David Byrne Journal: 12.26.06: Trees and tree shapes:
Do we purchase a car because the ad agency made a cute video? Is that how we make decisions? Maybe we do. Maybe the cleverness and technical virtuosity exhibited here imply to us that those same values carry over to the SUV. This would be a natural assumption to have about a person — if a person were clever, entertaining and executed something perfectly one would probably assume they had other good qualities. And the odds might be pretty high that you’d be right. In the case of ads the cleverness and the object being promoted are separate entities — rationally we should therefore love the ad agency and the director, not the car company that simply chose them to make the ad.
Would that we were rational beings. Whoops! We’re not.
