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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this.

Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning.

If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

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They're not art (typically) they're design—they exist to solve a problem. They're not all trash, sometimes they're rather brilliant solutions to selling a product or service or experience (of course they're still selling).

Don't fall into the Is Not For Me = Trash line of thinking. It's intellectually lazy.

Hm. Trash has a dozen meanings. I guess I would say, its trash in the use-once, disposable sense. Nobody thinks their ad is going to be timeless.

I 100% agree, when you're talking about the ads that are aired a hundred times a day on syndicated television. Then again, the shows are terrible, so I suppose it's fitting that the ads match.

However, what about Apple's 1984 ad? Or the BMW mini-movie advertisements they ran about 6 years ago?

There are some incredibly cool concept ads out there. They usually are not the ones broadcast, but if you watch the end of the year awards for the industry, there are some very creative minds working there. (And creating some impressive work).

Although this is an "ad" for wearing a seatbelt, I still watch it occasionally because it is so artistic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-8PBx7isoM

To say Art isn't Art unless it's the highest form of art is silly. Is the work of a great comic book artist not art because it isn't Picasso?

A comic book is so far above an ad as to make the comparison silly.

That's absurd. Just because the motive of the advertisement is to sell you an idea, doesn't mean it isn't done creatively and artistically. In fact, advertisements tend to be most effective when they are extremely artistic and unique.

Art is supposed to be emotionally engaging. What does a comic book do better?

A comic book has a theme, a moral, characters, continuity.

An ad has "Buy this car! Buy this car! Buy this car!"

I deny ads work better when artistic. True, you remember them better. But often I totally miss what the product was, which makes them score Zero on the ad-o-meter. Do you remember the product for those 'artistic' Apple ads? Not good enough to say "some Apple thingy".

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