ARTICLE Currencies of Commercial Exchange Advertising agencies and the promotional imperative

Abstract. Drawing on interviews with advertising practitioners, this article explores the circulation of understandings of research in the advertising process. These understandings flow between advertising practitioners, their clients, and academics, and function to constitute important power-knowledge formations. Focusing on agencies ’ imperative for self-promotion in a competitive, unstable market, I argue that attention to this circulation of knowledges is crucial for a fuller understanding of advertising as a commercial and social force. In the last section, I explore the interface between academia and the commercial realm and argue for a most subtle analysis of its inherent power-knowledge relations. Key words academic investments ● advertising agencies ● advertising practitioners ● advertising research ● power-knowledge ● promotion ADVERTISING HAS POTENT CULTURAL ASSOCIATIONS and is inflected by meanings and forces ascribed to contemporary capitalism. Often conceived as a predicate to the expansion of consumer demand and hence capitalism’s ideological thrall, advertising occupies a central place in analyses of contem-porary society. Many studies focus on advertising’s textual artefacts and analyse the sophistry they are thought to deploy as a weapon of persuasion. In this approach, advertising tends to be seen as a ‘cultural economy of signs’ (Goldman and Papson, 1998: 1) which creates ‘structures of meaning’ (Williamson, 2000: 12). Most commonly, advertising is understood as