Obstinacy in innovation:

The cultural discourse of

advertising

Neil O’Boyle

Working Paper CSGP 12/4

Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

www.trentu.ca/globalpolitics

Prologue

Researchers of one variety or another have long attempted to explain the phenomenological

workings of cultural identity. Indeed, there is something of a family resemblance between

concepts like schema, habitus and Verstehen. All of the aforementioned posit that meaning

and understanding derive ultimately from our interactions with others, most especially kith

and kin. Cultural identity is a matter of being but also becoming, as culture is constantly

evolving and changing. Yet “change” is never wholesale, particularly as it is experienced by

individuals; developmental psychologists highlight that “assimilation” (interpreting new

information through the prism of preexisting cognitive structures) occurs as readily as

“accommodation” (changing one’s cognitive structures). Likewise habitus, as accumulated

dispositions or ways of viewing the world that are rooted in unique social origins, can be

obstinate and inflexible. When it comes to culture therefore, change and continuity are rather

unhelpful terms. As Dolan (2010: 8) suggests, ‘continuity should not be understood as

stability or sameness over time, but as the contingent relations between successive social

formations.’

What follows is a chapter from my recent book New Vocabularies, Old Ideas (Peter

Lang, 2011), which examines cultural identity and advertising in the Republic of Ireland

(hereafter Ireland). In this chapter it is the relationship between cultural knowledge and

professional expertise that I am chiefly concerned with. Advertising interests me for a variety

of reasons but above all perhaps because of its perceived role as a shaper of identities and as a

mediator of meanings. In particular, I am interested in the notion that “culture matters” in

advertising; that advertisements carry culturally-specific meanings and messages which often

“travel” poorly. Culture in this context means Culture with a capital C (communal beliefs,

symbols, customs etc.) as opposed to celebrity culture, organic culture or any other variety. In

this book I attempt to tackle a very broad subject in a deliberately narrow way. The focus on

Irishness is used as a means of analytically linking advertising, as a commercial activity, and

advertisements, as socio-symbolic texts (though it goes without saying that the cultural and

the commercial are inextricably entangled in advertising). Irishness is both an input and an

output of the advertising production process; it is both produced and consumed in advertising.

Yet it is important to state from the outset that I am primarily interested in advertising

production rather than consumption and therefore while I consider some of the ways in which

Irishness has been represented in advertising texts, especially in the context of an increasingly

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globalised Ireland, for the most part this book focuses on how Irishness is constructed,

understood and used by practitioners in the field.

In line with the view, expressed perhaps most ably by Stuart Hall, that identities are

multiple and contingent and constantly “in process”, Irishness is increasingly envisioned as

plural and contested. This is often related to globalisation and mediated connectivity, which

not only challenge and disrupt the certainties of culture and identity (and the notion of a

smooth continuum from past to present) but which also offer new avenues for their

production and consumption. Likewise, recent large-scale immigration to Ireland has rapidly

transformed what was to all intents and purposes a mono-cultural society. As many have

observed, advertising acts as a mirror on society – albeit a distorted one. Advertisements are

often viewed as indices of cultural change, just as the advertising industry itself is often

imagined as fast-paced and constantly innovative. Advancing from an alternative position,

which borrows much from practice-based research, my book instead highlights the

routinisation of practices and representations in advertising. As mediated texts,

advertisements open up discursive spaces for debate and interpretation and permit a variety of

cultural representations. Yet they also contain symbolic codes (cultural grammar) which limit

the range of possible interpretations. Similarly, as I describe in the book, in interviews

advertising practitioners tend to emphasise cultural change while also (quite unconsciously)

implying an “alreadyness” of facts about Irish culture and identity (see Williamson 1978),

which suggests that flexibility and stability are not distinct or oppositional but closely

interrelated; that secure truths tend to keep the company of fleeing ones. More broadly,

though in much the same vein, Carey (2002: 292) reminds us that ‘fragmentation and

homogenisation are not opposites but mutually related trends of a single global reality’.

A final point requires mention. The title of my book is not intended to suggest a

Manichean dichotomy between “new” and “old”, nor should it be taken to imply that

advertising practices are never innovative. Rather, the title signals a circumspect position

towards the prevalence of the new and transformational in advertising discourse. Equally, it

highlights that despite the increasing contestation and pluralisation of Irishness – and

culture’s transformative capacity – essentialist notions of Irish culture and identity persist. In

short, that old ideas linger amidst the rhetoric of the new.

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Introduction

At the heart of every great piece of Guinness advertising is a compelling, resonant truth

between the brand and consumers1

This chapter foregrounds the uncertainty of advertising work and the ambiguity of

practitioner “expertise”. Like Kelly (2008), my interest is in the “emic” or vernacular

categories used and considered meaningful by my informants, as opposed to “etic” or

theoretical/abstract categories.2 What these cultural producers do and say – in particular the

“truth-making” they engage in – can never be meaningfully detached from commercial

interests or power relations. Knowledge and power are mutually implicated and articulated:

Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there is no point in

dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power […] It is not

possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge

not to engender power (Foucault 1980: 52).

“Truths” about consumers and brands (and indeed Irishness) – usefully illustrated in the

opening quotation of this chapter – are statements of expert knowledge in advertising; they

are designed to engender legitimacy in a field in which work is difficult to specify and

outputs are difficult to evaluate (see Keegan 1997: 16). Yet above all they are commercially-

motivated. As Cronin (2001b: 341) puts it, ‘what counts as true in this arena is determined by

the degree to which it is true to advertising’s commercial imperative’. Advertising tends to

operate with rather an “old” anthropological idea of culture, which is the idea that culture is

the bounded and enduring way of life of a particular people. This idea of culture conflates

individual and collective identity but most importantly, it makes culture amenable to

categorisation, measurement and representation. In this chapter I develop these ideas further

and investigate how advertising practice is informed by producer biographies. In doing so, I

draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about social and cultural capital to help explain the

prioritisation of experience (and in particular the importance given to being Irish).

I begin this chapter by examining how the tools and language of advertising

production have developed hand-in-hand. I suggest, for example, that increasingly

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sophisticated market research techniques have not only helped producers to identify trends

and lifestyles but equally, have enriched and enlivened their analytical vocabularies, enabling

them to both penetrate and comprehensively describe consumer “worlds” and “mindsets”. It

is for this reason that Astroff (1994: 103) argues that the “texts” of market research reports

are comparable to ethnographies; ‘market researchers “produce” a market by identifying,

naming, and defining a culture as a market segment’. In this process proximate cultural

knowledge appears extremely important and it is noteworthy that the majority of my

informants were born and raised in Ireland (and all were white). Of the mere three informants

who were not born in Ireland – all of whom were marketing managers rather than advertising

agency personnel – one was American, one was Dutch and one was English. For most of

those I interviewed, being born in Ireland and growing up in Ireland (in their terms being

Irish) were crucial to developing culturally-resonant advertising. While being Irish in this

sense hardly makes my informants uniform cultural beings, the perceived importance of

shared background, schooling, socialisation and ways of understanding (as collective cultural

resources) came across strongly in interviews. Likewise, on-the-job training and experience

were seen as crucial to developing professional instinct or “know-how” in advertising. In this

chapter I especially focus on this discursive affinity between constructions of nationness and

constructions of professional acumen in the accounts of my informants, which appear to

hinge on the notion of experience as practice. However, it is important to state that in drawing

from interviews with these workers I do not interpret their rhetoric as equivalent to aesthetic

articulation through practice but rather, following Foucault (1980: 52), I am attentive to how

such discursive phenomena are illustrative of the integration of knowledge and power.

In concluding the chapter I extend my analysis to a recent book on branding by the

Irish advertising practitioner John Fanning. Fanning’s The Importance of Being Branded

(2006) is important for a variety of reasons, not least because it is the only book of its kind

available in Ireland. His work is an entirely unique fusion of academic theory, professional

guidance and personal musings. In respect of my interests here, Fanning’s book offers a rare

illustration of how the advertising industry in Ireland is attempting to strategically respond to

cultural change. Fanning’s branding model, which identifies a series of “cultural

contradictions” in contemporary Ireland, is also exemplary of the “old” idea of culture in

advertising. While his book can hardly be considered representative of the views of all

advertising practitioners working in Ireland, Fanning’s status and reputation, built over

several decades working in this industry and through numerous published articles and papers,

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makes him something of a figurehead in Irish advertising and arguably the industry’s

foremost representative voice.

