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FIGHTING A LOST CAMPAIGN: AUSTAC AND AUSTRALIA'S ADVERTISING INDUSTRY

‘Politics, culture, and technology’, claims Juliann Sivulka, ‘helped shape advertising in the 1960s’ (290). In the United States, this combination of influences gave rise to the socalled Creative Revolution. This Revolution within advertising ranks produced advertisements that utilised ‘creative playfulness . . . to make the receiver feel better about advertising’ (Heller). Avis’ famous confession ‘Avis is only No.2 . . . we try harder’ and Volkswagen’s tongue in cheek advertisements illustrated how ‘scientific methods gave way to inspiration, intuition, and creativity’ (Sivulka 302). However, the changes did not stop there. As Thomas Frank observes in The Conquest of Cool, the Creative Revolution ‘ . . . came quickly to mean an appeal to nonconformist rebellion against the mass society in ads as well as a non-hierarchical management style’ (89). It would take a little longer before these winds of change reached Australia, where the circumstances that had given rise to the Creative Revolution in the United States only emerged during the 1970s. In Advertising International, Armand Mattelart contends that ‘The question of advertising has long ceased to be a national question, and indeed its transnational dimension constitutes its history as a network and a network of networks’ (ix). However, he concedes that it is a network that is fraught with ‘contradictions’ that creates ‘its own splits and discontinuities’. This paper examines one of these splits by focusing on the issues and influences surrounding the formation and collapse of the Australian-owned Advertising Agencies Council (Austac) during the 1970s. Although it appeared that the Creative Revolutions in Australia and America emerged from a similar set of conditions, there was one significant difference; Australia’s advertising agencies were also under pressure from giant transnational agencies. International companies had long played an important role in Australia’s economic development. However, in the increasingly politicised climate of the 1970s, the international agencies’ domination over the Australia’s advertising scene transcended economic concerns to become a cultural issue. The advertising industry’s influence over popular conceptualisation of Australian national identity attracted scholarly debate. Noel King and Tim Rowse claims that advertisements from the late 1970s and early 1980s featuring overtly ‘Australian’ imagery effectively depoliticised the process of identity construction. They contend that a combination of diverse representations of Australian identity together with a unifying jingle imposed an artificial ‘common interest’ on audiences (38 39). Extrapolating on these ideas, Rowse together with Albert Moran contend that ‘The populist identity of a public addressed as unitary and as consumers cuts across class identities, obliterating most sense of social antagonism’ (273). However, Stuart Cunningham suggests that such criticisms ignore: