Skip to content
Who's in the Video
Nina DiSesa has worked in the quintessential boys clubs of advertising for almost thirty years. In 1994, she became the first woman EVP, Executive Creative Director for McCann Erickson New[…]

You can’t sell somebody something they don’t want, DiSesa says.

Nina DiSesa: I don’t think that you can sell somebody something that they don’t want. I know that mean when I go around speak to universities, I still get the question of do is the subliminal advertising, I said why knew how to do that I would do it, because I think it would will be cool, but I have never heard that anybody subliminal, having subliminal messages in the advertising that would be use long, and I don’t think you can sell somebody, you can make a brand more attractive but there has to be some substance there. You can make a product desirable but if you don’t need the product, here with the product this in good one, you can’t make a product, survive if its not worthy and you can’t make people buy things if they don’t want. You can open up their eyes to the possibilities of a new way of doing things or a new way of having luxury around you but you can’t really force them to buy something they don’t want. So I don’t really think that advertising is manipulative. We do have strong powers of persuasion, this is one of the reasons why I have person never worked on a political campaign because I do have strong powers of persuasion. I have talents that allow me to be persuasive. And I don’t want to persuade somebody to vote for someone, I want the candidate to do that. I don’t really believe that people who are brilliant persuaders. So do something that is on ethical, I don’t think that’s unethical to do advertising for political people. I mean make that sound by go everywhere, but you have to be careful. I didn’t want a I was always very careful to be really good at what I did, so I didn’t have to work on products that I didn’t personally believe and I don’t want to say what those products are, but I in my entire career, I never had to work on something that I did not think was the right thing to do, I didn’t sell things to children that children shouldn’t have and I didn’t do things that I thought were bad, but you have to make that decision yourself as a creative person, and you have to good enough that you crap so when you say I don’t want to work on bla bla bla they don’t fire you...

Recorded on: 2/29/08


Related