The tools and language of production

The advertising industry has long borrowed from (and at times contributed to) the theories

and methods of the social sciences and other fields. In a narrow sense, this cross-fertilisation

has not only provided superior tools and methods but has also helped to enrich producer

discourse, enabling more descriptively compelling accounts of consumers and brands. In the

early to mid-twentieth century the influence of cognitive psychology was particularly

powerful in the advertising field, leading to rather simplistic and linear models of

communication, such as Strong’s (1925) AIDA sequence (Awareness, Interest, Desire,

Action) and Colley’s (1961) DAGMAR model (Defining Advertising Goals for Measured

Advertising Results). From the 1960s onwards considerably more advanced models emerged,

using various names such as the brand image school (Ogilvy 1963; Joyce 1967), humanistic

advertising (Lannon and Cooper 1983) and the right-hand side of the brain approach

(McDonald 1992). At the core of these more complex models was ‘a more symbolic, intuitive

and emotional view of products and advertising in the scheme of consumer decision-making’

(Meenaghan 1995: 324). Increasingly, the advertising agency moved away from a passive or

empty-vessel concept of the consumer to consider instead ‘the multifaceted human’ (Garsten

and Lindh de Montoya 2004: 8).

Sean Nixon (1996: 91) highlights that in the 1980s the advertising industry had two

dominant paradigms of consumer segmentation to draw from in describing audiences:

demographics and attitudinal/motivational segmentations (also called psychographics). He

suggests that since this time the latter variety has become increasingly important – a

suggestion that is borne out by my research in Ireland (see also Lury and Warde 1997). While

advertising agencies continue to employ neo-positivistic methods like copy testing and

survey research, they increasingly make use of interpretative research approaches, such as

semiotics, ethnography and discourse analysis, which are considered more revealing of

“authentic” experience and more suited to “real-life” (see Cronin 2004b; Hackley 2002; Lien

2004).3 Of course it goes without saying that these imported techniques and theories ‘function

less as means of accessing ‘the real’ (or as accurate means of describing and targeting the

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market), and more as rhetorical means of legitimating advertising as a commercial tool’

(Cronin 2004b: 353). Nevertheless, their infusion has had a dramatic impact; while traditional

media categories (ABC1 etc.) based on class are still used in producing campaigns,4 it is

arguable (certainly in the Irish case) that these have largely been supplanted by the idiom of

identity. Just as the concept of identity has offered academics a means of bringing emotion

into social theory, it has also enabled advertising practitioners to generate more compelling

and vivid descriptions of consumers and brands.5 In short, advertising discourse is affectively

enhanced by appeals to identity; practitioners are called upon to humanise business strategy

and in turn, their language shifts towards the phatic.

Statistical descriptions of the target market may be useful for understanding the

market trends, or for defining the role of advertising, and such descriptions are

certainly essential to the making of media decisions. But when it comes to creating

the advertisement itself, there is a need to get behind the statistics to see the consumer

as a person in a fuller human form (Abdullah and Donnelly 1995: 154).

A similar argument was often made by the advertising practitioners I interviewed, as

illustrated in the following comments from an account manager:

“You can’t just put everyone into the bracket of ok, you’re twenty-five to thirty,

therefore you think and act this way. Those days of demographics are over. We kind

of look at life stages. We do a hell of a lot of consumer research. We talk to these

guys, we sit down with them, we go to groups with them, we ask them what they like,

what they don’t like, why they like it, and get inside their heads” (Account Manager).

Drawing on Burrell and Morgan (1978), Aidan Kelly (2008: 173) explains that advertising

agencies seek to understand target audiences from an ideographic or ethnographic

perspective. For creatives in particular he notes the importance of seeing the world through

the eyes of consumers in an “eisegesic” fashion (Mick and Buhl 1992: 335). In a phrase I also

repeatedly encountered in my research, one of Kelly’s respondents stressed the importance of

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“putting yourself inside somebody else’s head” (Kelly 2008: 276). The imperative of “getting

inside” the consumer’s head or of “entering their mind” is commonly expressed by

advertising practitioners and it is therefore unsurprising that their discourse is infused with

psychosocial terms like “mentality”, “sensibility”, “psyche” and “mindset”. (This last term is

especially important as practitioners dismiss a narrow alignment of identity and age).6 In their

descriptions of consumers and brands, categories such as class and income – while not

entirely absent – were often regulated to issues of secondary importance by my informants.

Instead, these workers tended to blur brands and consumers, implying (in almost

Durkheimian terms) a shared cultural attitude or disposition (see also Davidson 1992; Moeran

1996).

As well as enhancing the tools and discourse of advertising, academic borrowings

have also helped to alleviate the cynicism practitioners often encounter when presenting

themselves as “professionals”. In his ethnographic study of Swedish advertising Mats

Alvesson (1994: 543) noted that advertising workers often have difficulty convincing

customers of their know-how – a difficulty which instigates various discursive strategies

designed to enhance their expert standing and which explains why academic knowledge is so

highly attractive to them. Anne Cronin (2004b: 339) has likewise argued that understandings

which flow between advertising practitioners, their clients, and academics ‘function to

constitute important power-knowledge formations’ and that ‘academic soundbites’ are used

by the former to make recommendations appear more scientific and valid. Furthermore, as

Lury and Warde (1997: 92) point out, ‘claims to expert knowledge and judgement’

(especially about consumers) helps agencies ‘bolster their position relative to producers’.

In the interviews I conducted, my informants similarly expressed frustration at what

they felt was a general lack of recognition and respect for their profession. Many claimed that

their work is commonly viewed as a kind of “dressed-up” everyday knowledge or counterfeit

expertise. As Kemper (2001: 23) suggests, it is against this general cynicism that advertising

workers learn to defend their profession; ‘much of that self-reflection is apologetic and

defensive, but it nonetheless produces the profession’s vernacular theory’. In the case of

agency workers, these feelings are commonly directed at clients, who sometimes seem to

place more trust in the views of family members (in particular their spouses) than in those of

paid agency professionals (see also Marchand 1985; Alvesson 1994; Kelly 2008). For

example, in the following passage a managing director recalls an encounter with a

particularly insensitive client and his attempts to convince her to produce an advertisement on

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the basis of his wife’s doodling. Against this, the managing director constructs her agency as

an expert, comparing the advertising profession to the medical profession and in so doing

constructing herself and her co-workers as “brand doctors” of a sort:

“One client came in one day with his pen and paper and he had a drawing his wife had

done and it was some idea for an ad and was something like ever-decreasing circles

and I was like; “what does that mean”? Like, you don’t go into a doctor and say; “I’ve

a pain in my arm, I think I know what it is, I think I’ll take […] what do you think?”

[Laughs]. But for some reason everybody’s got an opinion on ads and it’s not seen as

a particularly professional industry” (Managing Director).

In this passage the informant is at pains to present herself and her peers as experts and she

implies that advertising’s ubiquity and taken-for-grantedness make it difficult for the lay

person to recognise professionalism in this field. The comparison with practitioners of a more

exact scientific bent and indubitable professional stature is intended to collapse such

oppositions. It is also used to underscore and validate the notion of advertising expertise,

which is again apparent in the following passage in which a marketing manager describes his

preference for qualitative research:

“Some people are very much for quantitative research but I don’t really believe in it.

It’s a bit like a doctor I guess – you can evaluate the symptoms but that’s not the

complete picture […] you’ve got to walk away with a sense of what the issue is and

that’s where qualitative research has the advantage. The answer often lies where

numbers can’t reach” (Marketing Manager).

In this passage a clear statement about marketing expertise is made (“it’s a bit like a doctor”).

However, the suggestion that the “answer” frequently lies “where numbers can’t reach”

points to the limitations of formal knowledge. In contrast, this informant constructs marketing

as a career based on ‘practical psychology’ (Hackley 2005: 222). He argues that quantitative

data provide an unacceptably incomplete picture of the consumer and that in the interests of

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“depth”, qualitative research has the decisive edge. Yet the answer he hopes the research will

provide is self-directed; it must provide him with an adequate “sense” of the issue.

