Mental Visibility

Getting noticed. It is the single most important strategy in advertising as all notions of consideration and purchase behaviour follow from it. So would deliberately being invisible be even a remotely effective idea?

As it turns out, it can be, as this campaign from Don Giulio Salumeria, an Italian delicatessen in Moscow, demonstrates:

There is clever strategy at work here, because although the “hiding ad”, so called, is deliberately becoming invisible to a select few, it is salient because of the action of becoming invisible itself.

The campaign also relies on a good deal of social proof, as the policemen stopping by the ad command attention from bystanders, who in turn command further attention from those following the behaviour of others like some kind of snowball effect. 

A group of policemen standing around almost always warrants attention from passers by, so why wouldn’t it in this case?

Consider the example of an inner city cluster of people all pointing to the sky, first demonstrated by Stanley Milgram in the late sixties. If we were just walking by, we would of course look up to see what the fuss was about. Intentionally or not, Don Giulio have used this to great effect.

This is because humans are inherently social creatures, and we naturally follow the actions of others to determine normative social behaviour. This includes everything from following gazes to mirroring body language to identifying common patterns in the environment.

It explains why all hipsters invariably end up looking alike, despite cries of individuality in an otherwise ‘conformist society’.

Advertising benefits from leveraging social proof. Being physically visible should always be the predominant strategy, but being mentally visible comes in close second. If the people around you act like they don’t notice, why should you bother committing said noticing to memory?

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