Word: burnette
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Reviewing his agency's work, one is struck by Burnett's penchant for employing a range of masculine archetypes. Some were designed to appeal to female consumers. With the Jolly Green Giant, he resurrected a pagan harvest god to monumentalize "the bounty of the good earth"--and to sell peas. Years later, with the creation of the Doughboy, Burnett employed a cuddly endomorph to symbolize the friendly bounce of Pillsbury home-baking products. Aiming at male audiences in the '50s, a time when filter cigarettes were viewed as effeminate, Burnett introduced a tough and silent tattooed cowboy on horseback...
Like many other persuasion professionals of his generation--most notably Edward Bernays, the patriarch of public relations--Burnett was obsessed with finding visual triggers that could effectively circumvent consumers' critical thought. Though an advertising message might be rejected consciously, he maintained that it was accepted subliminally. Through the "thought force" of symbols, he said, "we absorb it through our pores, without knowing we do so. By osmosis...
With the arrival of television in the late '40s--an electronic salesroom going into nearly every American home--Burnett believed merchandisers had found the Holy Grail. "Television," he asserted, "is the strongest drug we've ever had to dish out." It marked the moment when graphic representation arrived as the lingua franca of commerce...
Evaluating Leo Burnett's contribution nearly 30 years after his death, one is of two minds. There is something both old-fashioned and timeless in the slightly homoerotic repertoire of corporate images he fathered. Born during the springtime of American consumer culture, when sales pitches were infused with an unfettered sense of optimism, a booming-voiced tiger like Tony and a benevolent Green Giant today come across as quaint throwbacks to the time when sugared breakfast cereals could still claim to provide an ideal start to the perfect day, and when mushy canned peas nestled alongside a piece...
...other hand, the central principles that guided Burnett's practice remain prescient. His celebration of nonlinear advertising strategies, characterized by visual entreaties to the optical unconscious, continues to inform the strategies of adcult. In advertising copy, the conspicuous triumph of typography over text, of catchphrase over explanation, reflects Burnett's admonition that--to the public mind--visual form is more persuasive than carefully reasoned argument...