In constructing powerful bonds between advertising and audience, and brand and

consumer, advertising practitioners often lay claim to an instinctive ability to recognise “fit”

between the various elements in this chain, enabling one to examine the relation between

myths of expertise as insight, myths of identity as knowing and myths of identification of the

audience with the object of representation. In the first instance, advertising practitioners are

prone to describe the advertising professional in terms of proclivity or acumen, resembling

Bourdieu’s (2000) dispositional theory of action centring on his concept of “habitus”. For

Bourdieu, habitus is ‘an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the

particular conditions in which it is constituted’ (Bourdieu 1977: 95). In short, habitus is a set

of dispositions or sensibilities. On the back of describing their work routines and activities,

my informants often sketched a repertoire of personal qualities or skills deemed suitable to

working in advertising. A creative, for example, stressed the diversity inherent in the industry

and insisted that one can gain a broader perspective on the world only if one is open-minded

and inquisitive, thereby constructing advertising workers as culturally omnivorous: “I’m at an

advantage because of what I work at because you wouldn’t be in the business very long if

you weren’t searching, finding things […] you’re always trying to at least look at something

slightly differently to how it’s been looked at before” (Creative). Similarly, an account

executive claimed:

“[Working in advertising] has shaped me more in the past five years than I would ever

have imagined or chosen because you look at things differently, you question things

differently, you are over-stimulated all day at work in terms of visual and thoughts

[…] you question things, and that’s not something that stops at five-thirty. You know,

I have learned to switch off and chill out but I think it has given me a perspective

that’s always there […] so I’m scarred for life! [Laughs]” (Account Executive).

This practitioner describes her work as a persistent and conditioned questioning of the social

world. An account planner likewise insisted that “multidimensional curiosity” and “synthesis

as a mental capacity in people is really, really important”, again drawing attention to the

cognitive and intuitive faculties of advertising workers. For my informants, on-the-job

experience was essential to this7; for example, an account manager insisted: “I think you find

out very quickly if you’re not suited to the world of advertising. You come in and you’ve just

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got to start running and it will become apparent very quickly if it’s not something for you.”

Here the practitioner constructs advertising as a fast-paced, dynamic industry, and insists that

it is on-the-job that one’s suitability is ultimately revealed. In a similar way, an account

planner claimed that advertising demands “a heuristic approach […] you learn as you go

along and your depth of knowledge expands.”

The suggestion that expertise is built on experience was expressed most forcibly by

creatives, who were often dismissive of formal research (and “book learning”) and tended to

favour the informal assimilation of their own insights (Hackley and Kover 2007: 69). In the

following passage a creative attempts to dispel the popular notion that creativity in

advertising is a skill easily acquired:

“I remember in fifth year in school thinking [advertising] would be great, [that] I

could do better than others were doing. You know, I think an awful lot of people feel

that but it’s not like that […] there isn’t an avenue or a college course […] To me the

best training is on-the-job training” (Creative).

In this passage the creative insists that advertising creativity is a skill mastered through

experience. While my focus in this book is on the cultural-national – which to some extent

precedes the professional – learning clearly encompasses a wide range of activities and

experiences and, as McLeod, O’Donohoe and Townley (2010) suggest, creatives learn their

craft by becoming “immersed” in the multiple, inter-related communities that constitute the

advertising world. Yet the above informant also suggests that creative ability is partly innate

– that his craft or artistic capacity is largely “untutored” (see Caldwell 2008: 41). To some

extent this middle-ground construction of creativity, in which intuition and experience are

united in practice, disrupts the age-old binaries of creativity learnt and creativity felt. More

directly in line with my interests here, however, Chris Hackley (1998: 127) analyses

creativity as ‘a feature of professional advertising discourse’. Adopting a social

constructionist framework, Hackley stresses that the question of what creativity “really” is or

what a creative person in advertising is “really” doing somewhat misses the point that

creativity is itself a social construction, ‘which cannot subsist apart from the ways people talk

about it’ (ibid.). While I do not have space here to examine the subject of creativity in

sufficient detail,8 the prioritising of experience and intuition – which are essentially two sides

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of the same coin – was most apparent when my informants were discussing their

understanding of (and communication with) the target audience.

Studies of cultural encoding in advertising emphasise the importance of knowledge-

sharing between producers and consumers, who typically occupy the same social milieu. As I

suggested above, much of the work of advertising involves the identification of “fit” between

brand and audience. A planner, for example, argued that it is necessary to find “a licensed

connection point” so that the audience is “complicit in that relationship”. This relates to

Hackley’s (2002: 215) suggestion that ‘advertising creativity can be seen to hinge on the

extent to which cultural meanings can be extracted from the consumer’s milieu and reformed

in juxtaposition with marketed meanings’. Producing a new campaign requires identifying the

brand’s current identity and positioning (product environment, competitor strategies,

demographics, industry shifts, policy changes e.g. the introduction of a smoking ban,

increased commodity taxes etc.) and deciding upon a new strategy, mindful that any change

must “make sense” to the consumer and, in the view of my informants, remain “true” to the

brand. In attempting to produce emotionally compelling and credible communication, the

cultural identifications of advertising practitioners (and especially those of creatives) are

deemed highly important, particularly where these overlap with those of the target audience

(Nixon 1996, 2003; Kelly 2008). For example, when discussing the source of his inspiration,

a creative I interviewed claimed: “[I] used to think that I need to watch more movies, I need

to read more books, I need to go to more art galleries but actually, that isn’t the answer at

all.” Instead, this informant insisted that it is more important to draw from his “own life” and

his “own experiences”. Another creative described this as “accessing something inside you

[…] something in your own life experience, something in your childhood, something in the

way you have formulated your own personality and the way you relate to other people”. In

short, the preferred route was to identify and exploit a perceived correspondence between

one’s own lifeworld and that of the target consumer. For advertising creatives in particular, it

seems that the more “personal” the solution to a creative brief, the more “authentic” the

resulting work will be. In this vein another creative commented: “I just love as much of your

own imprint as you can […] it also makes it easier to do because you’re not trying to […]

you’re kind of living with it, you’re having fun with it.” Here, the practitioner implies that

more interesting ideas derive from personal experience. His implication is that these ideas are

not artificially inseminated but borne of the creative’s own lifeworld; they are therefore more

genuine, appealing and worthwhile. He also implies a level of emotional commitment in the

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notion of “living” with the idea. Taken together, this emotional and experiential investment in

their work (combined with on-the-job training) helps to explain why creatives claim an

intuitive “sense”, a “gut instinct” and a “feel” for their work. However, my findings also

indicated that other practitioners too are prone to use such language. Indeed, it was not just

agency workers who appeared to rely on intuition; marketing managers also frequently

alluded to it as a guiding force in their decisions:

“You get to a stage where when we see ads […] I saw scripts that I hadn’t briefed and

they were just wrong. You just know. You look at it and you go; “no, it’s not us” […]

Sometimes you just can’t even say why but you just know that is, and that isn’t”

(Marketing Manager).

Another marketing manager I interviewed commented simply: “I know the brand and I know

the consumer. We inhabit the same world.” Hence, it is not merely the case that advertising

practitioners are interested in gaining “deep” and naturalistic views of the lives of consumers

via ethnography (Malefyt and Moeran 2003); the testimonies of my informants also

suggested the relevance of autoethnography as a means of accessing and utilising ‘knowing

from within’ (Shotter 1993: 19). In this respect, their accounts appeared to rest on a kind of

syllogistic logic by which practitioner, audience and brand were enjoined and mutually

appellated; in short, expressed “truths” about brands and audiences were to a large extent

based on the subjective truths of producers and the resulting texts were in large part the

reification of personal memory and experience.

