Advertising Ideas in the Digital Age: Changing origins, methods, and roles
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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There is often a reverence for the intuitive creative practice of key individuals when developing advertising. In this personal creative practice, the advertising material is conceived through subjective means, which are dependent upon the experience and perspective of the practitioners involved. However, there has also been an evolving application within advertising practice of social sciences generally, and psychology particularly, which has come to inform this use of creativity in advertising agencies. This has brought a systematic and allegedly objective approach to the creative techniques used to capture people’s attention and influence their attitudes and behaviour. There are implications for professional techniques, and critical evaluations of advertising from this dynamic evolution in industry practices. Central to this dynamic is the role played by the advertising idea. This concept has evolved, albeit inconsistently, into being a formative, summative and evaluative tool within creative development processes. This thesis explores and evaluates the essential attributes of an advertising idea within the context of normative practices by examining changes in advertising practice over the past forty years. These industry techniques have evolved to blend intuitive and informed creativity and are being further impacted by the emerging digitalisation and datafication of marketing communications, enabled by attitudinal and behavioural data from social media engagement and the ‘big data’ behavioural and transactional data that comes from the use of marketing and sales technology. This emerging new practice has been influenced by deductive and analytical techniques involving these new sources of data, which have become central to managing the delivery of advertising that can be shown to meet the objectives set for it. By considering this development of practice, this thesis raises questions about whether the application of creativity to advertising development is being changed by these emerging techniques, and if it is, what that means for the concept of the advertising idea. This thesis develops a theoretical and practice-led perspective about whether the advertising idea will continue to be a relevant tool for advertising development in the future, or whether the new methods have made it unnecessary.
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