Advertising eventually turns into art. People upload TV commercials to Youtube, post billboards on Flickr, and quote product slogans in their Facebook profiles. Ads don’t start out as art — they start out as a way to convince people to buy stuff. But eventually, they evolve: ads turn into a way to get a message to someone, mediated by some external, irrelevant force.

Examples:

• Billboards are messages mediated by cars. How do you deliver a sales pitch to someone driving by at 60 miles an hour? (You use simple text and exciting visuals).

• TV ads involve someone you don’t know barging into your living room to interrupt something you were enjoying, in order to make you spend money. They are, of course, wildly successful. Why? (Because staying entertaining for thirty seconds is easier than staying entertaining for half an hour — so you can get sitcom-level engagement without sitcom-quality content).

• SEO is the art of having a conversation with users, and making sure search engines overhear it. It’s a balance between making something readable and making it googleable, linkable, and sharable — building a sluice for linkjuice, that happens to be good architecture and good engineering.

I have no idea whether or not SEO is art today. But it’s getting there, because that’s what new forms of advertising do.