An obvious problem with this, of course, is that whilst perhaps authentic in respect of

the producer’s life and experience, the extent to which the consumer is given actual

consideration in this process is wholly unclear. Relatedly, in highlighting the multiple

motives informing advertising practice (see Chapter 2), Liz McFall (2004: 75) argues that this

“introspective” tendency is ‘characterised far more by studied reference to peers and

competitors than by a ‘scientific’ analysis of the target audience’. This point is also raised by

Soar (2000: 431), who suggests that advertising producers (and creatives in particular) are

primarily a self-addressing group; ‘the members of this group draw sustenance from their

own ranks, that is, from the work of other cultural intermediaries’. Whatever the cause, it is

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therefore arguable that the consumer is sometimes rendered “virtual” in the advertising

production process (see Lien 2004).9 From a different vantage point, Hackley (2002) suggests

that it is not so much that consumers are absent from this process but that assumptions are

made about them which may have little basis in codified knowledge:

Observation (and codification and subsequent analysis and sorting) of consumer

behaviour is a powerful technique used in advertising but more powerful still is the

way the consumers are captured within a non-orthographic system of knowledge. This

system of knowledge is the largely tacit and un-codified knowledge of consumers that

resides within advertising agencies. It derives from the interpretive judgment of

agency staff charged with producing, managing or fostering creativity (Hackley 2002:

220).

In his ethnographic study of an Irish advertising agency, Aidan Kelly also found ample

evidence of the importance of such informal knowledge. In describing an advertising

campaign that he witnessed in production, Kelly comments:

The campaign preparations illustrated how informal knowledge enters the creative

process, with advertising practitioners continually drawing upon their own experience

to develop insights for advertisements. This could often border on solipsism, as

consumer research insights were utilised a lot less than their own reflections on

consumption, and it could be questioned how grounded the subsequent advertising

strategies were within genuine consumer research (2008: 254).

Several of my informants conceded this point and singled out creatives as particularly

culpable in this regard. They suggested that in drawing from their own lives and social circles

(see below), creatives can often end up “talking to themselves” in the communications they

produce (Soar 2000). Remaining entrapped in their own lifeworlds, creatives are sometimes

incapable of identifying with different audiences. As put by one informant:

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“There’s a copywriter I know who has never once, and he is one of the most awarded

copywriters in Dublin […] who has never once been on an international shoot because

he’s always setting his ads around the kitchen table with a family. So he writes little

sitcoms all the time for his ads, which are brilliant and entertaining and do the job but

it’s like, if you put all his ads [laughs] back-to-back it would be his autobiography

[continues laughing]” (Account Manager).

The above informant’s use of the word “autobiography” suggests that the habitus of the

advertising practitioner is to some extent materially imprinted and preserved in the texts he or

she authors (see Cronin 2004c). So much so, in fact, that for the above informant the

creative’s life story is traceable through his oeuvre; it functions as an autobiographical

archive.

Experience as practice

As cultural producers, advertising workers mediate and intervene in the circulation of

meanings about Irishness, arguably routinising them much more than contesting them. As the

above suggests, these do not do so from a detached vantage point but as socially embedded

individuals who are ‘as much the products of the culture in which they exist as are the goods

they deliver’ (Shumway 1996: 251). None of this, of course, is to suggest a singular social

experience or unified set of identities on the part of my informants, yet it does imply

something of a ‘shared cultural repertoire’ (Lien 2003: 173). In the previous section I noted

that intuition and informal knowledge play an important role in advertising production; in the

words of one of my informants, “most work isn’t researched” (Account Executive). “Insider”

knowledge of the target audience is invaluable because it is perceived to lend credibility and

authenticity to the work. For example, in the following passage an account planner describes

working on an advertising campaign that was directed primarily at a rural Irish audience. As

this individual was from Dublin, she explains that it was the insights of her colleague (who is

originally from Kerry) that were key to the campaign’s development. In this passage the

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planner avers that her colleague’s experiences growing up in a remote part of Kerry bestowed

him with a distinctive ability to identify with and relate to the target audience:

“Having someone like Jim [pseudonym], who was the former account director and he

was a Kerry guy and he really was, you know, even though he kind of lived in

Ballsbridge and was into the Dublin kind of life […] he is still who he is, you know.

And so I think in talking and working with him I definitely got a strong sense of […]

he did have a really good feel of the humour that would appeal. I do think it helps to

have a little bit of that outside-of-Dublin mindset and being outside looking in”

(Account Planner).

Above, the planner suggests that her colleague could “feel” what might resonate with the

target audience and that despite living and working in Dublin he had remained true to “who

he is”. Her suggestion is that the trappings of modern urban living did not usurp his rural

identity and that his past continues to shape his engagement with contemporary Ireland. The

notion of “being outside looking in” is suggestive of the detached social scientist but this

individual’s position is more complicated as he is, for the planner at least, legitimately both

insider and outsider. Nevertheless it is his “sense” of place and person that ultimately counts;

it is not learned but instinctive. His capacity to intuitively screen ideas that might resonate

with the audience is described by the planner as something innate, rather than trained or

acquired. The implication here is that learning is acquired through practice, which produces

knowledge that is tacit, embodied and non-linguistic. As a product of such “legitimate”

cultural insights, the resulting campaign was therefore viewed as authentic and credible.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has an obvious relevance here, yet so too does his

notion of capital. Rather than a singular concept of capital (the economic) Bourdieu’s work

reformulated and expanded Marx’s concept to include non-material as well as material

phenomena (Svendsen and Svendsen 2004: 239). Earlier I highlighted that the “human

capital” of advertising practitioners (i.e. their education and qualifications) is important, if

occasionally derided. The concept of “social capital” is also relevant in the advertising

context. Social capital exists as a durable network of social relations; it ‘inheres in the

structure of relations between actors and among actors’ (Coleman 1988: 98). Bourdieu’s

15

concept of social capital is relational and centres on the resources (and obligations) which

accrue to members of groups or networks. He defines social capital as: ‘The aggregate of the

actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or

less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu 1986:

249). In advertising, social capital exists in the network of agencies, media houses,

publishers, photographers, designers and countless other stakeholders which make up this

industry. It is also generated in award shows, conferences, workshops, and other industry

gatherings:

Being known on the industry circuit of award ceremonies and campaign launches and

participating in wider social networks is crucial for career success. Social capital, the

resources available to an individual or group as a result of belonging to a network

(Ancliff, Saundry and Stuart 2007), is integral to the pursuit of the successful creative

career (McLeod, O’Donohoe and Townley 2010: 3).

Perhaps more than anywhere else, social capital is activated in the bars, pubs and restaurants

frequented by advertising professionals. A number of researchers have highlighted the

importance of social and interpersonal relationships in the advertising field (e.g. Moeran

1996; Haytko 2004; Kelly 2008), which is complemented by a tendency for locational

concentration; ‘it is perhaps not surprising that major capital cities register the presence of

advertising companies: it is very common to find advertising agencies grouped in small

quarters of cities (for example, Soho in London)’ (Pratt 2006: 1883).10 In the early part of the

twentieth century the fashionable Abbey Street in the heart of Dublin City was, in Oram’s

(1986: 31) words, “the Madison Avenue” of Irish advertising. However, in more recent times

agencies have gravitated towards the south side of the city. In the Dublin advertising scene,

several pubs (such as O’Brien’s and the Leeson Lounge) are well-known haunts for

advertising and media professionals and when working in this industry I regularly met

colleagues at these venues. Such havens exist outside the formal structures of the advertising

industry yet they have a deceptively important business function; apart from being sites of

relaxation and banter they also help to foster trust and cooperation, which are crucial in an

industry built on relationships. Indeed, some have suggested that it is in ‘the clubs and after-

hours bars’ that ‘most of the real work of advertising occurs’ (Sennett 1998: 92).

