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ABSTRACT
How do market intermediaries help other market actors see the market and their opportunities for action within it? This article introduces a theoretical framework of performative sensemaking to explore this question using the case of advertising agencies and their clients. Drawing on 12 months of participant observation and 81 interviews conducted across four general market American advertising agencies, the article illustrates how advertising practitioners provide their clients with visions of what the market is and what opportunities for action lie within it, developing advertising campaigns to match that vision. These performed accounts of the market are dynamically negotiated and socially embedded, reflecting the identities of the clients, their target audiences, and the intermediaries themselves. Because intermediaries dramaturgically perform these interpretations of the market for their client in micro-level interactions, they must also deal with contestation and negotiation over their visions of the market.
Acknowledgements
I thank the employees of the advertising agencies in this study for their generous donations of time. For numerous reviews, invaluable feedback, and overall enthusiasm I thank Fred Wherry. For feedback and guidance, I thank Jeffrey Alexander, Phil Smith, and the participants of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology Workshop. I am also grateful to participants at the Economic Sociology Panel at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, the Chicago Ethnography Workshop, and the Consumers & Consumption @ Yale symposium, for their constructive feedback. Finally, I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Consumption Markets and Culture, whose thoughtful and supportive reviews dramatically improved this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Andrew C Cohen is a Culture Industry Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and currently works as a brand strategist at Phenomenon, a brand transformation agency in Los Angeles, California. His dissertation draws on ethnographic research and interviews across four different advertising agencies to examine the ways in which cultural processes shape the various social activities of developing advertisements. His recent articles include “Advertising Morality: Maintaining Moral Worth in a Stigmatized Profession” (Theory & Society, 2018 with Shai M. Dromi).
Notes
1 Because of this, the sensemaking process in uncertain markets leads to mimetic isomorphism, in which organizations model themselves after their (successful) competitors (DiMaggio and Powell Citation1983).
2 I thank Fred Wherry for bringing my attention to this point.
3 Analysts differ in how thickly described these appreciations are; some focus on social class-based variations (e.g. Bourdieu Citation1984) and others on assemblies of meanings that are analyzed while bracketing class and other material conditions (Alexander Citation2012). These analytic brackets do not preclude including material factors in the final analysis. Instead, bracketing the material allows the analyst to privilege the interpretive struggles intermediates enact as they attempt to understand goods and their users in the right way.
4 All agency names, employee names, and brand names are pseudonyms. Additionally, some product categories have been changed and some job titles have been generalized to protect participant confidentiality. As per the institutional review board protocol, my role as a researcher was disclosed to all four agencies and was common knowledge among my coworkers. Furthermore, before observing and participating at any of the agencies, I signed a nondisclosure agreement. My role as a researcher did not interfere with my participation in the daily routines of the agency; in fact, on more than one occasion, after concluding my internship the agency tried to recruit me as a full-time employee.
5 CS-M and CS-P are two separate offices of the same agency that operate independently from one another, handling different accounts and run by different managing directors and creative directors. Although they share the company heritage and sometimes pool resources for major pitches, their day-to-day operations were separate.
6 I did not inquire directly about demographic information in interviews. This data emerged in interviews when people explained their educational background or training (or lack thereof) in advertising or expounded on their thoughts about advertising being a “young person’s game.” It also came up throughout the fieldwork process, such as in casual conversations and jokes.
7 For a further explanation and examples of perceptual maps, see Fripp (Citation2017).
8 Materials from the account planners’ research, as well as the “insights”, were also crafted into presentation materials that could be used as props in later performances; analytically, this research is part of the first stage of the performative sensemaking process for advertising agencies.
9 Producing a campaign concept clients will readily accept is difficult because clients cannot simply ask for what they want, in spite of knowing they want something. The supply of specific campaign ideas agencies generate necessarily precedes the demand for those ideas, which is unknown until the idea is presented (Caves Citation2000; cf. Hartley et al. Citation2013, 13). A visiting production artist at A&S used the metaphor of shopping at a grocery store to describe this tricky client-agency relationship:
It’s like the client is standing outside the grocery store, and you run in, and bring out milk. You ask, “Is it this?” The client says, “It’s not that. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s not that.”
10 I thank my anonymous reviewer for raising this important point.
11 I thank Jeff Alexander for re-introducing this expression to me as a means of understanding the relative autonomy of culture in shaping perception.