Ad agencies

This article highlights advertising agencies as marketplace icons. The role of ad agencies in creating iconic brands can sometimes be obscured, yet ad agencies are central to how the contemporary marketplace works. While ad agencies are no longer the hegemonic instance of consumer culture that they were from the 1950s to the 1990s, they have adapted to today's democratic advertisingscape by shepherding cultural content produced elsewhere to market. Ad agencies have remained the engine behind significant shifts in consumer culture, such as the warming of relations between music and advertising, by acting as the ‘midwife’ between art and commerce, facilitating new cultural practices in the process.