16

The importance of “cultural capital” in advertising has long been recognised (Soar

2000). For Bourdieu, cultural capital constitutes a resource that is inherited through exposure

to particular cultural practices. It exists in three forms; he differentiates “embodied”,

“objectified” and “institutionalised” cultural capital. McLeod, O’Donohoe and Townley

(2009, 2010) recently conducted a study of British advertising creatives’ working lives using

life history interviews, which as a method attempts to locate personal biography within

cultural history. The authors concluded that despite the appearance of being an intensely

individualised system, the career trajectories of advertising creatives are determined to a great

extent by the wider community of practice (2010: 15). They also found that a creatives’ social

class and background (including family life, childhood and education) exert a powerful

influence on his or her individual career trajectory and approach to work. For example, those

of wealthier backgrounds were generally more confident and aggressive in pursuing creative

careers. These individuals benefitted considerably from upbringings which fostered creative

pursuits, from accumulated tacit knowledge gained through participation in specialist

advertising courses, and from their related ability to cultivate and exploit networks. Hence,

economic, human, cultural and social capital tended to work in tandem. In my own research,

several informants similarly suggested that social class may explain a perceived disconnect

between advertising producers and audiences. For example, a very senior advertising

practitioner suggested that creatives in Irish agencies tend to project a particularly bourgeois

view of society and have little understanding of broader societal divisions. He claimed that

they have difficulty “understanding the normal society in the country […] they tend to have a

kind of slightly Dublin 41, for want of a better expression, view of the society in which they

live and not enough experience of the reality of that society”. Nevertheless, McLeod,

O’Donohoe and Townley (2009: 1014) also found that “once in”, those with working class

backgrounds were able to draw upon their distinctive cultural and experiential reference

points and in so doing convert these into valuable cultural capital within the industry.

Tom Inglis (2008) makes the point that Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital can be

further subdivided into “local” cultural capital and “global” cultural capital. This is a helpful

distinction insofar as it allows one to differentiate (analytically) geographically-particular

ways of knowing and more geographically-transcendent forms, or ‘decontextualised cultural

capital’ as Hannerz (1990: 246) might refer to it. In Global Ireland (2008), Inglis describes a

1 Dublin 4 is informally recognised as Dublin’s most exclusive postcode. For a caustic and satirical take on

bourgeois life in this area see Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Guide to South Dublin: How to Get by on,

Like, 10,000 Euros a Day (2007).

17

need for “deep sociological tissue work” and makes considerable use of Bourdieu’s concepts

in examining how globalisation is occurring at various levels (the national, local and

personal) in Irish society:

What makes Irish people different are cultural practices that have been developed

over centuries and inherited through socialisation. Irish people have developed

different ways of bonding and relating to each other. It is these practices, derived from

a particular habitus or unquestioned predisposed way of being in the world, that

produce a collective identity and a sense of belonging. The more Ireland became

globalised during the latter half of the twentieth century, the more it entered into the

global flow of culture, the more it moved from a Catholic culture based on practices

of chastity, humility, piety and self-denial to a liberal-individualist consumer culture

of self-indulgence (Inglis 2008: 3).11

As I have already noted, with three exceptions all of my informants were born and raised in

Ireland. Although half of these had rural backgrounds and half had urban backgrounds, the

assumption of shared or common social origins was strongly apparent in the ways these

practitioners described the advertising community in Ireland. Indeed, most seemed to valorise

rural Irish life. A number of those from Dublin, for example, made a point of informing me

that their families were originally from rural parts of Ireland and that they felt a close affinity

with such places. An account executive from Dublin commented: “Well I grew up in Dublin

but my father’s family are from Spiddal and I spent a lot of my childhood there. I still go

there as much as I can. I feel most at home there. In fact, I think Irish people identify more

with the west”. The only American interviewed also went to lengths to describe her mother’s

rural Irish heritage. On one level, this implies that some notion of cultural authenticity is

embedded in the “practical consciousness” (Giddens 1984) of the advertising workers I

interviewed.12 Certainly their comments suggest some measure of belief in a shared national

habitus, which remains deeply embedded in Irish people’s identity and sense of self (see

Inglis 2008: 13). My informants often implied the existence of what Hederman and Kearney

(1982: 93) describe as a ‘primitive atavistic layer of Irishness’. In other words, they seemed

to suggest a kind of autochthonous or indigenous way of thinking, relating to a distinctly Irish

18

cultural subjectivity or cultural umwelt (see Kemper 2001: 90). Such ideas can also be

identified in advertising texts.

MasterCard’s ‘knowing what it means to be Irish’ television commercial – produced

in 2005 as part of its ‘Priceless’ campaign – addresses the indefinable, visceral sense of

‘being Irish’. The commercial depicts what we are compelled to believe is a pukka Irishman

as he strolls through Dublin encountering cliques of tourists. In contrasting authentic

Irishness with its ersatz reflection in tourism, the advert strives to identify with genuine Irish

experience, however, elsewhere I have suggested that this work essentialises Irish identity

and despite its celebratory intent, offers a particularly sterile and insular vision of Irishness

(O’Boyle 2006a: 109). This commercial also came up during the course of one of my

interviews and the informant who referred to it (a marketing manager) was equally critical of

it: “Yeah I thought they just did it wrong […] they had the guy sitting down in Temple Bar

and you’re like; “who the hell goes out in Temple Bar except tourists?” [Laughs] And that’s

why you have to be really careful because people are so cynical and it’s very hard to actually

resonate”. Here the informant points out that framing advertising within a discourse of

authenticity can be difficult to achieve.13 In the case of the MasterCard commercial described,

it is noteworthy that all of the blatantly “touristy” things (faux Irish memorabilia etc.) are just

as accessible with the card. Ultimately the genuine and ersatz are served equally well by it,

and despite claims to the contrary, ‘being Irish’ appears imminently purchasable. Diane

Negra makes a similar observation in her analysis of another MasterCard ad (broadcast in the

US), which recounts a daughter’s satisfaction in paying for her Irish mother’s return trip to

Ireland:

In voice-over narration that rings of quiet satisfaction and pride, the commercial

features the sights and sounds of mother and daughter’s heritage journey, ostensibly

detailing the precise costs of the heritage experience, but doing so only by way of

making the point that truly important purchases are ‘priceless’. The ad disavows its

own strategies, pretending that forms of identity knowledge and family history can’t

be bought, even while it shows us that they can (Negra 2001b: 232).

19

Another excellent example of the framing of Irishness as intuitive and visceral in advertising

is a campaign for the IDA entitled ‘Ireland – knowledge is in our nature’, which was part of a

promotional campaign on ‘The Irish Mind’ announced in the IDA’s 2005 Annual Report:

What is different in Ireland is the way we tackle issues, solve problems and seek other

new and better ways to meet needs […] it reflects a mindset and an approach that is

innate, and which is likely related to the creativity that has been manifest in the Irish

literary and artistic tradition. This is what we will be conveying in our new

promotional campaign on The Irish Mind (cited in Lonergan 2007: 163).

As Lonergan (2007: 164) argues, the IDA campaign suggests ‘that the national – an

essentialised category that is applicable to the life of the state in its entirety – may operate as

a mode of differentiating the state in a global marketplace’ and in this respect ‘the suggestion

that there is an ‘innate’ Irish temperament seems worryingly essentialist’. However, for

advertising workers this is hardly a cause for concern. As Brubaker (2004: 10) reminds us,

individual takes on ethnicity – especially those of ethnic specialists such as ethnopolitical

entrepreneurs who live “off” as well as “for” ethnicity – are not merely descriptive but also

performative and generative:

By invoking groups, they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being.

Their categories are for doing – designed to stir, summon, justify, mobilise, kindle

and energise. By reifying groups, by treating them as substantial things-in-the-world,

ethnopolitical entrepreneurs can, as Bourdieu (1991: 220) notes, “contribute to

producing what they apparently describe or designate” (Brubaker 2004: 10, author’s

emphasis).

In short, Brubaker reminds us (pace Bourdieu) that reifying groups is precisely what such

people are in the business of doing. In the case of advertising workers, privileging experience

enables the activation and utilisation of individual biographical knowledge. In turn, this

facilitates the making of certain “truth claims” in an ideological space that ostensibly rejects

such positivism. In this way

20

the analysis of actual experience is a discourse of mixed nature: it is directed to a

specific yet ambiguous stratum, concrete enough for it to be possible to apply to it a

meticulous and descriptive language, yet sufficiently removed from the positivity of

things for it to be possible […] to contest it and seek foundations for it (Foucault

1994: 321).

