A new paper on how digitisation is changing creativity in advertising, published in the Journal of Marketing Management
Istituto di marketing e comunicazione aziendale
7 febbraio 2025
In a new article published in the Journal of Marketing Management, Dr. Yeşim Akmeraner-Kökat and Prof. Léna Pellandini-Simányi show how digital devices shape creativity in advertising practice, using a sociomaterial approach. Drawing on the Callonian notion of agencements, the paper argues that digitalisation does not simply override creative practice and ideation; rather, the dynamic interactions between different human and non-human actors configure creative advertising practice and creative outputs.
The paper identifies two modalities of digitalised creative work, which the authors conceptualise as human-led and device-led creative practices and delineate how digitalisation both empowers and constrains creativity in different forms of creative production. In human-led creative practice, creatives still lead the creative process, although the format requirements and metrics of the platforms constrain their role. In contrast, in device-led creative practice, creatives’ role is reduced to providing an initial input, while the creative process is fragmented by the modular templates of the AI-powered device, which empower a modular form of creativity. The authors theorise this process as a redistribution of creative agency across human and non-human (formats-metrics-templates) elements that dynamically constitute advertising practice.
The paper contributes to market studies and sociomaterial approaches to marketing by exploring the invisible routine processes that shape advertising as a market device. It extends debates on agencement, which have examined how devices constitute marketing and consumption practices in a network of human and non-human actors, by showing that with digitalisation, creative agency becomes more distributed to the technical elements of the advertising assembly. Finally, it contributes to the creative industries literature by uncovering a new type of creativity which is automated, modular and fragmented.