Creative Advertising : The Beginning

William Hesket Lever (1851 - 1925) was a multimillionaire businessman, entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 1885 Willam and his brother James entered the soap business. Together they bought a small soap and cleaning product work in Warrington. This is how the firm LeverBrothers was born. At that time soap was sold as unwrapped bars and there was a gap in the market for pre-packaged soap. The brothers who founded Sunlight soap in 1885, then started to manufacture wrapper packed soap. Becoming one of the first british tycoons establishing international trading routes later grew into the well known household name Unilever in 1929. Unilever is a british - dutch multinational consumer goods company now owning over 800 brands like Surf, Dove and Ben & Jerry´s.

Within a few years the Lever brother´s company grew and in 1925 they had employed 85,000 workers all around the world. Lever did also bring a huge contribution tho ordinary peoples lives, he created port sunlight that would work as housing for his workforce whilst he also campaigned for better welfare and shorter working days. There was a dark side to this. Good living conditions for his workers was contradicted by his use of slavery. In Africa he had workers extracting the now controversial product palm oil. Apparently this was known to be more devastating than the Natzi Holocaust.

William Hesket Lever was born at a very important time. 1851 was the year of The Great Exhibition.  It was the first international exhibition of manufactured goods. This was a place people for the first time in their life could view photographs. This later inspired colour printing on a larger scale. This was also at the time where the British empire was really successful.

The Crystal Palace where The Great Exhibition took place

To promote his Sunlight soap, William Hesket Lever started to collect art. He went to many different art exhibitions in London and bought pieces that he thought wold look appealing for the brands target audience, housewives. He had the paintings copied and added on the Sunlight brand name and slogan. Using healthy looking children and white fabric in the ads, people started to recognise Sunlight as a brand. William Hesket Lever became one of the pioneers of modern advertising. Advertising agencies during Levers time only sold advertising space, it was not until the 20th century the first advertising agencies started to blossom.

Example of an Sunlight soap ad

William Bernbach (1911 - 1982) was an american Advertising creative director. He was one of the three founders of the well known international advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). Bernbach is credited with being the first to combine both copywriters and art directors into two persons teams. Before that they had used to be in different departments. This model still exist in advertising agencies today.

"The trick is to tell the truth but make it interesting. Truth can be disarming"
- John Hegarthy

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Semiotics & Reading Images

Ferdinand de Saussure´s method 

Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols and signification and how they create meaningful communication. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913) was a swiss linguist that is counted as one of the founding fathers of semiotics. He focused his theory on the many different patterns and functions that made language. Saussure created the idea of the signified and the signifier which is the two components that create a sign. The signifier is the sound or written word and the signified is the object that created the word.


Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980) is another theorist of semiotics that not only followed Saussure´s approach but expanded it. He looked at the ideas that could be suggested by the signs, the connotation of the sign and not the denotation; the literal meaning of the sign like which is Saussure theory. There is two forms of meaning:

- The literal meaning of signs = denotation (Saussure)

- The ideas suggested by signs = connotation (Barthes) 

For example if you look at a picture of a cat the denotation would be what is directly shown in front of you and the connotation would be what comes to mind when you see the object that in this example is a cat. The connotations of a cat could be; cute, fluffy and soft. The connotations towards a sign can be different amongst people taking life experiences and cultural background in mind. 

Roland Barthes theory

A text is a purposeful assemblage of signs. It could be a sentence, photo, film, a sound recording etc. The denotation of an image can be lost if it is not clear what the image is representing, with that the connotation will also be lost and incorrect. 

Anchorage is attaching words to an image. The text that is being added to the image is anchoring the connotations you can get from it. It narrows the connotations of the image that is being shown. 

A myth is an unproven belief or ideology. In advertising this is stands as the idea behind the made campaign, but it does not have to be true since it is a myth. 

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