Those I interviewed constructed advertising as a practical craft and appeared to endorse

Wenger’s (1998) perspective on knowing and learning in practice – a perspective which

accords primacy to human experience and engagement in the world and adopts a critical

distance from formal education – yet equally, these workers are obliged to uphold certain

notions of codified professionalism. In his examination of marketing management texts,

Hackley (2003) similarly draws attention to the dominance of normative theory (or theory

built on practical experience) alongside attempts to position marketing as a legitimate

academic field. Hackley highlights the need to invoke ‘theory’ as a discursive resource in this

field, ‘while also rhetorically privileging practice over theory’ (Hackley 2003: 1334). This is

a dilemma that is never completely resolved in advertising. Nevertheless, one gets a sense

that these are not mutually exclusive positions; in effect, ‘becoming a professional is not a

process of substituting theory by experience, but a process of fusing theory and experience’

(Bromme and Tillema 1995: 266). For this reason advertising practitioners tend not to regard

personal life experience and professional experience as practices of a different sort (Roesler

2001) but rather they are prone to blur or circumvent any meaningful distinction between

these. As one of Aidan Kelly’s respondents (a planner) expressed it:

I think you know you can’t underestimate your personal experience […] I mean

experience can be another word for research. If you believe that research is

ethnography, observation is experience the line between intuition and experience and

research fades (cited in Kelly 2008: 279).

21

In the final section of this chapter I turn to examine a recent book on branding by the well-

known Irish advertising practitioner John Fanning. Fanning is Chairman of the McConnell’s

advertising agency, which is one of Ireland’s oldest advertising agencies (founded in 1916)

and which remains, somewhat uniquely, Irish-owned. He is also Adjunct Professor of

Marketing at Trinity College Dublin, a non-executive director of the Irish Times and a former

chairman of both The Marketing Institute and The Marketing Society. In addition to his

extensive experience working on many of Ireland’s leading brands, Fanning’s contribution to

scholarly debate, in the form of numerous papers and articles published in journals such as

Marketing and Irish Marketing Review, is exceptional within the Irish advertising

community. In short, John Fanning is neither a marginal voice nor an arbitrary choice but is a

central figure in Irish advertising, who is uniquely active in the complex nexus between the

media, business and academic spheres. As such, I suggest that Fanning’s book offers a unique

insight into some of the ways advertising practitioners imagine and construct their audiences

(as well as the cultural assumptions underpinning these) and offers a rare illustration of how

the advertising industry14 in Ireland is attempting to strategically respond to cultural change.

The Importance of Being Branded

The title of a recent book by John Fanning respectfully (and perhaps calculatingly) nods to

Oscar Wilde and sums up well the book’s overriding message. The Importance of Being

Branded (2006) presents an Irish perspective on branding that is the culmination of more than

a quarter of a century of writing and reflecting on the subject. Whilst not a memoir, Fanning’s

book draws heavily on his extensive experience working in the Irish advertising industry and

skilfully interweaves personal recollection and professional insight. If in one sense it is a

genealogy of Irish branding, in another it is the professional biography of a skilled

practitioner in the field. Fanning’s book is interesting not merely for its numerous

professional insights but also for its narrative form; frequent anecdotes and reminiscences

animate and personalise the material and bolster the suggestion that brands are complex

cultural, psychological and emotional entities that wield considerable power. However, for

my present purposes, I examine this book by the “grandfather of Irish advertising”

(O’Mahony 2004) as a strategic commentary on Irish cultural transformation and as

exemplary of the “old” idea of culture in advertising.

22

Fanning presents various case studies of successful Irish advertising campaigns and

comprehensively describes the evolution of marketing techniques and consumer research. He

notes, for example, the growing popularity of ethnographic research by marketers, which

aims to unearth deep beliefs and guiding values. Though often circumspect, essentialism is

inscribed in Fanning’s writing; throughout the book he stresses the importance of leveraging

brand “essences” and core “truths” and of grounding marketing communications in the “real

nature” of a brand. Likewise, culture is implicitly constructed as a kind of changing same. In

outlining the usefulness of “semiotics”, for example, Fanning cites Lawes (2002) who writes:

Instead of interrogating respondents, semiotic analysis begins by directly interrogating

the culture itself – it proposes that we are all creatures of our cultures and we perceive

the world, draw up our value systems, and make our group meanings in accordance

with the perceptions, values and meanings of the particular culture we belong to.

Fanning’s thinking is significantly influenced by the work of Michael Mazarr and Douglas

Holt. Mazarr is an American professor of national security studies whose chief interest is

geopolitical studies. For Fanning, Mazarr’s Global Trends: 2005 (published in 1999) ‘offers

some of the most profound insights into societal trends’, in particular its emphasis on the

growing importance of ‘paradox’ and ‘contradiction’ (ibid. 128). These ideas are also central

to the work of Harvard professor Douglas Holt, whose theory of cultural branding – outlined

in How Brands Become Icons (2004) – is used as a blueprint for Fanning’s own model. Holt’s

core thesis is that marketing companies should attempt to harness “deeply rooted” cultural

contradictions in individual societies.

Throughout his book John Fanning argues cogently for the importance of local

branding. He insists that marketers must be ‘alert to sociological change’ but should be slow

to relinquish cultural bearings. In particular, he stresses that local brands not only reflect but

also ‘form part of the character of a society’. In rather an anthropological vein, he insists that

local brands ‘are part of the sights and sounds and smells that give a place its character’

(2006: 229). For Fanning, there is no contradiction between asserting national difference and

competing as strongly as possible in the global economy. Yet he concedes that the logistics of

advertising production make it culturally reductivist; the need for consensus on the “core

23

branding proposition”, consistency of communication and single mindedness (as well as long

term planning, time and budget constraints) drive simplification and fixity into the process.

Hence, while acutely aware that national identity is constructed and dynamic rather than fixed

and static, Fanning recognises the benefits of maintaining a distinct Irish identity and regards

the national brand as an invaluable asset. Towards the end of his book Fanning describes six

possible directions for branding in the twenty-first century; cultural branding, fusion

branding, quaker branding, positional branding, trickster branding and puritan branding. Of

these, he suggests that cultural branding will be the most important. Inspired by Douglas

Holt’s work, Fanning argues that identifying cultural contradictions (such as “cash rich, time

poor”) will be key to the branding exercise going forwards. The foundational premise of

Holt’s model is ‘that iconic brands perform national identity myths that resolve cultural

contradictions’ (2004: 232). Following Holt’s lead, Fanning argues that twenty-first century

Ireland is especially rich in such contradictions and he identifies six which are particularly

worthy of attention.

The first cultural contradiction described by John Fanning is ‘freedom vs. constraint’,

which alludes to the change in Ireland from a socially conservative, largely Church-led state

to a putatively liberal and cosmopolitan one. While Irish people often celebrate freedom from

the bonds of tradition, Fanning observes that ‘sometimes it is only when we are freed from

tradition that we can appreciate the advantages of integrity, authenticity and continuity’

(2006: 326). In a similar vein his second cultural contradiction, ‘individualism vs.

community’, describes a loosening of traditional connectedness and, as its counter trend, a

growth in social atomisation. Although he considers growing individualism a natural

development, Fanning argues that economic prosperity is unlikely to erode altruistic,

communitarian feeling, which he describes as ‘deeply embedded in the Irish psyche’ (ibid.

328).

The third cultural contradiction, ‘globalisation vs. dinnseanchas’, Fanning considers

the most interesting to exploit. Put crudely, this highlights the tension between wanting to

enjoy the fruits of globalisation and wanting to preserve a sense of local identity. The Irish

poet Seamus Heaney (1980: 131) defines the Irish nature writing genre called dinnseanchas

as ‘poems and tales which relate the original meanings of place names and constitute a form

of mythological etymology’. For Fanning, ‘globalisation vs. dinnseanchas’ is a cultural

contradiction evident in many European countries but is one which is particularly acute in

Ireland, where the emotional loyalty to local counties, villages and townlands has always

24

been intensely strong. He suggests that ‘in twenty-first-century Ireland there is a feeling that

life is moving too fast, that we may be jettisoning too quickly tried and trusted ways of life

that have served us well in the past’ (Fanning 2006: 329). Fanning’s fourth cultural

contradiction, ‘affluence vs. affluenza’, may have diminished relevance in the recent

economic downturn, yet the intensification of wants Fanning describes and, by association,

the growth in anxiety, still strikes a chord in contemporary Ireland. Likewise, the fifth

cultural contradiction ‘control vs. chaos’ describes the conflict between, on the one hand,

empowerment gained through technological progress and, on the other, the intensification of

status anxiety. Both of these cultural contradictions as described by Fanning show

considerable parallels to the theory of “reflexive modernisation” advanced by Beck, Giddens

and Lash (1994). The sixth and final cultural contradiction described by Fanning is

‘conformity vs. creativity’, which refers to the tension between an increased confidence and

willingness to express personal thoughts and opinions versus an ingrained deference to

authority. Drawing on the insights of Professor Joe Lee (1989), Fanning claims that the

‘peasant residue in the Irish psyche confuses the distinction between necessary confidentiality

and furtive concealment’ (Fanning 2006: 336).

