Advertising Aesthetics Research 09/10
On a black-and-white sea, a surfer waits. The wave finally rises, and its white foam becomes a herd of charging horses. The first feeling is force and release. Only then does the structure of the film become clear: this advertisement has been about waiting all along.
That is the decisive aesthetic move in Guinness's 1999 film Surfer. Framestore's official case page describes a lingering close view of the man's face, the surfers entering the ocean and the horses composited into the ultimate wave. A production note published by Academy Films preserves the repeated “tick followed tock” narration and the principal credits. The observations in this article are limited to those official descriptions, published stills and archive records; unavailable streamed footage is not presented as a frame-by-frame viewing.
The case matters not because the horses are spectacular, but because they do not perform alone. They compress the release after waiting, the force of the wave and the promise of a mythic reward into one image, then lend that relationship to the brand. This makes the value of advertising metaphor more precise: it does not hide a selling point more cleverly; it lends the product the relational structure of a familiar image.
Metaphor transfers a relationship, not a shape
The weakest advertising metaphors depend on resemblance alone: a bottle becomes a mountain, headphones become the moon, a car becomes a predator. The image may be polished, but if viewers can say only what it resembles and not why the resemblance matters, the metaphor remains decoration.
Surfer transfers something more structured: waiting accumulates tension; force approaches; a person meets it at the threshold; release follows. The horses are the most visible carrier of that relationship. Viewers do not merely borrow a noun. They borrow a sequence of actions.
This also explains why some visual spectacles are memorable but difficult to attribute to a brand. Isolate the horses in the wave and the effect still works. Remove the waiting face, the sense of time and the narration, however, and the bridge between the image and the brand proposition weakens. A good metaphor gives viewers room to decode; it cannot leave behind only an interchangeable “cool shot.”
A metaphor has to complete four movements
Creative review becomes more useful when a metaphor is separated into four movements rather than judged as more or less “premium.”
- Source image: What object, action or situation does the audience recognize first?
- Transfer: Which specific quality or relationship is borrowed from that image?
- Brand landing: Why does the transferred meaning belong to this product or brand rather than any competitor?
- Cultural decoding: Does the intended audience share enough experience, language and symbolic convention to complete the transfer?
If any movement breaks, the metaphor changes character. An unfamiliar source gives viewers no entry. Too many transferred qualities create an unranked mood board. A late brand landing lets the spectacle capture the memory. Untested cultural decoding can make the same symbol feel flat, comic or offensive in another market.
Shanghai is not the background. It is the grammar
Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai's 2018 film Shanghai's Never Done offers a different method. The agency describes Mr. Lin, the owner of a struggling store that sells race finish lines. His business is failing because Shanghai athletes refuse to stop: runners avoid the finish line, a high-school basketball game reaches a 33rd overtime, skateboarders build a seven-storey half-pipe and MMA fighters refuse to tap out.
In the published stills, finish-line products crowd the shop around Mr. Lin. Another image places a realistic city beside an impossible elevated skate structure. The metaphor is not completed by one symbol. It is built by repeatedly rewriting a causal relation: everybody needs a finish line, except that people in this city refuse to be finished.
Shanghai is therefore not a background that can be replaced directly with Tokyo, London or New York. The account of a constantly remade city, the athletes' dissatisfaction and the shopkeeper whose livelihood depends on “ending” form the grammar of the idea. A cross-market version that swaps landmarks, casting and accents but keeps the same joke may preserve the surface while losing the cause.
Localization does not simply replace symbols. It asks: what lived experience can carry the same brand relationship in this culture? A global brand may retain the tension of continuing forward, while allowing each market to choose a different hero, a different comic mechanism or a different image of the city.
Cross-cultural research offers a warning, not a universal rule
A 2019 study in Food Research International tested whether visual metaphor produces the same response across cultures. The authors ran two 2×2 between-subjects experiments. The first included 417 participants in India and the United States; the second included 181. The stimuli compared metaphor and non-metaphor versions of print ads for invented coffee and ice-cream brands.
Within those two experiments, visual metaphor had a more positive effect on attitudes toward the advertisement and brand among the Indian participants than among the US participants. The result should not be simplified into the claim that one culture is naturally “better” at metaphor. The work covers two countries, invented food brands and print executions. Its practical warning is narrower and more useful: metaphor appreciation is not universally automatic, and a familiar decoding habit may belong to the creative team rather than its audience.
Cross-cultural review should therefore go beyond asking whether a symbol has a negative meaning. It should investigate which relationship viewers actually perceive. Without explaining the concept first, ask a small sample of intended viewers three questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What does it suggest the brand is promising? If the answers cannot converge, greater craft precision may not solve the problem; the metaphor chain itself may be broken.
Put the metaphor into the storyboard, not the pitch narration
An executable metaphor should remain intelligible when the creative director is not in the room. During treatment or storyboard development, mark the task performed by every decisive shot.
- Establish the source: Let viewers understand the object, action and spatial relation before announcing what it means.
- Create the transfer: Make one quality change a relation inside the image, such as waiting becoming stored force or a finish line becoming an obstacle.
- Land on the brand: Use product behavior, context of use, brand language or an ending action to complete attribution, instead of attaching a logo after the spectacle.
- Test the decoding: Show no-copy versions, cutdowns, vertical crops and stills to viewers in the intended market. Record misreadings rather than explaining them away.
There is a necessary trade-off. Explain too little and the metaphor becomes a puzzle understood only by its makers. Explain too much and viewers lose the pleasure of participating in meaning. The goal is not maximum agreement on every association. It is stability in the core relation, with room for secondary readings. Viewers may feel differently about the horses in the wave, but if most remember only horses and never feel the release after waiting, the required transfer has not happened.
Aesthetic memory should not be treated as evidence of sales impact. The Guinness and Nike cases help us observe how composition, narrative and symbols organize meaning. They do not prove that the same choices would produce growth in another category, market or media environment. Metaphor addresses how meaning is felt and remembered; purchase also depends on product, price, distribution, media frequency and other material conditions.
Move from “What does it look like?” to “Why is it ours?”
The previous study on realism and stylization asked which layer of an advertisement viewers are expected to believe. This installment moves one step further: when an image does not speak literally, which relationship does the viewer carry back to the brand?
A concept worth approving does more than present an elegant comparison. It can explain where the meaning comes from, what is transferred, why it lands on this brand and whose cultural experience allows it to work.
If your team is reviewing a brand film or a cross-market visual concept, write these four movements into the creative brief before script and visual development begin. ONCE's brand video production service outlines the collaboration from concept through production. To discuss a specific project, share the product, markets and communication task through the project inquiry form.
Source scope: Framestore's official Guinness case page; Academy Films' 25th-anniversary production note for Surfer; the D&AD Surfer archive; Wieden+Kennedy's Nike: Shanghai's Never Done project page; and the 2019 cross-cultural visual-metaphor study by Margariti, Boutsouki, Hatzithomas and Zotos.
