Creativity and Advertising

10 Excessive media

On the first introductory page of Decoding Advertisements Judith Williamson (1978) remarks that the world of advertising involves separateness from the medium by which an advertisement is carried. For Williamson the significance of advertising, structures of meaning and the ways we might analyse these have little to do with media. From the perspective of 2013, this is no longer as tenable as it once might have been and certainly at the award-winning end of the spectrum, the work that agencies do is sometimes more akin to media engineering. While disinterest in media held well for criticism of advertising from its professionalisation in the 1920s until the 1990s and perhaps into the 2000s, increasingly media do make a difference ...