I used to think surrealism was just about melting clocks and lobster telephones.
Turns out—and this hit me somewhere around my third rewatch of that Skittles ad where a man births rainbow candy from his beard—the movement that André Breton launched in 1924 Paris has basically colonized the entire advertising industry. Not subtly, either. Walk down any city street, scroll through Instagram for thirty seconds, watch prime-time television, and you’ll see Dalí’s fingerprints everywhere: impossible juxtapositions, dream logic masquerading as product benefits, objects behaving in ways that would make René Magritte nod approvingly while smoking his pipe that may or may not be a pipe. The weird part? It works. Consumers in 2019 studies showed 34% higher recall rates for surrealist ads compared to straightforward product demonstrations, and I guess that makes sense when you consider we’re all drowning in roughly 10,000 commercial messages daily, give or take.
Here’s the thing about why advertising creative directors keep returning to surrealist techniques like exhausted lovers to toxic relationships. Our brains are prediction machines. They hate surprises but also desperately need them to stay awake.
When Salvador Dalí Meets the Thirty-Second Spot: The Mechanics of Commercial Disruption
The core surrealist principle—automatism, or bypassing rational thought to access unconscious desires—maps almost perfectly onto what advertisers call “breaking through the clutter.” I’ve seen this in agency briefings where creative teams are literally told to “make it dreamlike” or “add something unexpected.” What they mean, whether they know it or not, is deploy the surrealist toolkit: dislocation (objects in wrong contexts), scale distortion (tiny cars, giant products), metamorphosis (things becoming other things), and juxtaposition of unrelated elements. That 2015 Heineken ad where a meteor crashes into a board meeting and everyone just keeps drinking? Pure Max Ernst energy. The brand didn’t improve, the context collapsed, and somehow that communicated “refreshing” more effectively than showing condensation on a cold bottle.
Wait—maybe I’m overstating the sophistication here.
Most advertising creatives aren’t sitting around reading Breton’s manifestos or studying Giorgio de Chirico’s empty piazzas. But the visual language has permeated so thoroughly through decades of art direction that it’s become the default grammar for “memorable.” Agencies in London, New York, and Tokyo independently arrive at similar surrealist solutions because, honestly, what else cuts through when rational arguments about product superiority all sound identical? You can say your car has better fuel efficiency, or you can show it swimming through an ocean made of clouds while a jazz singer emerges from the sunroof. Both communicate something, but only one ends up in award show reels and, more importantly, in neural pathways that weren’t already worn smooth by ten thousand other car commercials.
The Unconscious Mind as Target Demographic: How Dream Logic Sells Mundane Products
Surrealists believed rational thought was a prison. Advertisers believe rational thought is what makes consumers compare prices on Amazon. Same problem, different century. When Old Spice put Isaiah Mustafa on a horse backwards in a bathroom that became a boat that became a beach, they weren’t selling deodorant features—they were selling an emotional state that exists somewhere between confusion and delight. That campaign increased sales by 107% in one month, which tells you something about how effectively the irrational can motivate purchasing behavior when it’s deployed with precision.
The thing is, this approach only works for certain product categories.
Why Your Insurance Company Probably Won’t Use Floating Eyeballs in Their Next Campaign
Financial services, pharmaceuticals, anything regulated or tied to YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content—these spaces resist surrealism because trust requires coherence, and coherence is surrealism’s natural enemy. You’ll see it in cars, soft drinks, fashion, fast food, alcohol—categories where emotional association matters more than rational evaluation. I guess it’s no accident that the products most enthusiastically embracing surrealist advertising are often the ones with the least actual product differentiation. When every cola tastes roughly identical, you need melting vending machines and polar bears in tuxedos having existential conversations. When every insurance policy has similar coverage, you get a gecko with an accent, which is absurdist but not quite surrealist—there’s still too much logical consistency there.
The Instagram Aesthetic and the Democratization of Commercial Unreality
Social media has made surrealist techniques accessible to literally anyone with a phone and editing app, which means the style has simultaneously become ubiquitous and diluted. Everyday users create floating product shots against impossible gradient skies, and brands respond by going even weirder to reclaim differentiation—thus the recent Samsung ads featuring moon-headed businesspeople or whatever that was. The cycle is basically: surrealism provides novelty, novelty becomes template, template requires new surrealism, and we all end up slightly more desensitized to visual impossibility than we were last quarter.
Anyway, I’m not sure if that’s progress or just exhaustion wearing a Salvador Dalí mustache.
What Happens When the Unconscious Becomes a Commercially Optimized Database
The final weird thing—and this would have definately horrified Breton—is that surrealism in advertising isn’t spontaneous or automatic anymore. It’s A/B tested. Focus-grouped. Algorithmically optimized. Agencies use eye-tracking studies to determine exactly which impossible juxtaposition holds attention for 2.3 seconds versus 1.8 seconds. The dream logic gets refined through data until it’s not really dreamlike at all, just calculated unreality designed to trigger specific neurological responses. Which raises the question: if surrealism was about liberating the unconscious from rational control, what happens when we use it as a tool of commercial persuasion? I think the answer is we get a culture that’s simultaneously more visually interesting and more manipulative, which is probably the most surreal outcome of all, though nobody’s laughing except maybe the ghost of Man Ray, and even he seems tired.
