Creating a creative industry: Australian advertising agencies in the 1960s-1970s

In the post-industrial age, the creative industries and their economic contribution have attracted growing attention from scholars and policy-makers alike. Although there has been significant discussion about what industries constitute the creative industries, it has been widely and uncritically accepted that the advertising industry is one of them. However, discussions of the creative industries and their formation have been largely ahistorical. This article addresses this absence by focusing the evolution of the advertising industry in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. Although advertising agencies increasingly embraced creativity as a defining feature of their operations, it was tempered by the business side of advertising practice. By examining the different images of the advertising industry as well as the tensions between them, this article uses a historical approach to demonstrate that creative industries are neither fixed nor inherently creative