Negotiating creativity: An ethnographic study of selling advertising services.

Abstract: Advertising creativity has proven to be highly subjective and its inherent tensions becomes apparent when studying how advertising services are sold. An advertising agency is often evaluated through a pitch which creates an asymmetrical power relation where the client commonly receive the advertising they are perceived to want, which is not necessarily what they need. However, the agency rather aim to utilise the potential of their knowledge in order to present a solution to the client’s problem. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the pitch work, preceding the actual pitch presentation, unfold in practice. By adopting a sociomaterial perspective this ethnographic study follow the pitch process of an advertising agency in Sweden. The results show that the agency made their knowledge explicit through the use of different objects in order to create a common knowledge of how to solve the predetermined problem. In this perspective the tensions are not to be solved, but rather negotiated at a boundary in order to accumulate the knowledge from the different specialists’ involved in the creation of the advertising. Thus, agency managers need to focus on negotiating and transferring the agency’s knowledge, rather than presenting the final advertising.