Creativity and Advertising

Affect, Events and Process

Andrew McStay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415519557
• eBook ISBN: 9781135045302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing that combinatory accounts of advertising based on representation, textualism and reductionism are of limited value, Andrew McStay suggests that advertising and creativity are better recognised in terms of the 'event'. Drawing on a diverse set of philosophical influences including Scotus, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Schiller, James, Dewey, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Bataille, Heidegger and Deleuze, the book posits a sensational, process-based, transgressive, lived and embodied approach to thinking about media, aesthetics, creativity and our interaction with advertising.

Elaborating an affective account of creativity, McStay assesses creative advertising from Coke, Evian, Google, Sony, Uniqlo and Volkswagen among others, and articulates the ways in which award-winning creative advertising may increasingly be read in terms of co-production, playfulness, ecological conceptions of media, improvisation, and immersion in fields and processes of corporeal affect.

Philosophically wide-ranging yet grounded in robust understanding of industry practices, the book will also be of use to scholars with an interest in aesthetics, art, design, media, performance, philosophy and those with a general interest in creativity.

Andrew McStay lectures at Bangor University and is author of Digital Advertising, and The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising and Deconstructing Privacy, the latter forthcoming in 2014.

1 Introducing the sensational world of creativity and advertising

The notion of creativity is at the very centre of contemporary advertising. Indeed, the inside cover of Andrew Cracknell’s book The Real Mad Men (2011) reveals: ‘Of all the places where people make money, advertising is one of the most exotic. People are paid to be crazy and applauded for being heretic. It’s where commerce meets showbiz and where hard money meets artistic whimsy.’ Creative output is an advertising agency’s calling card and, given that agencies do not formally advertise their services, their creative capacity is judged by the advertising they produce. The centrality of creativity is not only the opinion of many within the advertising industry, but also clients who employ advertising agencies and come seeking magic so to better their intangible brand assets and fortunes, raise awareness of charitable causes, and persuade voters one way or another.

Without creativity, the world of advertising agencies would look utterly different. As a discourse that informs and comprises both boutiques and behemoths, the notion of creativity permeates all areas of the advertising business. It is literally the means by which many people in advertising define themselves and while one might doubt the existence of ‘true’ creativity in advertising, what is undeniable is the self-identification of the advertising business as a creative one. It also deeply affects the output of the industry and that which it valorises and rewards. Of course, from an outsider’s point of view, the idea that advertising is creative might come as a surprise, particularly given that our reaction to the majority of advertising, at best, tends towards indifference. Too often advertising tends towards the pornographic in that frequently it lacks guile, is lurid, crass, leaves nothing to the imagination and is utterly lacking in seductive qualities. This low-grade advertising that permeates the vast gamut of our mediated experiences is not the focus of this book. Instead my interest is in that which wins awards and that which is experimental in its trials of newer forms of media, modes of representation or means of affecting us.

The advertising sector’s intensity of feeling about the value of creativity is evidenced in industry blogs, publications such as the US-based Advertising Age, and the UK weekly industry periodical Campaign, which are awash with discussions of creative awards and creative excellence. Despite this, thought-out suggestions as to what the word might mean are not forthcoming. Even the ad world’s most thoughtful commentators such as Jeremy Bullmore (2006) tend toward quite hackneyed accounts of creativity involving expressions such as the ‘Mad Inventor’ who challenges convention, makes novel connections and invents new analogies (this person is contrasted with ‘Time-and-Motion Man’). Trade associations for the creative advertising industry such as D&AD (2012), originally British Design & Art Direction, are similarly hazy and brief on what creativity might signify. D&AD’s website for example refers to creatives as curious, restless, bloody-minded, commercially savvy, weird, sometimes romantic and other times cynical. The judging criteria for the highly sought-after D&AD awards provides a little more detail. For example, in 2012 these were threefold where the work was to contain a highly original and inspiring idea; be exceptionally well executed; and be relevant to its context (D&AD, 2012a). Indeed, the role of the idea continues to be pre-eminent in creative advertising and people in advertising are obsessed with ideas – or the guiding thought that dictates what is to be said and the means by which this is best expressed.

However, as creativity contributes so much to the advertising industry and elsewhere, this is still an unsatisfying and unclear account for those seeking a more specificdefinition or deeper insights. The aim here is to interrogate that which goes unquestioned and assess, probe and better understand the relationship between creativity and advertising. We will not reach a final conclusion on what it is but rather the aim is to open up new borders, depths and dimensions in how we think about creativity, and its relationships with advertising.

The book then is not aimed at a specific audience but is for anyone with an interest in creativity, advertising, media, representation, developments in commercial persuasion and how we might account for these in the broadest possible terms. It will also be most enjoyed by those of a philosophical disposition. As will become clear the book is wide-ranging and encompasses many modes of thinking and approaches. While this is an academic monograph and jargon is to be expected, it is highly interdisciplinary and I have tried where possible to pare back the language around ideas for them to be as accessible as possible. (Apologies in advance for where I have not succeeded in this.)

