accepting ways of seeing by john berger: as a digital creator

in marketing, we like calling ourselves storytellers, problem-solvers and creatives. and we are. but at the end of the day, our job is also to shape desire. to make people want something they didn't know they wanted five minutes ago.

accepting that isn't a criticism of our industry. it's what helps us do the job more consciously. and there's no better guide to that idea than a 50-year-old book by an art critic who never once mentioned instagram.

the book that saw this coming

john berger was a british writer, painter and critic, the kind of person who could look at a renaissance painting and somehow end up talking about class, power and who gets to own beautiful things. in 1972, he turned that way of thinking into a bbc series called ways of seeing, and then into a slim, unassuming book of the same name. no jargon, no ivory tower. just one idea, argued so clearly it still holds up today: images are never neutral. every picture has been shaped by someone, for a reason, and it's worth asking what that reason is.

what oil paintings and instagram ads have in common

the sharpest part of the book compares old european oil paintings to modern advertising. it sounds like a stretch until he lays it out.

those old paintings, the lords and ladies standing next to their horses, their houses, their piles of fruit, existed to say one thing: "look what i have." they were a record of ownership. wealth on display, permanently, for anyone who walked past.

advertising does the opposite. instead of showing you what you have, it shows you what you could have. take a fragrance ad. it almost never shows you the perfume. it shows you the life around it: golden light, a rooftop in rome, someone leaning in to hold you affectionately. the bottle gets about two seconds of screen time. what's actually being sold is the feeling of almost there.

build a world that's just out of reach, then whisper the same line, over and over:

you're not enough yet. but you could be.

buy the watch. drive the car. wear the clothes. become the person.

swap oil painting for instagram feed and berger's argument barely needs updating. every grwm (get ready with me for the uninitiated) video, every influencer's morning routine with the cold plunge and the manifestation coach before 7 am, is doing exactly what those paintings did, just faster, cheaper and aimed at you personally instead of anyone who happened to walk past a gallery. the platforms changed. the psychology didn't move an inch.

why this is our job to think about

here's the part that matters for us specifically: we're not just scrolling this, we're building it. every "aspirational" brief, every carousel designed to stop a thumb mid-scroll, is another brushstroke on the same painting berger described. and off the clock, we're just as susceptible, wanting the same watch, the same holiday, the same next thing as everyone else.

which is exactly why the book is still worth ten minutes of anyone's time in this industry. not because it reveals that advertising manipulates people, we already know that, it's the job. it's worth reading because the moment you understand how an image creates desire, you get better at two things at once: making images that actually work, and knowing when to pull back.

our work will always shape how people see the world a little. that part isn't up for debate. the real question, the one worth asking on every brief, is whether we're doing that on purpose, or just adding to the noise.