Secret Agencies: How a Critical Media Scholar Got Inside Advertising

Abstract

Abstract: This access narrative recounts how I conducted ethnographic research on the lack of diversity within advertising agencies in New York City during the summer of 2010. It positions this effort as a response to the scholarly tendency to make semiotic analysis the dominant mode of critical advertising studies and follows cultural studies scholar Richard Johnson's call to "decenter the text" and move the attention of cultural studies toward what Marx called "the hidden abode of production." My hope is that this essay will help demystify my process for securing entrance to agency settings and thereby encourage emerging critical scholars to generate new methods of understanding (and disrupting) the closed social networks that enable and perpetuate White opportunity hoarding throughout the creative industries.