ADVERTISING EVANGELISM AND AUTHORSHIP

The average citizen may look upon advertisers as a group of vandals best to be kept under house arrest, but, according to Roland Marchand, advertisers, at least those in the 1920s, look upon themselves as guardians of the progress of modernity, the catalysts needed to bring the products from manufacturers to the eager consumer. More on that in my presentation

As we always delve into the subject of authorship, with Madison Avenue, the situation is complex. In the 1920s, the copywriters would write copy, then it must be approved within the ad agency, then it must be approved by the client, the seller of the product. Do the copywriters earn full authorship, or does the head of the agency deserve it, or is authorship shared, perhaps as in the corporate world of Kompare?
Or does the client deserve the authorship of the copy, as they have a vested interest in the result of the copy?

Does the researcher, who delves into the mind of the consumer for the agency to mine it for profits, have a say in authorship, since his reports are vital to the advertisers?

We must not forget the consumer. His inputs to the researchers give him a bid for authorship. Even more, the very lives of the agency, the client, and to some extent, the researcher depend upon the buying whims of the consumer. Could he not demand authorship? I would side with the corporate approach. Being sole author is not helpful should the sales campaign fail!

Returning to the copywriters, they did try to wrest authorship by insisting upon signing the copy and making themselves known to the public. More conservative heads stopped this. The primary reason was agencies were not free of the hand of Bourdieu, and there was that tension between the autonomous principle of hierarchization, and the heteronomous principle of hierarchization. With the first, the copywriters were proud of their work and interested in art for art’s sake, and wished to be recognized. With the second, the cooler heads understood that the primary mission of the advertising agency, even above that of evangelizing modernity, is to compel the consumer to buy something. Anything that could distract from that primary mission must, to them, be considered heresy.