In addressing creativity and advertising, I develop and explore two key propositions that appear in various guises throughout the book:

1. Creativity in advertising is not just representational but sensational;
2. Creativity involves acts of will in situations without clear determinates.

The first point has to do with the premise that longstanding approaches within cultural and media studies to understanding creativity and advertising are predicated on what will be accounted for as combinatory approaches to representation. These I argue are limited in their capacity to adequately characterise creative endeavour. Where advertising was once synonymous with frame-based visual representation (generally conceived in terms of posters, press and television) things have developed in light of newer forms of media, novel modes of engagement and also approaches that are less contingent on visual media. Where the professionalisation of advertising from the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century involved developments in representation, play with meaning and the building of sign value through knack and high proficiency with images and words, this version of advertising is no longer as assured as it used to be. Likewise, Saussurean-inspired semiotic critique of advertising is not as all-embracing as it once was. Identification of impotency in traditional approaches used to account for developments in advertising first appeared in my book The Mood of Information (McStay, 2011) that deals with feedback systems and political economy, and emerged in a very different guise in the writing of the book you are reading now. Both books however express dissatisfaction with the semiotic, representational and ideological enterprise to account for advertising. Where The Mood of Information examined online behavioural advertising, media and biocapitalist concerns, Creativity and Advertising is different in orientation. It shares, however, a common sentiment in that it recognises the dramatic shifts to have taken place in the practice of advertising and that the once assured indexical link between images, representation and advertising is no longer as firm as it was once thought to be.

In loose alliance with what has been dubbed ‘the affective turn’ (Clough, 2007) and its digressions from the pre-eminence of representation, the arguments presented here derive in part from the developing advertising and media environment, and the ways in which commercially harnessed creativity is adapting in light of this. Indeed, criticisms of representational accounts of media are emerging from many quarters. These revolve around the observation that representational or textual approaches are over-concerned with images and do not pay enough attention to place, time and the ‘liveness’, ‘nowness’ or ‘vitality’ that accompanies mediation (Kember and Zylinska, 2012). The origins of the affective turn are generally located in Spinoza (1996 [1677]) who opposed mind–body dualism, preferring instead a monism that more directly links mental goings-on with the body. Affective accounts, then, have less to do with abstractions, and more to do with drives, motivations, will, emotion, feelings and sensations. For Spinoza, these were not incidental to being human, but a central feature. Deleuze’s (1988 [1970]) monograph on Spinoza, along with later writing with Guattari, has also done much to bring affect back to critical attention. This places the capacity for affect in relation to an expanded idea of what constitutes a body and opens up corporeal capacities of affect to visual and other image-making systems. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, affect is an aesthetic activity in the way that artists (and here argued advertisers) are interested in generating intense and affective experiences that take the body (including the brain) from one condition to another.

While affect-based theory suffers from being a repository of everything that is non-representational and non-semantic (Grossberg, 2010), indirectly affect provides a mode or gateway with which to engage with media, advertising and contemporary communications programmes in a less imagistic way. It allows us to think of advertising as afield of attention, attraction and affect. The idea is thus to consider creative advertising less in terms of abstraction, but more in terms of stimulation and sensation – or that which is experienced in a lived and embodied place, time, field of movement and action, and is engaged with. In spite of this, my argument has less to do with rejecting representational approaches than to broaden understanding about the means and affects that advertising generates. Rather, the semiotic aspect becomes merely one dimension of experience in what are accounted for here as events. This means that we might think about creativity and advertising as including ideas and corporeal experiences, rather than just the more usual symbolic dimension. More plainly phrased, although in analysing advertising through a representational lens we typically tend to decontextualise it from the context that was intended by media planners and buyers, the world of advertising is very much about affect, calls to action and moving us to behave a certain way or engage in a given act. This zone in-between idea and thing is argued here as being aesthetic, sensational and intensive.

Rather than thinking about advertising as a system that appropriates, steals (although many in advertising will readily own up to this) and re-presents meanings from elsewhere to sell and make its points, this book also accounts for what is unique, immediate and affective about individual advertising events. The idea of the ‘event’ is a term that will be employed throughout and goes to the heart of the methodological and philosophical orientation of this book. Emerging first from the Stoics around 300 BCE and subsequently traceable through Leibniz in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and onto Whitehead and Deleuze in the twentieth century, it prefers processes to substances, happenings rather than things, multiplicity over solidity, and being as becoming (Bowden, 2011; Deleuze, 2011 [1969]; Shapiro, 2012). The event in this case is that which is irreducible to composite or fixed things and while an event or singularity is clearly linked to parts that are involved, there is also an extra dimension comprised of a novel and indivisible character. My general orientation, then, differs from representational approaches and rather than thinking about objects, things or symbols, this book privileges process as it is this which gives rise to that which we understand as objects. This perspective sees the object as the abstraction and reality as made up of ongoing processes. Indeed, the event as a point of engagement sees the coming together of a wider range of processes and happenings so to comprise a nexus, or multiplicity of becomings – each unique and novel. For Whitehead (1964 [1920]) an event is that which occurs during a period of time and is comprised of a specific character. This character comes to be by dint of being related to other events. These might be as commonplace as the noticing of the shadow of trees on the books that line my office wall, the ringing of my mobile phone, the chilli plant growing on the windowsill, my external hard-drive whirring to automatically back-up, the sharp pencil marking the paper as these notes were originally made, or indeed, as this book explores, creative advertising. The idea of the event is predicated on a sense of temporal immediacy disclosed in sense-awareness. As Massumi (2011) in discussion of Whitehead points out, there are two factors requiring attention in accounting for events: first there is the relational coming together of parts and factors so to comprise something more than the sum of these interrelations; second is the qualitative dimension of the event where a character is generated that is discerned by feeling. This latter point does not lend to post-event analysis, but rather is immediate and to be accounted for as it unfolds and happens.

