Temporality and templarity in an advertising agency
François Bouchetoux, University of Leicester
Gavin Jack, University of Leicester
Understandings, and critique, of the nature, role and effects of the institution of advertising are most typically refracted through grand narratives of economy and society which serve to reify and demonize it. Moreover, such narratives typically rely on the deployment of a set of problematic dualisms (e.g. culture v. economy; authentic v. inauthentic value; modern v. post-modern) which limit expression of the complex and ambiguous relationship advertising, and advertisers, have with society.
Aside from these big pictures of advertising and society, very little research attention, with notable exceptions (e.g. Moeran, Miller, Nixon, Cronin), has been given to so-called ‘practice-based’ accounts of advertising which focus on the everyday routines of advertisers as an occupational group. What exactly, for instance, do advertising creatives do? What is their everyday routine? How do they ‘create value’? And how might an account of their everyday practice differ from grand narrative accounts of their institutional role in society?
This paper will address these questions using data constructed from an ethnographic study of a French advertising agency. It will focus on two inter-related sets of creative practices found within the agency: those of temporality (i.e. practices associated with the construction, use and experience of time) and templarity (a neologism we use to refer to practices of ‘belief-making’ in the agency), both of which call attention to the quasi-religious nature of advertising work.
Drawing upon Bataille and Bergson, we describe and discuss how, for instance, creatives takes advantage of the chaotic nature of time in their work to displace an internal, invisible time (duration) with an external, visible time. The way in which creatives transform the unpredictable productivity of duration into a predictable and timely production seems to point to an overarching effort to externalise, legitimise and control it. We discuss the implications of this and other ways in which time in a ad agency can be articulated through metaphors of ‘rhythm’ and ‘prediction’. It is in terms of the practice of prediction that we articulate an analogy between the advertising agency and a place of worship. Creatives spend much time rationalizing events, fabricating cause and effect, justifying their (un-)productiveness in similar way, it might be said, to the manner in which the church explains our nature, locating it perhaps in original sin, and preparing us for death.