Advertising and Consumer Society, 2nd Edition

8 Advertising agencies Organisation, agency, and internal conflict

DOI: 10.4324/9781003253037-11

Advertisements don’t just make themselves. Although it may sometimes appear that way from the perspective of political economy and related approaches, it turns out that most ads, in practice, are made by people. While this may seem a painfully obvious point, it can nevertheless sometimes get lost in discussions of political economy, ideology, consumerism, commodities, fetishism, audience labour, branding, and promotion. While offering powerful analytic methods for making sense of advertising and its relation with other parts of society, such sweeping theories of advertising are not without their limitations. One particular problem is that such approaches ...