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Tomas Ariztia. Unpacking insight: How consumers are qualified by advertising agencies. Journal of Consumer Culture, July 2015; vol. 15, 2: pp. 143–162.

By describing how consumers are qualified and mobilized in advertising agencies, this paper aims to contribute to this increasing body of literature that explores ordinary marketing and advertising practices, knowledge, and devices. This is done by unpacking and analyzing a particular aspect of routine advertising work, which is the production and circulation of insights about consumers in advertising agencies. This article argues that producing insight involves performing a particular type of qualification of the consumer that relates to two specific processes. Firstly, the article describes these practices in terms of an extensive process of mediation that involves the deployment of progressive definitions of products and consumers that pass by different actors in the agency and through which production and consumption are connected in the very local and specific space of the advertising agency. Secondly, the article argues that this process of mediation goes together with a process of “purification” that involves performing a specific version of the consumer aligned with creative advertising work. Furthermore, the article describes how this process involves considering some specific consumer qualities and descriptions (mostly interpretations about possible connections between goods and consumers) and leaving others asides. It then identifies this last operation as a particular type of cultural calculation. This argument is empirically supported by evidence collected from 40 interviews with advertising professionals and ethnographic fieldwork carried out at eight advertising agencies based in Santiago, Chile.

Antonio Pineda, Víctor Hernández-Santaolalla, and María del Mar Rubio-Hernández. Individualism in Western advertising: A comparative study of Spanish and US newspaper advertisements. European Journal of Communication, August 2015; vol. 30, 4: pp. 437–453; first published on June 2, 2015.

Following an extended tradition in cross-cultural research about individualism and collectivism as defining features of national cultures, this article aims to go in depth by taking into account the implications of these complex concepts. Under the premise that advertising is a product that reflects cultural values, this article focuses on a comparative content analysis of newspaper advertisements from the United States and Spain, two presumably different Western countries as far as the individualism–collectivism continuum is concerned. The conclusions obtained challenge some theoretical assumptions regarding this topic. The evolution of Spanish society as mirrored by advertising is discussed as well.