This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

The same and the different
Most car ads look the same. That’s because the sameness sends a signal
about the car being worth considering, a safe alternative for such a huge
investment.
Fashion ads in Vogue look nothing like the ads in Field & Stream or
Sports Illustrated. Why? The vernacular matters. You’re not people like us
if you don’t talk (talk means typefaces, photo styles, copy) the way we
expect you to.
This is what a good designer offers you. The chance to fit in.
And sometimes, you might choose to hire a great designer instead.
Someone who can break the expectation and talk differently, but not so
differently that you don’t resonate with those you seek to connect with.
When ad legend Lee Clow took the imagery from George Orwell’s 1984
to create the most iconic TV commercial of all time, almost no one
watching Apple’s Super Bowl ad understood all of the references. (They’d
read the book in high school, but if you want to impact a hundred million
beer-drinking sports fans, an assigned high school book is not a good place
to start.) But the media-savvy talking heads instantly understood, and they
took the bait and talked about it. And the nerds did, and they eagerly lined
up to go first.

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The lesson: Apple’s ad team only needed a million people to care. And
so they sent a signal to them, and ignored everyone else.
It took thirty years for the idea to spread from the million to everyone,
thirty years to build hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. But it
happened because of the brilliant use of semiotics, not technology. At every
turn, Apple sent signals, and they sent them in just edgy enough words,
fonts, and design that the right people heard the message.
Case Study: Where’s Keith?
Not all semiotics are benign. When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer started
their site Witchsy.com, they had trouble getting their emails answered. They
created a third partner, a fictional guy named Keith, gave him an email
address, and had him initiate and participate in email threads.
This simple shift exposed a shameful gap in how our society treats
women and men. Emails from “Keith” were quickly responded to. Vendors,
developers, and potential partners were more likely to get back to Keith,
addressed him by name, and were more helpful, they reported to Fast
Company.
We’re judging everything, and people are judging us in return. Often,
those judgments are biased, incorrect, and inefficient. But denying them
doesn’t make them disappear.
The marketer can use symbols to gain trust and enrollment, or find that
those symbols work in the opposite direction. To change the culture, we
have no choice but to acknowledge the culture we seek to change.
That doesn’t mean giving up, fitting in, or failing to challenge injustice.
But it does require us to focus our stories and symbols with intent. Who’s it
for? What’s it for?