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Advertising Ideology and the Encoding of Advertising Meaning: an Ethnographic and Discursive Approach
Aidan Kelly, Dublin Institute of Technology
Katrina Lawlor, Dublin Institute of Technology
Stephanie O’Donohoe, Dublin Institute of Technology

[to cite]:
Aidan Kelly, Katrina Lawlor, and Stephanie O’Donohoe (2005) ,"Advertising Ideology and the Encoding of Advertising
Meaning: an Ethnographic and Discursive Approach", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 32, eds. Geeta Menon
and Akshay R. Rao, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 645-646.

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 Advertising Ideology and the Encoding of Advertising Meaning: An Ethnographic and
Discursive Approach
Aidan Kelly, Dublin Institute of Technology
Katrina Lawlor, Dublin Institute of Technology
Stephanie O’Donohoe, Dublin Institute of Technology
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Advertising Ideology and the Role of Advertising Agencies as
Cultural Intermediaries
Advertising has a pivotal role in ascribing symbolic meaning
to consumer goods, and forms an integral part of the textual tapestry
of social and cultural life. The pervasive influence of advertising
within society has drawn many researchers to the view that adver-
tising constitutes a powerful ideological force within consumer
culture (Elliott and Ritson 1997; Ewen 2001; Hackley 2002; Jhally
1987; Wernick 1991; Williamson 1978). The discourse of advertis-
ing has a dialogic and reciprocal relationship to other cultural
institutions and social systems such as family, religion, arts, litera-
ture and music (Cook 1992; Tharp and Scott 1990), and through this
interactive and fluid relationship advertising has developed into a
potent “cultural system” which shapes and reflects consumers’
sense of social reality (Sherry 1987).
Advertising agencies mediate the communicative exchange
between consumers and marketing institutions as “cultural
intermediaries” who generate symbolic meanings for commodities
(Featherstone 1991), and they provide a critical link between these
institutions and culturally based consumption meanings (Thompson
and Haytko 1997). However the process through which advertising
agencies encode meanings and the work practices of agency
practitioners remain under-explored within marketing and consumer
research literature. Studies that have adopted an agency and
production perspective have often relied on interview-based
approaches to understand the work of advertising practitioners
(Cronin 2004; Hackley 2000; Hirschman 1989; Kover 1995; Nixon
2003; Soar 2000). Most recently the use of ethnographic
methodologies within advertising research has proved insightful in
providing interpretive accounts of the internal workings of
advertising agencies (Alvesson 1994; Dewaal Malefyt and Morean
2003; Hirota 1995; Miller 1997). This study is positioned within a
similar interpretive framework to develop theoretically and critically
informed insights into intra-advertising agency processes and
practices.
Research Methodology
An ethnographic research approach was adopted during which
time the researcher spent a period of six weeks immersed within an
Irish advertising agency as a non-participant observer. A number of
data sources were accessed and generated during the ethnography
including internal strategy and creative meetings, agency
documentation, personal interviews with advertising planners,
copywriters and art directors and personal notes and observations
which were recorded in a methodological diary (Hirschman 1986).
Hackley (2001, p. 44) has noted how advertising is socially
constructed through the discourse of clients, advertising practitioners,
and consumers, which makes the advertising process ripe for
discourse analytic exploration. This study adopts a discursive
framework to talk and text generated during the ethnography to
identify common “interpretive repertoires” from the data (Edley
2001; Potter and Wetherell 1987; Wood and Kroger 2000).
Interpretive repertoires are the metaphors, tropes and resources that
are drawn upon by advertising practitioners in interviews, meetings
645
and documents which characterise the processes and practices they
engage in to produce advertisements. These discursive interpretations
are enriched and combined with contextual ethnographic insights to
develop a reflexive account of intra-agency advertising production
(Alvesson and Skoldberg 2000).
Main Findings
A number of common interpretive repertoires and patterns
emerged from the analysis. The knowledge of culture that advertising
agencies and practitioners have was a central resource that was
drawn upon in the encoding of advertising meaning. Advertising
copywriters and art directors described in interviews how they
would develop idiosyncratic advertising ideas through their
knowledge of other discourses and areas of culture such as art,
music, movies, books, newspapers, films and other advertisements,
which they used as reference points for the development of their
own material. Planners and creatives also discussed how they drew
upon their own life experiences and experiences and stories of other
friends and family members in developing campaigns which
influenced their work.
These interviews and observations illustrated how advertising
practitioners utilise embedded cultural knowledge as consumers in
the development of advertising (Soar 2000), and how discourses
and narratives within cultural and social life become an encoded
component of advertisings’ ideological structures. Consumer
knowledge in the form of research also had a central role in the
development of advertising ideas and campaigns. Codified
knowledge was fed into the advertising process through qualitative
and quantitative consumer research which was used by advertising
planners to write creative briefs, and this knowledge was often
filtered from the research departments and structured systems of
larger clients. However, un-codified knowledge such as informal
research conducted by creatives and planners in the form of informal
conversations with consumers and observations of consumption
situations also had an integral role within the advertising development
process. The “panoptic” metaphor which Hackley (2002) has
applied to the role of advertising agencies was found to be particularly
appropriate within this context, as agency practitioners valorised
formal and informal cultural consumer knowledge to develop
strategies of power for large corporate clients (Foucault 1980).
Large clients had a particularly dominant role within the campaign
development process, and the power relationship between agency
and client was particularly evident in everyday practices. As the
Irish market is relatively small, the agency was extremely
economically dependent upon larger clients.
The strategic processes of larger clients such as idea screening
and campaign development checklists were often the mechanisms
through which campaigns were produced, and client discourses and
ideologies permeated through these processes. In interviews,
practitioners acknowledged there was a “client way” of developing
advertising which was dominant within the process, and this
relationship had to be accepted by the agency as it was the client
who “paid the bills”, as one planner explained. These processes
were often viewed as rigid and inflexible by creative teams,
particularly when it came to evaluation practices such as copytesting
advertisements with audiences. Some of the teams drew from the
Advances in Consumer Research
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analogy in interviews that advertising was intrinsically of the art
world, and clients sought to rationalise the creative process through
the application of science. One copywriter described how the
process of audience copy testing reduced advertisements to the
“lowest common denominator”, and some of the creative teams
drew upon the metaphor of how they had to “do battle” and “fight”
hard for their work through the evaluation process. This was
interpreted as a clash of managerial and creative ideologies within
the advertising process, and the struggle between creative integrity
and commercial imperatives was evident in interviews with creative
teams.
Conclusion
While the findings of this study are based upon one advertising
agency within one context, they illustrate how cultural meanings
are filtered and encoded through the advertising process, which is
structured through corporate strategic goals, and how this process
is a central dynamic in the construction of advertising’s ideological
power. Advertising agencies are institutions where cultural creativity
and commercial business objectives co-exist and collide and the
discourses of capitalism and culture become enmeshed and
intertwined. The findings in this study provide some insights into
how this process takes place and the role of advertising agencies and
practitioners within it.
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