Cultural mediums: The work world of 'creatives' in American advertising agencies

This thesis examines the occupational community of art directors and copywriters in American advertising agencies, men and women known in their world as "the creatives". The study is based on three-years ethnographic fieldwork in twenty advertising agencies in New York City. Creatives are the symbolic experts who construct and help produce the print and electronic advertisements that inundate American society.;To link advertising production and its product, one must understand the meaning of creativity in creatives' work world. The thesis demonstrates that the advertising world is a maelstrom of competition and ambition in which art directors and writers try to produce "creative advertising" essentially to please their peers who are the gatekeepers to status, rank, and say-so in their world. But such efforts at creativity regularly get blunted and thwarted by the bureaucratic structure of their work, most notably by account people whose primary task is to please the clients who buy advertising. In making advertising creatives must continually negotiate between the demands of their careers and the organizational exigencies of the commercial context within which they make their living.;In the process, creatives become cultural mediums. Mainly to further their own career goals, they garner resonant materials from wherever they can and recycle them back to mass audiences. More specifically, the construction of images and interpretive frameworks accessible to mass audiences requires and fosters certain occupational habits of mind. There include a knack for symbolic inversion and what might be called a promiscuous affectivity, a willingness to appropriate material from any sphere of experience and use it commercially. The thesis argues that such habits of mind shape and come to be embodied in the symbolic products that creatives fashion.;Advertising forms an important symbol system in American culture that mirrors and shapes commonplace assumptions and values. Symbolic products of any sort incorporate the particular casts of mind of their creators. Broadly speaking, the thesis asks: How and in what ways is the work process of advertising production manifest in the product?...