Should the passage above be too woolly and vague then consider that an experience of any sort is not just about theoretical abstractions, being locked up in private intellectual processing, but that experiences emerge out of embodied engagement with things in the world that themselves exist as an outcome of other processes. After all, advertising is never solely experienced as an abstraction or assemblage of theoretical propositions so why should we conceive it so? Advertising is deeply experiential and staffof all departments in advertising agencies are interested in what goes on at the meeting place between people, their advertising and the impressions or affects that are generated at that engagement point.

The point then is to restore some balance between textual and structurally-inspired criticism, and what here is accounted for in terms of sensation, affect, quality, media, co-creativity, interactivity and machinic arrangements (to borrow the latter from Deleuze and Guattari, 2003 [1980]). The two approaches differ as textual accounts generally have little interest in the embodied practice of advertising itself. Rather, such criticism uses advertising as a way of exploring wider social structures and cultural phenomena. These are generally depicted within a critical framework of representation, commodity fetishism, and manipulative and exploitative accounts of capitalism (Marcuse, 1964; Williamson, 1978; Arriaga, 1984). Textual accounts derive from linguistics and while this lends methodological rigour and insight to accounts of representation, it also means that advertising is compartmentalised within existing frameworks, categories and out of connection with everyday experience. This emphasis is important, as much recent award-winning creative work is contingent upon real-time engagement and temporally-bound advertising events. Contemporary examples might take the form of unfolding interaction on social networking sites, activities in metaverses, the use of new media search tools to find things in real life, in-situ happenings that are simultaneously web-cast, and with wider use of more recent media forms that blurs online and offline goings-on.

Textual analysis is that where advertising is dissected, decoded, seen as mediating something else, interpreted and contextualised within larger structures. I do not disagree per se with this, but see it as a rather one-dimensional approach to understanding advertising. My emphasis here is less about critical frameworks, but more about considering advertising in terms of affective experience, interaction, embodiment, co-creation, emotional faculties and felt experiences of contemporary creative advertising. The focus here then is mostly on the aesthetic dimension understood in the older sense of lived sensational experience, rather than having to do with beauty and taste. Further, we cannot properly understand objects of our attention without knowing something of the causal conditions that give rise to them. In textual accounts of advertising, this tends to be framed in relation to critical accounts of capitalism and ideology. My chosen tack is to assess another causal factor – creativity. Undoubtedly there will be differing views on the existence of traces of creativity in the products of advertising, but what is clear is that creativity in advertising is a key dynamic and primary mover, and if not these, it is certainly a belief and ideology that impels those who produce advertising.

This brings me to my second proposition and opening definition of creativity that describes the process as an act of will in situations without clear determinates. This suggestion is underpinned by broad discussion throughout this book on how this proposed definition has been arrived at and what the constitutive words in the sentence represent. The context to this is largely Kantian, particularly in regard to his Copernican revolution where Kant (1990 [1781]) posits that we relate to objects through representations and organising principles that we project into them. This might be read as a liberational notion in that destabilisation of the given allows for all manner of shaping, forming and creative acts.

In regards to what this book is not, there are four points to be made:firstly, as will already be clear, it is not a ‘how to’ book on advertising and creativity. Practitioners of advertising have far more useful things to say on this than academics.¹ It is not an easy book either as a wide range of material has been drawn upon to generate unique and far-reaching understanding of both creativity and advertising. While on occasion we might enjoy being able to scan a book safe in the domain of known ideas, albeit with novel application of acknowledged concepts, this book will require more time and a closer read.

Second, it is not a generalist account of creativity. Originally the book was broader and more comprehensive in relation to the various areas of study that have something to say on creativity but as the writing of the book progressed it became apparent that was there little utility or benefit in painting a broad picture of how creativity has been treated across various literatures. While arguably some context has been lost, this has allowed space to advance what I feel are more focused and related issues. For th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introducing the sensational world of creativity and advertising
• 2 Strangely revealing
• 3 The poetics of advertising
• 4 Playful combinations
• 5 Sensational dimensions
• 6 Vivid living, excess and the marketplace
• 7 Creativity and the Counter-Enlightenment
• 8 Embodying culture
• 9 Concrescence and the unfashionably new
• 10 Excessive media
• 11 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index