Advertising communication plays an increasingly important role in structuring our culture. Relationships, feelings, and social and microsocial changes are guided more and more by the discourse of commercial creativity. If we consider its broadest anthropological interpretation, contemporary culture (understood as a way of life, a world view and an ideological configuration), unquestionably owes a great deal to advertisements.
Advertising creates and recreates the world. It listens and proclaims, copies and transforms. Yet it also invents because it discovers, publishes, and publicly verifies as part of society things that otherwise would go unnoticed. There is no doubt that it generates what we call "the world". Love, food, houses, money, objects, desire, needs, so many things we all feel are our own, totally unique and the grounds for our identity, would not mean what they do to us without having been efficiently shaped by advertising, without, let's face it, advertising's creative action.
That's why we like advertising. Because it resembles artistic (and political and divine) work. Because we see it as an opaque, unknown and still unexploited player in our cultural scenario. If advertising is so relevant, so close and intimate for everyone, let's put it in the spotlight. Let's talk about it, play with it and take part in it. These days we can all be artists, celebrities, millionaires or winners, but what will happen if we try to be advertising designers? Perhaps everything or nothing. So why not try?
After all, interests do exist and are universally shared. The brands are out there looking for ideas and new ways to relate with their consumers. The advertising industry wants society to value the importance of ideas; it wants its work to be appreciated. They want the public to be more familiar with it, to love it more. And they want fair recognition for the efforts this great industry is making to keep consumption, the economy and even a certain social cohesion alive. And in NotodoPubliFest.com consumers, creators and citizens have a chance to intervene, to create, to gain access, even if through the back door and virtually, to a great simulacrum (with real ammunition) of this world in which nothing is worth more than a great idea, which has no intention other than playing at inventing, creating, forming culture and competing for prizes that try to make of this festival a race well worth entering.
Actually, however, we do not aspire to that much. We'll be content just to have given birth to a new and intriguing popular communication event that is simple, easy, and, if the gods permit, entertaining. Let's all play at making ads. Let's offer anyone who is willing the chance to create and play a very serious game.
We've probably left something out, but that is often just what great advertising is all about: showing us day by day that there is still something left to say.
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