John Fanning’s The Importance of Being Branded (2006) is an insightful exposition

of the importance of branding in contemporary Ireland and an invaluable resource for

industry professionals. However, the text can be critically analysed in a variety of ways. For

one thing, Fanning’s book calls to mind the importance of “myth”, which Barthes famously

describes as a type of speech characterised by its apparent “naturalness”. For Barthes, myth

requires the suppression of politics and history and the purification of complexity. Myth

empties or “siphons” reality and abolishes all dialectics; ‘it organizes a world which is

without contradictions because it is without depth’ (1972: 143). As Kelly (2008: 42)

observes, ‘it is at the level of myth that most advertisements acquire social meaning, as they

juxtapose signifiers and signifieds to create a second order signification for the advertising

sign’. However, Barthes also points out that myths do not resolve contradictions: they only

mystify, mask over or give imaginary solutions, often through the purchase of commodities.

Hence, Fanning’s six contradictions may be utilised in advertising strategies but the

contradictions remain; the globalised Irish consumer is the object rather than the redresser of

these contradictions. However, for my present purposes, I suggest that Fanning’s book also

serves as an excellent illustration of how culture is understood and applied in advertising.

25

The “cultural contradictions” described by Fanning stem from a root notion or “old”

idea of culture. His contradictions are not merely descriptive of contemporary Ireland but

more importantly function as templates for professional appropriation; they are designed to

capture, curtail and make amenable to intervention. They do not do away with essentialism –

nor do they blandly “reconcile” past and present15 – but rather add newer, constructivist ideas

to the mix. Each duplet suggests that Irish culture is malleable enough to accommodate

change yet sufficiently fixed to dissect, appropriate and use. Amongst the features of the

“old” idea of culture Wright (1998) describes are: a bounded entity; a checklist of defined

characteristics; unchanging, in balanced equilibrium or self-producing, and; shared meanings

of authentic culture. On this last point, it can be observed that “authenticity” continues to

play a crucial role in Irish cultural production, as argued by Colin Graham. Indeed, Graham’s

“old authenticity” – a kind of Yeatsian cultural whole – is fundamentally compatible with

Wright’s old idea of culture, in particular in its ability to coexist with the market. The trope of

authenticity persists and defies definition, ambiguously fusing completeness and change:

‘Authenticity combines the prioritisation of ‘origins’ with the ‘pathos of incessant change’ –

again moving steadily through history. Its definition is a set of contradictions; static but

changing; conservative but adaptable; originary but modern’ (Graham 2001: 63).

As I have already indicated, in a typical (interview) sitting advertising practitioners

alternate between essentialist and constructivist understandings of Irishness. However, their

discourse, to paraphrase Boyer (2000: 17), rationalises a plurality of subjective experiences of

Irishness into an actionable cultural whole. In this way, the reification or commodification of

culture is crucial to advertising’s professionalization project. Despite the standard caveats

which acknowledge the constancy of change, this changing same notion of culture functions

to reclaim and recentre:

Such essentialist definitions of culture are usually modified, appended often with

caveats asserting that, in fact, “culture” is not static but ever changing, and

additionally, that people, being individual, have differing levels of identification or

ties to their cultures. These caveats, do not, however, substantively affect the

functional conceptualization and deployment of “culture” in the discourse, since the

idea of changeability and fluidity are assigned not to the category of “culture” itself,

but the specifics of characteristic attributes. Remaining embedded within the caveat is

26

the identification of a static core “culture” which can be modified and differentially

adhered to, since variance must center around something, and modification

presupposes a core entity which can be modified but remain discernible as itself (Park

2005: 23).

If the Irishness advertising practitioners describe is a “dodgy territory” (as put by one

informant) that is less bounded and increasingly uncertain, the underlying cultural assumption

is of a stable core; flux is championed but fixity is presumed. This enables advertising

workers to navigate uncharted cultural seas without diminishing their putative expertise.

Irishness, though uncertain, can be emplotted and assimilated assuming the right expert is at

hand. Despite being a dodgy territory, it is one for which – to paraphrase Marianne Lien

(2004: 60) – the advertising profession can seemingly provide a map.

Conclusion

Focusing on their valorising of innate “knowing”, this chapter attempted to explain why

advertising practitioners regard their own life experience as practice. I suggested that in order

to produce compelling and resonant advertising, producers ostensibly rely on research, yet

this is often subordinate to intuition, instinct and informal knowledge. I also suggested that

the conceptual arsenal of Pierre Bourdieu (in particular his concepts of habitus and capital) is

especially useful in accounting for how individual background, education and experience

inform the work of advertising producers. For Bourdieu, habitus refers to schemes of

perception; like cultural capital it implies a disposition, a habit or ‘unthinkingness-ness in

actions’ (Grenfell and James 1998: 14). However, the prioritising of actual experience in the

discourse of advertising workers should not be seen to dismantle positivist tendencies in this

industry but rather is indicative, I suggest, of a certain rapprochement between thoughts of

the positivist type and reflections inspired by phenomenology (see Foucault 1994: 321).16 In

fact, this chapter emphasised that in advertising, “knowing” (which connotes action, doing

and practice) must always become sellable “knowledge” (which connotes things, elements,

facts, processes and descriptions) (Faulconbridge 2006: 526). This reflects the truism in

advertising that any population that is to be defined and treated as a market must be

27

identifiable, accessible, measurable, and profitable (Astroff 1994: 106). Such thinking applies

equally to culture. Even the cultural contradictions described by John Fanning hold firm to

the notion that culture is ipso facto an objective, knowable thing. It is this view of culture as

an objective body of knowledge that constitutes the legitimate foundation for the building of

interventions; the reification of culture makes it measurable and actionable, which is crucial

to advertising’s professionalization project. If advertising practitioners are hesitant to define

Irishness, this does not prevent them from claiming certain “truths” about it; the territory may

be “dodgy” but it is navigable nonetheless. Being Irish (and it seems being able to source

one’s identity in the rural realm) is constructed as the necessary compass; it constitutes a

particular and non-transferable competitive advantage (see Appiah 2005). However, these

Foucauldian truth claims are chiefly the products of exogenous pressures put on agencies to

produce such legitimising and competitive rhetoric (see Cronin 2004a: 72/3). In other words,

it can be suggested that these workers are merely responding to a demand for truth in a global

marketplace in which particularist knowledge is endlessly pursued and lived experience is

considered a gateway to the esoteric world of the consumer.

Notes

1. This quote is taken from an interview with Gavin O’Ruairc (Guinness Marketing

Communications) on The Media Show, City Channel March 18 2009. Similarly, in an

interview with the Sunday Business Post in December 2003, Mark Ody – then Marketing

Controller for Guinness – described the focus of his brief to Irish International (an Irish

advertising agency) as “getting back to being Irish and being extremely proud of being Irish,

both in terms of valuing the tradition of being Irish, and also looking forward to the future of

a prosperous and commercially successful Ireland” (O’Mahony 2003). Much like the

language used by O’Ruairc, Ody added that Guinness commercials remain popular because

they “genuinely communicate from a basic human truth, and that truth will have lots of

different expressions” (ibid.).

28

2. ‘It is important to appreciate that emic and etic are not necessarily dichotomous but, as

Pike (1967) puts it, they often represent the same data from two points of view’ (Daymon and

Holloway 2002: 137). Thompson (1996: 390) adds that the main point of using these

concepts is ‘to capture a difference in interpretive emphasis rather than present an absolute

distinction. In an emic analysis, the goal is to articulate the system of meanings that compose

the worldviews of the participants, whereas etic interpretive categories seek to link these emic

meanings to more global theoretical terms and/or structural patterns’.

