Sean Nixon, Advertising Cultures (review)

Abstract

At the core of Sean Nixon’s very engaging Advertising Cultures lies a straightforward proposition. Nixon proposes that, in order to understand advertising in particular, and commercial applications of creativity in what are increasingly termed the ‘creative industries’, there is a need to understand the workplace cultures of people engaged in creative advertising. Nixon does this through a tightly argued ethnographic study of creative workers in London advertising agencies, and the workplace cultures of these agencies. From this, he draws out a unique and very valuable series of observations about creativity, its relationship to gendered identities (particularly to masculinity), and the relationship between competitiveness and collaboration in highly competitive commercial workplaces.