The Downward Dog of Advertising

Everything in life has a little bit of yoga in it.

I know this is a departure from what we've been talking about in our last few posts, but I feel like it's necessary. Advertising, especially, is like yoga.

This requires some background on the yoga front: taken in its own context, yoga is all about balance. Not just "Tree" pose, or any of the ones where you're only standing on one leg. Yoga is feeling the tension between the down and the up, finding the center between right and left, in order to discover a place within yourself that is totally free and balanced. Building the foundations in any pose requires this, but especially in poses such as Warriors I and II, in which one leg is bent while the other is straight. Your first instinct is to lean into that bent leg, bringing your entire body forward and putting undue pressure on that leg. It may be a great quad workout, but your knee will definitely not appreciate you after all the time spent on it. Instead, you're supposed to balance the weight between your front leg and your back leg by grounding your back foot in such a way that the outer edge of your foot is pressing into the ground. That way, you find the balance between your bent leg and your straight leg, and allow the lower half of your body to sink into the ground while at the same time reaching upwards with your arms. You're spreading yourself out, you're up and you're down, and ultimately, you're balanced.

It works the same way with any campaign. They key to an effective advertisement is all about the insight, finding the balance between the obvious and the unseen, and discovering the space, the niche, in which no other advertiser has ever been. A campaign cannot be too funny, too sarcastic, too depressing, or too cliche; instead, it has to be some of each. It cannot just be one of the above, it has to be a personality. It has to be a human being- relatable, understandable, and knowable. Any brand is the person behind the product, and not just the target market; it is everything that that product would be if it were an actual person. And to find that person, you have to find the space out of which that person is created.

This is why one has to know a little bit of everything in order to be successful in the advertising business (not that I would really know, but this is just what I think)- you have to know enough about what the brand would be made up of in order to bring it down to the consumer's level. There's a fine tension there, and it begs a lot of questions about the brand personality itself. What are its axes? What pulls and pushes it around? What stretches it out?
But most importantly- how can we take that personality and contort it, put it through its paces, so that the consumers can see the space that is created? And even more prevalent than that, how can they appreciate and become loyal to that space?

Just like any person, brands can become more flexible with time. They can hold themselves up through trials and tribulations, and sweat out any toxins that are built up within them. They are malleable, and in the end (if they're successful), they're appreciated just for who they are.

Namaste.