3. Consequently, several researchers suggest that the work of advertising practitioners shares

much in common with that of social scientists, and anthropologists in particular (Astroff

1997; Hirota 1995; Kemper 2003; Malefyt and Moeran 2003; Moeran 2005). ‘If every human

being is a folk ethnographer by default,’ Kemper (2003: 35) tells us, then ‘anthropologists

and advertising executives are ethnographers in the strict sense of the word.’

4. Traditionally, media populations have been analysed using the following socio-economic

groups: A (upper/middle class), B (middle class), C1 (lower middle class), C2 (skilled

working class), D (other working class), E (lowest level of subsistence), F1 (large farmers:

50+ acres), F2 (small farmers: 50- acres) (http:// www.medialive.ie ).

5. The centrality of emotion in identity is highlighted in the work of Melucci (1988, 1995)

and Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2000), amongst others. Thoits (1989) suggests that

increasing academic attention to emotion is partly due to the acceptance that humans are not

entirely rational-economic beings and partly a consequence of epistemological challenges to

traditional scientific methods (which have traditionally been dominated by ideas of

objectivity and researcher impartiality). While identity has offered academics a means of

bringing emotion into social theory, it is noteworthy that many researchers still overlook it

(see Vogler 2000).

6. Arguably in just about every sense the category of “youth” is expanding to include

biologically older people (O’Boyle 2006b).

7. ‘This includes knowledge of current trends in the look of ads (and of films, magazines,

etc.); an understanding, largely the result of experience, of how the ad concept will look once

it has been printed in a newspaper or shot for a commercial and therefore what will work

technically; an intuition about what will appeal to the audience in terms of stylization, tone of

voice, pacing, use of humour, cultural references (such as the use of celebrities or inside

jokes), and so on’ (Soar 2000: 421).

8. While it is impossible in a book of this length to tackle a subject like creativity in

advertising in any depth, it is clearly central to advertising practice and discourse. Creativity

is a complicated subject that has a particular affinity with identity, in large part because both

concepts owe their acceptance into academia not to the social sciences but to psychology. In

the contemporary world, ideas about the self and development, and particularly the view of

identity as a reflexive project (Giddens 1991), imply an enhanced role for creativity.

Likewise, creativity (along with ‘flexibility’) looms large in accounts of organisational

change and enterprise culture (du Gay 1996). In advertising, creativity is considered an

29

“asset” and a “competitive advantage” of agencies. However, despite its ostensible import,

creativity assumes an ill-defined form in many accounts of advertising and is frequently

presented as self-explanatory. Vanden Bergh and Stuhlfaut (2006) highlight that creativity in

advertising has traditionally been approached as an entirely individual matter, with the classic

definition found in legendary copywriter James Webb Young’s (2003) five stage process of

ingestion, digestion, incubation, inspiration and verification. As Vanden Bergh and Stuhlfaut

(2006) point out, such a conception is almost exclusively concerned with the creative’s

subconscious mind and the processes therein. In contrast, Vanden Bergh and Stuhlfaut –

along with various others such as Smith and Yang (2004) and Reid, King and DeLorme

(1998) – emphasise the importance of social systems and cultural context. Nevertheless,

practical methodological approaches to creativity in advertising which remain individually-

focused and construct creativity as instinctive rather than intellectual remain commonplace

(e.g. Cotzias 1996). Like Vanden Bergh and Stuhlfaut (2006), Hackley (1998: 126) highlights

the inescapably social dimension of creativity in advertising, yet he insists that this form of

creativity cannot simply be reduced to the social: ‘A purely sociological level of explanation

would eliminate the sense of human agency and creativity which the industry itself regards as

a fundamental and distinctive part of creativity in successful advertising.’ Hence, it can be

rather safely argued that creativity in advertising is partly learned and partly felt, both

culturally inspired and commercially bent, and likely demands at least four levels of analysis:

sub-personal (genetics and neurobiology), personal (psychological, cognitive, personality,

motivation), impersonal (domain) and multipersonal (field) (see Gardner 2001: 130).

9. Lien (2004) concedes that the term “virtual” is misleading in the sense that flesh and blood

consumers clearly exist. Nevertheless, her point is that ‘the term ‘consumer’ is not

meaningful with regard to identification at a personal level. It does not offer any lasting

source of identity […] the term ‘consumer’ is, in other words, a part-time activity

reconstructed as a person, and reclassified as ‘hedonist’, ‘traditional’, ‘retro’ or ‘generation

x’, whatever term appears appropriate in the light of current fads of market research’ (Lien

2004: 61).

10. Advertising agencies in Britain and Japan are concentrated in London and Tokyo. Other

international centres of advertising include Paris, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf,

Sydney, Toronto and Amsterdam. Although New York still dominates in the United States,

the industry is somewhat different to other countries insofar as there are important secondary

centres of advertising, such as Chicago and Los Angeles (Leslie 1995: 410).

11. Kemper’s account of how Sri Lankan advertising workers assume the role of “cultural

brokers” is particularly fitting in the context of Inglis’s description of habitus:

Advertising people acquire some of their knowledge about Sri Lankan society from

simply growing up in Sri Lanka, being formally educated, and having adult

engagements that range from reading to conversation. But what is distinctive about

those views is what they have learned from practicing their profession. They pursue a

business that keeps them in the company of foreign clients and Westernized Sri

Lankans, but their livelihood requires their speaking to and for the generality of Sri

30

Lankans. Their position makes them cultural brokers as much as folk ethnographers,

and because they receive regular feedback about their ability to recognise affinities

between certain commodities and certain consumers, they are self conscious about

their role as modern day beachcombers (Kemper 2001: 132).

12. Giddens (1984: 375) defines practical consciousness as ‘what actors know (believe) about

social conditions, including especially the conditions of their own action, but cannot express

discursively’. The conflation of ‘know’ and ‘believe’ here implies something akin to

intuition. In this I am reminded of Clifford and Marcus’s (1986: 8) account of the Cree hunter

who, when asked to tell the whole truth under oath, hesitated saying; “I’m not sure I can tell

the truth […] I can only tell what I know”. In this statement “truth” is deemed less important

than that which is instinctively “known”, a position that aligns rather well with the views of

the advertising practitioners examined in this book.

13. According to Amy Fuller (Vice President for Brand Building, MasterCard New York):

“What’s made ‘Priceless’ so successful is its authenticity about how we fit into people’s

lives” (Elliott 2004). Similarly, Joyce King Thomas (Executive Vice President and Executive

Creative Director of the New York office of McCann-Erickson) remarked: “We’re always

looking for ways to make the campaign resonate better with consumers” (ibid).

14. Of course, neither Fanning’s book nor the interview disclosures analysed in this book

should be ‘taken to stand for “the industry” in a totalizing or unified sense […] While “the

industry” label may be significant ideologically and rhetorically, the term covers over a great

cultural heterogeneity and diversity of economic and trade interests’ (Caldwell 2008: 7).

15. While the notion of “reconciling” past and present oversimplifies considerably,

contemporary Ireland does offer numerous examples of attempts to give worldly progress a

traditional inflection and to demonstrate ‘the simultaneity of the universal and the particular’

(Robertson 1992: 172). Boucher (2004: 63), for example, describes the preservation of a

‘core Irishness’ by the Irish political elite, which recombines ‘traditional’ features of Irish

society and culture such as Gaelicism, Catholicism, agrarianism and rurality with ‘modern’

features based on urbanism, secularism, liberalism and consumerism.

16. Likewise, it should be noted that although “intuition” is suggestive of individual

autonomy, it hardly signifies an escape from discourse and socially constructed subjectivity:

‘Intuition is the form of reason that is not yet fully articulate, that may never be such. It

requires proximity because it cannot be annexed; however, that does not make intuition

simply “internal” to a subject rather than intersubjective or communicative. Philosophical

descriptions of it as internal, and personal experience of it as such, betray not a truth about

intuition but the continuing subject-centred and logocentric interpretation of mental processes

in modernity’ (Phelan 1993: 609).

31

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