‘Silk Cut’ were particularly known for this, with most of their adverts neither featuring the product, nor its logo, nor its name.

I have a box of doughnuts that says the ad agency pitch that resulted in Herman Cain’s campaign commercials sounded very much like this.

Hope springs eternal, as does the certainty of each new generation that they are smarter and better than generations that came before. And yet, the world is not yet paradise. Curious.

Medieval, you say?

In the full essay he says he’s referring to puzzles in entertainment–embedded mysteries for the fans to solve. He doesn’t mention Twin Peaks, but what he describes sounds like an extension of what David Lynch started. Only, he wants to whore out the log lady:

“Imagine making the brand a cipher, something that the consumer has to figure out. Imagine creating a brand that teemed with meanings, some of them explicit, some of them an invitation to decode. Allowing the consumer to find his or her way into the brand would surely make that brand more compelling. Imagine making a brand that was a lot like a manor house, complete with hidden passage ways and secret compartments. Imagine making the brand as they would have done in the medieval or early modern period: shot through with secrets of every kind.
Whether we like it or not, marketing is moving away from modernist simplicities, away from the “Keep it simple, stupid” era. With more sophisticated consumers, more and more subtle media, more robust and complicated value propositions, this was bound to happen. The only real question is what we will make of this liberty. Perhaps the place to go looking for the future is in the 15th or 16th century.”

The art historian in me was about to write paragraphs about the willful wrongness in that original excerpt, but I think that quote above is plenty.

“The human brain is a problem-solving organ, a characteristic that probably is at the center of our dominance over other species. The brain frequently remains inert until a problem is presented to it. In the case of The Last Supper, the profound ambiguity it contains alerts and stimulates the brain into action. DaVinci clearly believed that ambiguity was a way of arriving at the truth. As a result, the painting moves us in a deeper and more profound way than any direct statement.”

http://miltonglaser.com/pages/milton/essays/es2.html

Ant: I’ll see your pedantic and raise you a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

(To decrypt this message use http://infoencrypt.com/)

I admit that I do have a genuine fondness for our “Less is More” guy and the Minimalist, modern architectural movements ( it goes back to my college days). But I also fully agree with your opinion about Art Deco and Art Nouveau ( and also Gaudy :).  I used to be Donald Deskey’s senior designer and he presented a magnificent world of Golden Age American Deco.

 I believe that the creation of ornamentation is an ages-old human desire and boldly apparent in all cultures.