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Winsome Kirton

THE INDEPENDENT, PROFESSIONAL CREATIVE

Taking a look within an advertising agency, what does the creative process entail? Responsible for the 300 to 1,500 ads seen daily per person (according to various studies), who is the Creative and who can be a Creative? Can the person who plays this enigmatic role, the author of a substantial amount of our visual culture (yet most popularly related to through the television series Mad Men), be anyone with access to the appropriate digital technologies? Does a legitimate Creative need to have established lines of communication with the Client?

The proliferation of consumer-generated ad content on social networking sites and crowd-sourced ad assignments facilitated by the Internet are changing the traditional Creative's scope of work. Does the Creative conceive of an idea and its implementation which is then executed by a third party production team, or is the Creative a jack-of-all-trades? These are a few of the questions that launched my research into the professional agency Creative and his/her eminent future in Adland. As the Creative is a huge contributor to our contemporary visual culture, this shift in their role within the advertising industry and his relationship with the consumer will have implications on the way we generally receive and digest visual information.

Sector C: Art Practice and Technology

Advisers: Sharka Hyland (FNAR) | Tanya Jung (COLL)