Margarita Gluzberg – Manifesting Commerce
In a recent issue of NY Arts Magazine, Éva Pelczer interviewed Margarita Gluzberg about her show The Money Plot at Paradise Row Gallery in London.
Posts Tagged marketing
Misdirection and advertising’s holy grail
At a party in Bristol a few years ago, I met a barrister who had recently started to train as a magician. He was an intense person, standing a bit closer than people normally do, and fixing me with a stare. When I realised that he was dangling in front of me the watch that he’d removed from my wrist, I have to admit I was impressed. It’s a pretty standard trick, but I count myself as being an alert person, almost to the point of edginess, and it’s unusual for something like that to escape my attention.
What he was using is called “misdirection” – a simple trick where the magician makes you more interested in something else (in this case his close proximity and the close attention he directed at me) while removing your watch. (Having said that, and to his credit, you still have to be extremely dexterous to do something like that).
Another more threatening example was when my mobile phone got stolen. I was sitting outside a cafe when some kids came up to me and one thrust a piece of paper with something scrawled on it into my face, mumbling something unintelligible – all my attention was on the fact that the first kid was too close for comfort, and I didn’t notice that the second one had simply picked my mobile up from the table until they were long gone. Misdirection can seem like magic, but in a different context you can feel like you’ve been conned.
Advertising and marketing have adopted this trick of misdirection, except it’s more subtly done, and it aims to avoid the feeling that you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes – on the contrary, it aims to please. This move towards misdirection has been recent, as advertising has become steadily more sophisticated. Have a look at this Persil advert from the 1960s:
