Regimes of mediation: advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries?

Abstract

This paper explores the status of advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries and uses that analysis to think through the contested relationship between consumption and production, and culture and economy. Using examples and illustrations from interview data with advertising practitioners in the UK, I explore how the circulation of rhetoric in the advertising industry functions as one form of mediation performed by advertising practitioners. I argue that practitioners’ role should not be understood solely in terms of a mediation between producer and consumer; instead, their role should be conceived in terms of a negotiation between multiple “regimes of mediation”, including that of the relationship between advertising agencies and their clients. Agencies perform commercial relationships, bringing them into being and constantly redefining them. Attending to these multiple modes of mediation opens up questions about the status of advertising, the role of cultural intermediaries, and the relationship between production and consumption, economy and culture.

Keywords:

• Advertising Agencies
• Advertising Practitioners
• Consumption/Production
• Cultural Intermediaries
• Culture/Economy
• Mediation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for reading drafts of earlier versions of this paper and offering comments: Anne‐Marie Fortier, Nick Gebhardt, Adrian Mackenzie, and Alan Warde. My thanks also to the editors of the journal and to anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

Correspondence to: Dr. Anne M. Cronin, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. Email: [email protected]

Bauman (1987) make a similar argument, claiming that the traditional role of intellectuals and leaders such as religious figures (“legislators”) has been displaced by the new “interpreters” such as advertising practitioners. These interpreters offer to the public models of living—ways of conducting oneself—which tend to focus around consumption.

Whilst their numbers may be limited, Nixon and Du Gay (2002) suggest that cultural intermediaries may exert a disproportionately large influence on economic and cultural life.

Negus (2002) makes a similar point, arguing against the emphasis on aesthetic forms of mediation in discussions of cultural intermediaries. He calls for a more multi‐layered, subtle approach which includes the role of other types of practitioners in the culture industries such as accountants in the music business.

Creatives are art directors or copywriters who produce the ideas for an advertising campaign and the images and the copy (written text). Account Planners write briefs for the Creatives outlining the remit and aims of a campaign; they generate the campaign’s long‐term strategy, and co‐ordinate with research companies. Account Managers deal with overall project management and finance, and mediate the agency’s everyday contact with the client. Media Buyers select and buy media space for the placement of advertisements.

This was a small‐scale research project focusing on nine advertising practitioners in the following advertising agencies: Grey Worldwide, Ogilvy and Mather, Partners BDDH, Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R and one mid‐sized agency which wished to remain anonymous. Each interview lasted between 1 and 2.5 hours and was conducted in January 2002.

Accurate demographic figures about advertising practitioners are difficult to obtain, and my small study cannot be taken as representative. In Nixon’s (2003, 63) study, many of the agencies’ personnel had received private education and half of all senior personnel were graduates from elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Nixon (ibid., 66) cites Institute for Practitioners in Advertising figures which indicate that 50% of those employed in UK agencies belonging to the IPA were below 30 years of age, and 80% below 40. Nixon (ibid., 95) cites an estimate that black and minority ethnic groups constitute 1% of the advertising workforce in the UK, whilst women constitute 9% of senior agency staff (e.g., managing directors) and 22% of board directors. Women are over‐represented among secretarial, clerical and junior administrative staff, with nearly 100% of secretaries being women, whereas the picture is more even amongst account handlers (54% women) and media buyers (44%) (Nixon 2003, 96).

Several practitioners, however, were ambiguous or explicitly negative about tobacco advertising although, interestingly, not about alcohol advertising (see Cronin 2004). This suggests that practitioners do not perceive advertising in general as socially detrimental, but focus their objection to tobacco advertising on its reference to a dangerous product.

A decision about what constitutes a “safe” advertisement clearly draws on notions of risk. This is an area which has been explored most notably by Beck (1992), but a discussion of his complex thesis goes beyond the scope of this paper.

In the UK, the current government pressure on universities to establish more formal links with “users” such as local government, museums and schools, and to produce “useful” research that can be deployed by industry, points to the ways in which British academics are being positioned as “intellectual intermediaries” between academic analysis and “the real world”.

See Haraway (1997) for a discussion of the creation of commercial relations between people and things, and between categories of things, with regard to genetics and branding.

Gerald Ratner owned a large chain of low‐cost jewellery shops across the UK. In a 1991 speech to The Institute of Directors, he famously remarked that his jewellery was “positioned as very down‐market”, that it had “very little to do with quality”, and that his jewellery was, in fact, “total crap”. His comments were widely reported in the press with the result that an estimated £500 million was wiped off the value of the company. The case has since become part of business folklore.

See Miller (1998, 2002b) for a discussion of the embeddedness of “value” in social relationships and social practices.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne M. Cronin

Correspondence to: Dr. Anne M. Cronin, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. Email: [email protected]