Abstract

In today’s media-saturated world, we are not only surrounded by edited material such as newspaper articles, but also constantly bombarded with advertisements. For some time, advertising has assumed the status of a pervasive form in symbolic environments. It is also a powerful tool of social communication, interpreting, negotiating and reinforcing our views of everyday life, as well as relationships between people, nature, time and the world. Furthermore, it drives our desire for material prosperity, thus playing a vital role in today’s consumer society. It is, thus, not surprising to find a developing field of study into advertising from this perspective. The literature that has developed has attempted to decode advertisements and undertaken critical analysis of the role played by advertising in contemporary culture. However, existing literature seems to lack interest in the organizational structure under which advertising is actually produced by practitioners. This is surprising in light of the above-mentioned status of advertising, namely its powerful and ubiquitous nature in media culture. How can one fully understand the meaning of advertising without a good knowledge of the immediate economic and industrial framework in which advertising is produced? A body of sociological literature called the ‘production of culture ’ perspective promulgated by Peterson (1994) has asked this very question in investigating many subfields of the cultural sector ranging from visual art to music and literature over the last 20 years. Pratt (2004) endorses this view that more attention needs to be paid to the organization of production, and the interaction between production and consumption, in order to better understand the ‘cultural economy ’ (see Scott, 2000). The lack of academic focus on the industrial side of advertising becomes even