Agency Practitioner Theories of How Advertising Works

Abstract

In-depth interviews with senior-level agency practitioners (creative, planning, and account directors) were conducted to explore their thoughts about how advertising works. The study was designed to add to the understanding of the academician-practitioner gap in advertising by uncovering practitioners' hypothesized knowledge autonomy in the context of the sociological theory of professionalization. Results provide evidence for the existence of such autonomous practitioner knowledge schemas. Agency practitioners' core theories include a two-step "break through and engage" process and the longitudinal "mutation of effects" idea. They also believe in the primacy of emotional effects. Creativity is identified as the singularly most important factor in effectiveness, and agency professionals resisted any other regularities that may curtail creativity and result in formulaic advertising. Practitioners also emphasized the importance of defining boundary conditions when making claims about how advertising works, and identified strategic campaign objective, product category, medium used, and historical time period as key domains to consider. Implications for both academia and practice are offered, as are possible future research directions.