The great adman Bill Bernbach once said ‘Advertising isn’t a science. It’s persuasion. And persuasion is an art’.

In 1905 a man asked a simple question ‘why do we some animals survive and others die’, the answer was natural selection. 

Charles Darwin asked loads of questions and came up with theories around those questions, some turned out to be right while others were wrong.

But without asking those questions there would be no problem to solve.

Many other scientists throughout history started with a relatively simple question and went on to find the answer, mostly through testing, experiments and then drawing theories.

In advertising, we usually start with a question, then go and find the answer to that question. Sometimes it’s AB testing, theories and research. So the question then has to be asked ‘Is Bill Bernbach wrong?’, Is advertising actually a science not an art?

When you think about how we come up with advertising concepts there are a lot of similarities with science. 

We assume science is absolute but it’s not, a lot of the time it’s a theory, only research and testing then prove a theory right or wrong.

In advertising we do a lot of research, sometimes it’s quantitative and sometimes it’s qualitative. We then take that research and find solutions to the problem we were trying to solve. We then test the solution using A/B testing and find what worked best. Scientists do the same.

Where the art comes in, as a good scientist would do, it’s the idea or question that nobody had thought to ask.

To Bill Burnbach’s point about advertising being ‘persuasion’, you could argue persuasion is psychology and psychology is science.

If that certain apple didn’t fall, would Isacc Newton have asked that vital question of why an apple falls straight to the ground (rather than sideways or upward)?

Same goes with some of the great advertising campaigns ever made. If those agencies/creatives didn’t ask those questions that nobody had thought to ask, would they have ever been made?

Campaigns like Fearless Girl, Think small, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like or the most awarded campaign of all time Dumb Ways to Die?

These campaigns in some shape or form changed the face of advertising forever and they probably all started with a simple question, just like Issac Newton or Charle Darwin did.

Asking questions that nobody had asked before is key. But, the difference with advertising might lie in the art, craft plays a huge part in making a campaign good or even great.

Bill Bernbach is a legend in the advertising industry but he might be a little wrong when it comes to the quote at the beginning. There’s a lot of science to what we do in this industry and as an industry, we don’t make enough about this fact. 

So let’s go with something like ‘Advertising is the art of psychology and psychology is the art of science’.

Written by Pat Langton - Partner and Creative Director at Magnum Opus Partners