A History of Marketing / Episode 49

Have you ever stood in front of a 500-year-old painting of a father devouring his son and asked yourself, “Who paid for this?” Me neither. Until I met Peter Van Wijnaerde.

Peter is a CMO based in Ghent, Belgium, and the writer behind a Substack that connects art history to modern marketing.

Rory Sutherland recommended I speak with Peter (which is as high a compliment as you can get in this field) after seeing his presentation on medieval branding.

Peter’s premise is provocative: art was the original marketing department.

Patrons funded paintings, statues, and tapestries not for beauty’s sake, but because they needed to project power, build legitimacy, and sway public opinion. The separation of fine art and commerce is a relatively recent development.

Peter brings a perspective that’s part art aficionado, hobbyist historian, and marketing strategist. He shows us that “stopping power” has been central to persuading the masses for a thousand years.

Here is my conversation with Peter Van Wijnaerde.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Quick Update: Thank you to the thousands of marketers from around the world who have played The CMO Game! It’s been amazing to see the response and I’ve had a few marketing professors reach out to request using it in their classes.

Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And thank you to Rory Sutherland for introducing me to Peter.

The Intersection of Art History and Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: You’ve written about so many topics connecting history, marketing, mythology, and art, and branding, and merging the past with the present in our work as marketers today. So how would you describe the content of your Substack and your perspective that you bring?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I like to stretch out the history of marketing a little bit to before the 1950s. And I love art and I love looking at art and I love using those art pieces that were made to compel people to have stopping power. I use those to explain how marketing is really one of the oldest professions there is and what we can learn today of marketing. So not that there’s no surprises anymore in the current time, but my blog is about widening the scope of the time frame of marketing.

Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned one of the oldest professions. It is funny when Pompeii was uncovered – the ancient city that was covered by Mount Vesuvius. They discovered brothels but also they discovered artwork that would point people to the brothels. Right. So if prostitution is the oldest profession, there seems to be types of advertising to get people there. So they were very interconnected. So advertising does seem like an old profession.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Exactly.

Andrew Mitrak: So what was your initial spark? How did you start connecting the past to the present?

Peter Van Wijnaerde: I was always a very visual person, liked to engage with things that are visual. But I think the spark happened my first time in Vienna in the Belvedere. I started to appreciate medieval art. And normally medieval art is something we laugh about. You have the memes with the medieval cats and there is full Instagram feeds full of that. But actually we should not laugh with medieval art, because it’s very communicative. Because it’s very symbolic. It says there are two guys and a child and the child is just a little human and this is happening, right? And so it’s basically like a cartoon. I started to appreciate it, started to look at it and then started wondering, that must have been expensive and difficult to make. Why were people making this?

Uncovering Medieval Marketing in the Bayeux Tapestry

Peter Van Wijnaerde: The moment that it clicked was when I was doing medieval travels through Europe. And I was in France and I was in Bayeux. Have you ever heard about the Bayeux Tapestry?

Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know about the Bayeux Tapestry. I’m not too familiar with tapestries in general.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it’s a 70-meter long tapestry that was embroidered in the year 1080, let’s say. They don’t know precise but it was embroidered there. And it’s a tapestry about the Battle of Hastings, about William the Conqueror kicking out the Anglo-Saxons out of England and putting in Nordic rule in England. And this guy, his brother, yes, this one.

Andrew Mitrak: For listeners, most people listen to the audio, but I am going to, because this is a visual conversation, I’ll pull them up on the screen, because I find it useful to hear and see what you’re talking about. So I’m sharing my screen and showing the Bayeux Tapestry.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: So what’s so interesting about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it’s a scroll of 70 meters, it’s about 40 centimeters high or something. And it tells the story about why William the Conqueror thought he had the right to conquer England and what the deal was and how they prepared for it and who they talked to and the whole story from beginning to end is on that tapestry. And it was made...

Andrew Mitrak: So it’s a really wide tapestry. Cause it’s like frame by frame. Cause it’s... wow, okay. Yeah.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: And you can roll it up too. And it was made by his brother, the Bishop Odo of Bayeux. And what’s so interesting about it, it was not a painting, it was not a statue, it was a tapestry. And there is actually really no other tapestry of that kind. But if you think about it, it was mobile, you could roll it up easily, you can transport it easily and put it out somewhere else also as easily. So it was actually a bit of a prop of a PR tour for William the Conqueror by his brother the Bishop of Bayeux. And then it clicked. And I thought, oh my god, they should give this Odo guy an Effie Award or something because he invented a completely new way of storytelling to convince the people that this king is their legitimate ruler. And you don’t do that by building a cathedral because a cathedral is only in one place. So I thought this is a 1,000-year-old marketing campaign in front of me. So this is when it started clicking even more.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s, and you mentioned medieval art almost looks like a cartoon sometimes because it’s a little more two-dimensional, they didn’t quite have the same sense of perspective and lighting and depth that you convey that you’d later see in the Renaissance. But and then also medieval art sometimes you see it in memes today. Like you see it in internet memes and you see it kind of translates kind of because it’s cartoon-like. And in a way memes are such a huge part of internet culture and the way people communicate now. And this artwork, this tapestry kind of reminds you of a comic book almost, or a frame by frame and it sort of takes that type of visual storytelling and it seems like it communicates that to the masses who mostly would be illiterate but would still appreciate a story.

Peter Van Wijnaerde: If you walk in front of it and you just go, it takes half an hour to see the whole thing. And there’s action scenes in there and little jokes in there. There’s a warrior showing his bare ass to another warrior, things like this. So it’s also made to entertain. And I think that’s beautiful actually. It’s not just, this is history, this is also, also very interesting fact: the guy who made it gave himself a very prominent role in the history as well. But he was the guy who commissioned it right? So he could embroider himself into histo...