McStay, Andrew. Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events, and Process.

Crandall, Heather

McStay, Andrew. Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events, and Process. New York, New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 173. ISBN 978-0-415-5194-0 (cloth) $130.00; 978-0-41551955-7 (paper) $41.95; 978-0203-49220-8 (ebook) $39.95.

If you are keeping an eye out for new ways to think about advertising and the creative process, then read Andrew McStay's new book, Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events, and Process. Motivated by the problem that creativity is "without a clear common referent" (p. 10), and because creativity is of paramount importance to the advertising industry, McStay examines creativity deeply to figure out what constitutes creativity, where creativity emerges from, and how creativity works. In so doing, McStay opens a space to consider the sensational side of creativity.

The direction McStay takes to accomplish his goal is interdisciplinary, philosophical inquiry. Chapter 2 of Creativity and Advertising covers historical context and how creativity has been differently conceived by luminaries over the years, as well as how creativity has been phenomenologically engaged in culture. He uses philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty to show where advertisers need to delve into "all properties, attributes, and connections about the object that typically go unremarked upon, passed over, and unsaid" (p. 14). Chapter 3 continues a "practitioner perspective" and details what McStay considers the "poetics of advertising." The idea being that advertising was once "simply representational" and bound, but is now more of an event. Examples include the Old Spice Guy tweeting answers to your questions or products sponsoring community painting projects. Chapters 4 through 9 expand into "the broader topic of creativity." McStay takes readers through advertising's symbolic nature and its combinatory aspects before exploring biosociative approaches to advertising, and ends by considering advertising as affect and sensation. On affect, McStay argues that affect and sensation matter to the mind and body, to neuroscience and psychology, and to qualia. At this point, McStay fully immerses into philosophy to turn our thinking away from rationalist approaches of "being, knowing, and creating" toward a transgressive understanding of creativity and its relationship to bifurcation and Counter-Enlightenment thought. His deepest philosophical section is on reality and the subject, and it is here that McStay discusses at some length thinkers like Kant, Nietzsche, DeLanda, Bergson, and Bohn. He also argues for the centrality of pragmatist philosophers such as Dewey, Rorty, James, DeLeuze, and Guattari. McStay's arguments and philosophical comparisons are fascinating, but also where his overall aim fades until Chapter 10 where he brings the focus back with discussions of media ecology, media affordances, and transductions. For media ecology, McStay uses Ong, Postman, and Strate--all solid choices, though he talks about the power of medium without direct connection to McLuhan yet in the midst of McLuhan's other thoughts.

Toward the end, McStay offers possibilities for the future of advertising that, I assure you, are easy to understand by this stage of his argument. The concluding chapter revisits the original foci of 1) showing how creativity in advertising is not just representational but sensational, and 2) showing how creativity includes acts of will in situations without clear determinants" (p. 2). If these foci are not clear here, they will be by the time you are done with the intellectual journey that is Creativity and Advertising.

It is uncommon to read a book with an ambition as impressive as McStay's, and success depends on strong organization, which he uses. He introduces a concept early, refers to how it will deepen in later chapters, and then delivers on said deepening. The result is a cohesive treatment of what sometimes seems confusing. At under 200 pages, McStay's book appears short, but this is deceiving. While his aim is to write in an accessible way, the nature of his undertaking requires some jargon. He offers an apology about this unavoidable situation and sometimes meanders into complicated language and elaborate sentences, but does not betray readers. Where he is clear is when he writes chronologies of the field of advertising, trends and definitions, and again when he discusses examples of advertisements dubbed creative by the advertising industry. Where he is complicated is during philosophical discussions, the bulk of his book. McStay does claim his book will be "most enjoyed by those of a philosophical disposition," (p. 2) and further along says his book is not to scan, it takes time and should be read closely (p. 6).

Of affect, McStay argues that the visual eclipses other ways of thinking about affect to the detriment of the practice of creativity in advertising. To remedy this, McStay reintroduces qualia, feeling, emotion, neuroscience, and the "value of sensation and poetic appreciation as a subject of inquiry, over abstraction and intellectualization" (pp. 154-155). He lays the philosophical ground for more thinking on affect because in his words,

   A key problem with affect, however, is that
   although we can see its effects, recognize its
   diagnostic power, understand that theoretically it
   better fits with the practices of advertising than
   representational approaches, in itself it currently
   possesses very little in the way of explanatory
   and analytical power. It draws attention to something
   extremely important, but it is not easily
   studied. (p. 154)

McStay locates affect as occurring at the individual level, and while initially this sounds reasonable, it does not account for how huge swaths of people have similar affective reactions to certain ads or movie scenes or sounds. He is careful to mention that Creativity and Advertising is squarely about creativity rather than affect, and that advertising is more of a case for thinking about events, affect, and processes.

As you read Creativity and Advertising, McStay's likes and dislikes emerge. He takes every opportunity to rail against textual semiotic approaches to analyzing advertising and the visual "hegemon" that keeps us stuck. He talks about the "textualist sinkhole," and that textualism as a tool is tidy yet "their clarity is won through limitation." In this way, his arguments begin as critique and end in animosity. McStay is an Alfred Whitehead fan. Whitehead was a process philosopher who wrote in the '20s and '30s. McStay uses Whitehead's ideas of concrescence to talk about the creative process. Concrescence is "the means by which what is novel might emerge" (p. 17). It is the in-between point, the place where ideas can go one way or another. While author biases are clear, his book is not redundant.

Creativity and Advertising would be useful to Ph.D. students studying the philosophy of creativity or teachers who teach in-depth about creative processes and their potential. Particularly useful is his own curiosity. McStay starts paragraphs with "one might wonder ... " or "some obvious questions are ... " He poses questions and speculates on the possibilities, an invitational tone for both learning and thinking.

--Heather Crandall

Gonzaga University