Doing Collaborative Digital Advertising Conceptualization: An Ethnomethodological Study

The development of digital advertising capabilities has drawn attention toward the benefits of advertising automation and digital consumer analytics, including the appropriate technical skills to support these capabilities. By focusing on constraint and provocation in otherwise innocuous requests from advertisers, I uncover collaborative creative practices undertaken by the digital advertising workers responding to those requests when conceptualizing creative digital branding campaigns. The findings highlight some of seen but unnoticed interpretive methods these workers use to marshal a variety of technical and non-technical resources to develop successful and creative campaign ideas and plans from these requests. Outcomes can be used to improve the technology used to plan and launch digital advertising campaigns by helping teams better consider the user and advertiser, and enable better communication of campaign differentiation.