What casting decides about a brand

Casting is choosing who appears. It says more about a brand than its palette, its typeface and its tone of voice put together, and it is usually decided last, in a hurry, from a folder of agency cards. Who is in the frame is what the audience actually reads. A viewer takes in a face before a headline, a logo or a product, and decides from it who the picture is for and whether that includes them.

That judgement is fast. In 2006 the Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov showed people photographs of unfamiliar faces for a tenth of a second and asked them to rate each face for attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness. Their ratings closely matched the ones other people gave when they could look for as long as they liked, and the extra time mostly made people more confident in a judgement they had already made. Your casting is read in that tenth of a second, long before anybody reads your copy. Whatever the face says in that moment, the brand has said too.

The decision underneath every casting is whether you are showing people your customer wants to be or people your customer recognises. Aspiration is the older route. A fragrance campaign built around a film star sells a life the viewer will never live, and the distance is part of what it sells. Recognition shows the audience itself, or somebody close enough that the viewer thinks that could be me, and brands choose it less often than it deserves. Both are legitimate. Mixing them produces an advertisement that is plainly talking to nobody in particular, such as a model with catwalk looks in an ordinary kitchen doing an ordinary chore, who reads as neither the dream nor the neighbour.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty is the best-known recognition casting in advertising. Launched by Unilever in 2004 with the agency Ogilvy, its first billboards went up in Germany and Britain and showed women who were not professional models, photographed by the portrait photographer Rankin, with an invitation to passers-by to vote on whether each woman was, for example, wrinkled or wonderful. The casting was the idea. The same billboards with professional models would have said the opposite of what Dove meant, however the copy had been written. That is what it looks like when casting decides a brand, and it is why the choice of who appears belongs in the first meeting about a campaign instead of the last.

On a real job, casting runs through a sequence of steps. Each one narrows the field. The art director writes a casting brief describing a character, such as somebody who looks as if they have just come in from a long walk and is pleased about it, and sends it to a casting director or to model agencies. Candidates come back with a portfolio of their best work and a set of digitals, the plain unretouched photographs that show what the person actually looks like. A shortlist is called back to be seen on camera and given a note. Dates are held with options, then confirmed, and the usage, meaning where and for how long the pictures may run, is agreed in writing before anybody arrives on set.

Casting speaks across a body of work as well as in a single frame. A brand that casts one kind of face for fifteen years has told its audience something about who it is for, and the fact that nobody decided it does not stop it being a message. Audiences notice the pattern. A skincare brand that has only ever shown women in their twenties has told every older customer that its products are not for her, even if nobody in the building believes that. This is where brands most often say something they never intended. Every face in every campaign adds to the same account, so the question for each new shoot is what this person adds to the story the earlier pictures have already told.