and magazines with nothing but columns of squiggly text. Popcorn would not have been invented because there’s no cinema.

The camera was invented only some 180 years ago. And this is why, all history before that is sort of fuzzy. I mean, we aren’t even sure what Genghis Khan, Leonardo da Vinci, or Paramesawara really looked like.

All we got are portraits, done by artists who were paid to make the guys look better than they did. Did Alexander the Great actually look great? Maybe he was a scrawny mata sepet.

So what has this to do with marketing and advertising? Lots. Advertising’s two greatest tools are words and pictures. In fact, they are the only tools it has. (trivia : the first ad with a photograph was published in 1843 in Philadelphia.)

Let’s put writing aside. Let’s talk about pictures, or visuals as they appear around us and in our living rooms. And for this, we have a famous example.

In September 1960, something big happened. For the first time, politics used the power of
moving pictures. Senator John Kennedy and vice-president Richard Nixon were engaged in the first-ever televised ‘Great Debates.’ Prior to this, debates were aired only over radio. But here, for the first time, two presidential aspirants were going to battle in the visual arena.

The debates were held both on tv and radio. And the outcome has become a case study in politics, journalism, psychology and advertising.

In terms of what they said – pure content- both Kennedy and Nixon were evenly matched. In fact, those who heard the debate on radio preferred Nixon.

But, on television, Kennedy won by a huge margin. And the reason was visual.

Kennedy was this debonair, young man. He had just come in from California, campaigning in the summer, looking tanned and confident. And he put on a great performance on tv.

Nixon on the other hand was not exactly GQ material. He was also just out of hospital and 20- pounds underweight. He was pale and to make it worse, declined the usual studio make-up.

The bottom line was, viewers voted based on what they saw, much less by what they heard.

Never judge a book by its cover? All true and good, and substance matters. But we do react to what we see. We are sensitive to form, shapes, colours or whatever that meets the eye.

The entire visual presentation of someone or something, real or dressed up in our heads, is an awfully powerful thing.

To quote Andy Warhol, the great pop artist who undestood this so well, “I am a deeply superficial man.”

One can see why cosmetics is a billion-dollar industry.