Advertising and Anthropology

Ethnographic Practice and Cultural Perspectives

Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Robert J. Morais

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining theory and practice, Advertising and Anthropology is a lively and important contribution to the study of organizational culture, consumption practices, marketing to consumers and the production of creativity in corporate settings. The chapters reflect the authors' extensive lived experienced as professionals in the advertising business and marketing research industry. Essays analyze internal agency and client meetings, competitive pressures and professional relationships and include multiple case studies. The authors describe the structure, function and process of advertising agency work, the mediation and formation of creativity, the centrality of human interactions in agency work, the production of consumer insights and industry ethics. Throughout the book, the authors offer concrete advice for practitioners.Advertising and Anthropology is written by anthropologists for anthropologists as well as students and scholars interested in advertising and related industries such as marketing, marketing research and design.

Part I
Introduction

1
Anthropologists In and Out of Advertising

This book is written by anthropologists for anthropologists and others who are interested in advertising and related industries such as marketing, marketing research, and design. We hope that our experience, views, and recommendations will be of value to those who work or plan to work in these kinds of enterprises and contribute to anthropologists’ study of organizational culture, consumption practices, marketing to consumers, and the production of creativity in corporate settings. We write as anthropologist-cum-business practitioners who have spent substantial time working within advertising agencies. For a combined forty years, we have been employed by advertising agencies large and small in such disciplines as account management, strategic planning, and marketing research. We have collaborated with a wide array of agency professionals: account executives, account planners, creative executives, media planners and buyers, producers, digital specialists, product, package and Web designers, marketing research firms, and financial managers. Our clients have included brand manufacturers in a broad range of categories, including automotive, digital communications, financial services, foods and beverages, health and beauty aids, hotel and hospitality, household cleaning products, pharmaceutical devices and medicines, industrial products, and technology. As of this writing, Timothy Malefyt leads an in-agency ethnographic unit that collaborates with creative executives, account managers, and account planners on client brands and new business pitches across the BBDO worldwide network. He has been in this role for nine years and previously held account planner positions in two other advertising agencies for six years. Robert Morais spent twenty-five years employed by advertising agencies engaged in account management, account planning, and advertising research. Currently, and for six years, he has been a principal at Weinman Schnee Morais, a marketing research firm that works with advertising agencies and marketing corporations.

When we first embarked on our business careers, we were integrated into our companies as business employees, not anthropologists. We were hired to be account managers (Morais) and account planners (Malefyt) and were trained by our agencies to master the requirements of our jobs. We were educated in the fundamentals of advertising account management and strategic planning; we learned how to be market researchers, data analysts, focus group moderators, brainstorming facilitators, soothsayers, communications planners, strategic thinkers, and writers of the blueprint for advertisement development, the creative brief. We gained the ability to work intimately with colleagues and clients, often mediating across conflicting departments, disciplines, personalities, and objectives. We were taught to respect and include our clients’ and colleagues’ points of view in our thinking, especially when their views contrasted with our own. We grasped early on that we should look toward the goal of representing consumers’ beliefs and practices about brands while inspiring and building teamwork among our colleagues and clients. Throughout our professional lives in advertising, we have experienced the intensity, thoughtfulness, and hard work entailed in developing an advertising agency’s strategic and creative products. These efforts include preparation for meetings internally and with clients, multiple discussions and plans of action with teams before and after meetings, the exhaustion of long nights and weekends working on a new business pitch, the responsibilities for brand analysis based upon consumer attitudinal and behavioral data, media planning, and sometimes contentious relationships with our clients, the demanding corporate executives who manage a brand and hire our firms. We have felt the emotional ups and downs of winning and losing accounts, and we have generated strong friendships with our colleagues. Over many years of immersion in what might be called extended fieldwork, we have become advertising professionals in addition to anthropologists. Our everyday business employment requires us to focus sharply on our clients’ brands and the business of our companies, which informs an analysis of the inner workings of advertising agencies. We contribute our best strategic thinking, manage staff and client relationships, and operate within tight deadlines and budgets. Our day-to-day mission is very different from that of cultural anthropologists in academia, where professors often occupy siloed domains of expertise and power. However, like academics, we have often lost ourselves in the demands of our work and navigated the politics of cooperation and competition.

