1st Edition

Creativity and Advertising Affect, Events and Process

By Andrew McStay Copyright 2013
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    198 Pages
    by Routledge

    Creativity and Advertising develops novel ways to theorise advertising and creativity. Arguing that combinatory accounts of advertising based on representation, textualism and reductionism are of limited value, Andrew McStay suggests that advertising and creativity are better recognised in terms of the ‘event’. Drawing on a diverse set of philosophical influences including Scotus, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, Schiller, James, Dewey, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Bataille, Heidegger and Deleuze, the book posits a sensational, process-based, transgressive, lived and embodied approach to thinking about media, aesthetics, creativity and our interaction with advertising.

    Elaborating an affective account of creativity, McStay assesses creative advertising from Coke, Evian, Google, Sony, Uniqlo and Volkswagen among others, and articulates the ways in which award-winning creative advertising may increasingly be read in terms of co-production, playfulness, ecological conceptions of media, improvisation, and immersion in fields and processes of corporeal affect.

    Philosophically wide-ranging yet grounded in robust understanding of industry practices, the book will also be of use to scholars with an interest in aesthetics, art, design, media, performance, philosophy and those with a general interest in creativity.

    Andrew McStay lectures at Bangor University and is author of Digital Advertising, and The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising and Deconstructing Privacy, the latter forthcoming in 2014.

    1. Introduction  2. Strangely revealing  3. The poetics of advertising  4. A Playful combinations  5. Sensational dimensions  6. I’m with stupid: vivid living, transgression and dirt  7. Creativity and the Counter-Enlightenment  8. Embodying culture  9. Concrescence and the unfashionably new  10. Excessive media  11. Conclusions

    Biography

    Andrew McStay is a Lecturer in Media Culture at Bangor University. His previous publications include The Mood of Information (2011), Digital Advertising (2009) and  Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context (2009, co-authored with Long, Wall, and Bakir).

    "Creativity and Advertising would be useful to Ph.D. students studying the philosophy of creativity or teachers who teach in-depth about creative processes and their potential." - Heather Crandall, Gonzaga University, Communication Research Trends