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Re-imagining the ad-agency
S. Nixon
In this piece Nixon talks about the changes in the relationship between client and advertisement agency, as an example of the intense relation between culture and economics. Explain this.
The ad agency and its business relations are usually considered in purely economic terms, but with recent debates within this realm, the importance of culture surfaces quite clearly. With economic recession amongst others, clients of the advertisement industry were forced to re-evaluate the use of marketing and the budget that can be spend in this facet of business. This re-evaluation instigated a more thorough investigation within the advertising industry itself. It dealt with the ways advertisement should work and the best way to get paid for these services. At this point the relationships are very much a question of economics, dealing with question and demand, and the ways to stay innovative within a certain market segment. However with this re-evaluation of the advertisement industry, a question was raised that dealt not so much with the economic position of the industry, but with the identity of it. It had to consider how it should act and how it relates to the cultural climate. It was argued that the tactics of the industry, where out-dated and had difficulty surviving within a new a changed cultural climate. The traditional and economic practice of commission payment, for instance, was preventing the industry to use the potential of new media devices at its fullest, because it emphasises too much on the effect of the end product (the advertisement), not on ideas related to it. It becomes clear within this example that economics alone does not deal sufficiently with factors shaping the relationship.