Through all of this, we have a developed an experientially based understanding of how the advertising business works and the process by which disciplines and hierarchies come together to increase clients’ brand sales and grow an agency’s client roster. This phenomenon of having “gone native” is what now allows us to analyze our advertising agency experience in a unique way and write about agencies from an insider’s vantage point. For the past several years, we have stepped back and studied the advertising industry as anthropologists, and we have continued to be involved as advertising and marketing research professionals. Through our on-the-job experiences and by systematic observation and interviews with colleagues and clients, our analysis of our work lives has comingled with our day-to-day responsibilities. We are more than participant observers; we are, in a variation on John Sherry’s term, observant participants (Sherry 2003: xii). This collection includes updates on work that we published previously as well as new essays. This volume, then, constitutes our report to date from the field. One purpose in writing from the native’s point of view is to amend Reinharz’s contention that “there are few published accounts of [going native] since those who have gone native cease to publish” (1988: 168).

The experience of having gone native or “pure participation” (Dewalt and Dewalt 2000: 263) can be analyzed in the current academic context of self-reflexive participant observation in fieldwork. Reflexivity involves the challenge of first confronting and then sorting out one’s own experience in a situation in contrast to that of the other. Typically, the task of the anthropologist in fieldwork is to work with informants to access the interplay between self-reflection and immediacy by constructing grounds for mutual experience (Rabinow 1977: 38–39). This dialectic between self and other is what lies “at the heart of reflexivity that defines anthropological knowledge” (Behar 1996: 82). Indeed, when one is fully immersed in the fieldwork experience and, more precisely, the lives observed, the knowledge gained is not mere data collection; it provides a sense of the self as the other. This is what Polanyi (1958) calls tacit knowledge and is developed in and through the self, both to inform the interpretation and to incite the production of knowledge as something that is lived and experienced. In studying the Yolmo ways of healing, anthropologist Robert Desjarlais (1992), as described in Dewalt and Dewalt (2000: 264), trained to become an apprentice shaman. Beyond observing Yolmo culture, Desjarlais found it necessary to learn how to move and experience his body as a Yolmo shaman. He notes that, as he gained cultural knowledge, learning how the Yolmo sip tea, catching the meaning of jokes, and participating fully in their everyday lives, his interactions shaped his “understanding of local values, patterns of actions, ways of being, moving, feeling” (Desjarlais 1992: 26). This degree of pure participation goes beyond just producing knowledge of another’s way of life. It is personal knowledge that is embodied as daily living and is experienced in sensing, feeling, and thinking. As James Clifford writes, the ethnographer who fails to fully experience the world of the observed through participant observation finds it more difficult to critically examine research assumptions and beliefs and even themselves in relation to those they study (Clifford 1997: 91).

We have fully experienced the world of advertising in Clifford’s sense. Moreover, our dedication to both our jobs and to anthropological observation has produced a duality in our professional lives. We are at once business professionals and anthropologists who study the business profession. Our views as business professionals and anthropologists who present and publish academically are not mutually exclusive. Extending on our response to Reinharz (1988: 168) above, we hope that professionals in business and academia, often cast at odds with each other, find greater integration and collaboration. We have accomplished this objective in our careers. Malefyt is a part-time professor and presents at academic conferences; Morais guest lectures at universities and participates in academic conferences. Both of us publish scholarly books and write articles for peer-reviewed journals. Working in a corporate setting and contributing to the academic community is not an either/or proposition. We urge those engaged in the field of business anthropology to join us in forging connections between the academic and practicing domains if they are not yet doing so.

We also have opportunities to reflect on our findings from a broader cultural, social, ethical, and economic perspective than is available in academic settings alone. Whereas most academic anthropologists choose a subfield, a people, a focus on some aspect of culture and spend years developing thoughts around a single fieldwork episode or revisiting a familiar location, we are exposed to myriad situations, ideas, thoughts, locations, cultural and personnel issues. On any given day, a new client can be won. During the course of a day, we can be working on projects for an orange juice brand, an industrial lubricant, and a dental product. Each of these categories presents a different set of clients and consumers and marketing challenges as well as call for distinct analytical and conceptual frameworks to address business opportunities. Working across brand categories and consumer experiences has necessitated that we take a broad view of our projects and see them as part of a network of connected cultural systems. When, for example, we observe creativity expressed by mothers facing the daily decision of what to prepare for the family dinner, we note interconnections with ways they depend on their cell phones, Internet and mobile devices to keep track of family wishes, changes in individuals’ schedules, last-minute recipe searches, and so forth. While the brand categories in this scenario are distinct—a food company and a telecommunications company—this confluence of experiences is precisely why an anthropological perspective that cuts across manufacturers’ categories is advantageous in business. Anthropological approaches to consumers’ lives take a holistic approach that incorporates the range of behaviors that people are involved in on a daily basis. This intersecting of lives, resources, and technology is only one illustration of research projects that link our thinking with the larger landscape of consumer experience, category fluidity, and cultural interconnectivity. This process also demands that we engage a range of intellectual approaches within anthropology (structural, functional, psychological, cognitive, symbolic, semiotic, practice theory, historical, etc.) and from outside of anthropology, in disciplines such as personality and social psychology, linguistics, literature, and philosophy. We also incorporate observations and insights from popular consumer culture. All this enables us to understand consumers more fully and serve our clients’ objectives in addition to making contributions to scholarship.

