“We’re not here anymore”: The cultural dislocations of creative organizations in outlying regions

Abstract

The marketing communications industry, whose most visible manifestation can be found in advertising, is closely connected to creativity—so much so, in fact, that this creativity constitutes one of its cornerstones. Within the industry itself, the cult of creativity is legitimized, reaffirmed, and maintained via various competitions, the press, and professional associations, without mentioning the discourse of agencies that put creativity at the heart of their business models, adopting it as their very purpose. Yet this creative doxa, associated with prestigious clients and major campaigns, and spread virally by social media, appears to be the province of the major metropolitan agencies. What about the small agencies outside the major urban networks that are animated by the same doxa, but that rarely or never acquire high-profile clients, win awards, or produce creations whose public notoriety would legitimize their creative value?

This article sets out to investigate how organizational dynamics are actualized, maintained, and debated; in short, how they are cultivated in the name of this regional creativity, particularly in the context of small advertising agencies in outlying regions (SAORs). Taking up the ideas of ventriloquism and based on two case studies, we will demonstrate how regionality percolates into and constantly (re)appears in the discourse of these agencies’ employees. Moreover, we will demonstrate, using five “iconic figures” of creative culture, – namely seclusion, defense, distinctiveness, maturity, and expansiveness – that to maintain such a creative culture outside the legitimizing structures, SAORs must dislocate to a “creative elsewhere”.