Throughout this book, we consider advertising from experience “near” and experience “far” viewpoints (Geertz [1983] 2000). We examine how advertising agencies produce creative work from both an internal organizational and consumer research perspective. The extensive literature from a cultural studies perspective examines advertising as a producer of symbols and form of social discourse, which circulates broadly in the public realm. Advertisements have been labeled an empire of signs (Baudrillard 1994; Lash and Urry 1994), a discourse of persuasion (Jhally 1987), a public ideology (O’Barr 1994), a circulation of ideological “texts” for public consumption (Williamson 1978), “social tableaus” of society for immigrants (Marchand 1985), and a system of symbols (Sherry 1987). Advertising messages compete in “sign wars” (Goldman and Papson 1996: 2), reinvent cultural difference through commodity image production (Mazzarella 2003b), and have been described as an “absolute simulation … the superficial transparency of everything” (Baudril-lard 1994: 87). This scholarship draws attention to the ways signs and symbols are produced and circulated in society.

The essays that follow are from a different perspective. We join a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists who analyze advertising culture and its practices from within agencies and among its people (Couvson 2009; Malefyt and Moeran 2003; Moeran 1996, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010; Zwick and Cayla 2011). Brian Moeran, in particular, in his groundbreaking 1996 advertising agency ethnography, provides one of the first in-depth and thorough accounts of advertising from within a Japanese advertising agency. Other scholars and anthropologists have also described personal roles in industries related to and including advertising (Baba 2006; Cefkin 2009; McCreery 2000; Squires and Byrne 2002; Sunderland and Denny 2007; Wasson 2000; Zukin 2004). Concurrent with the ascent of ethnography in the realm of consumer marketing and research (Malefyt 2009; Sunderland and Denny 2007), the value of anthropology as a discipline is noted by many social scientists and journalists (Ante 2006; Denny 1999; Inglessis 2006; Louis 1985; Miller 1990; Monari 2005; Morais 2009a; Murphy 2005; Sanders 2002; Wasserman 2003; Wellner 2002). McCracken has been particularly vociferous in applying anthropology to business practices (for example, McCracken 2009). Evidence of growing interest in business anthropology includes the appearance of general academic books in the past several years (Jordan 2003; Tian, Lillis, and van Marrenijk 2010). EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) focuses on business anthropology, and the Society for Applied Anthropology and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology have published articles, newsletters, and blogs on marketing and advertising topics. The International Journal of Business Anthropology was launched in late 2010, and the Journal of Business Anthropology is planned for 2012. There are numerous online communities that discuss business anthropology, many of which engage advertising and marketing issues. LinkedIn, a popular business networking site, includes such groups as Ethnography Forum, Media Anthropology, and the Anthropology Network. Clearly, the trend in business applications of anthropology is growing. Yet, despite all of this activity, there remains a lacuna in the body of literature that includes insider perspectives on the advertising industry from the practitioner’s point of view. We are not aware of any other work, other than our own, that reflects an extended career lived as advertising professionals and then described from an anthropological perspective.

Advertising Agencies in the Early Twenty-First Century

Advertising is one component of a marketing mix that includes a wide range of programs, including brand innovation, pricing, packaging, and promotions such as coupons, among other techniques, that are designed to increase consumer purchase of brands. Naomi Klein (2000: 32) writes of the importance of advertising in a new age of branding, where its role has changed “from delivering product news bulletins to building an image around a particular brand-name version of a product” (2000: 6). U.S. manufacturers are committed to advertising as a necessary development of brand image, and they devote substantial time and money to advertising strategy, development, production, and placement. In economic terms, advertising agencies have rebounded from 2008 revenue lows (Kirby and Chesler 2011). After two years of slumping fortunes, the Big Four global advertising agency holding companies—Omnicom, the WPP Group, Interpublic, and Publicis—showed growth with 2010 revenues returning to 2007 levels (Gillette 2010). Total advertising expenditures increased 6.5 percent in 2010 to finish the year at $131.1 billion, according to the Kantar Media Report (2011).

Despite recent financial improvements, advertising agencies face major challenges in the twenty-first century. More than ever before, agencies must demonstrate their value as business partners to their clients. To do so, they are compelled to substantiate the effectivenes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF ADVERTISING AGENCIES
• PART III: APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY IN ADVERTISING AGENCIES
• PART IV: CONCLUSION
• Notes
• References
• Index