Ads and Authorship

There are a few things that I think are important to keep in mind when considering whether advertisements are "authored" in any way. First of all, it is certainly true that advertisements have creators (something can't just come out of nothing), but are they really authors? I think it would be useful to think of advertisers in terms of certain "criteria" of what constitutes an author. For example, if you define an author as a person who has a considerable amount of creative control over their work, then I would not categorize advertisers as authors. They are there to do a job and are given direction of what to do (kind of like Amy, was that her name?). They may be creative in the sense that they have some room to decide what kinds of marketing strategies to use, but ultimately, if what they create is not to the liking of the corporation they are working for, it may be rejected, or else edited. This leads to another point to be made, namely about collaborative authorship. If anything, I would tend to think of advertisers as part of a process. Therefore, if you define authorship as attributed to a "sole creator", then advertisers would not qualify as authors here either. Although one person may have the original idea of how to market a product, many people ultimately are involved in the development of that idea, not to mention that these ideas are essentially constrained by the task at hand, the whims of whatever corporation they are working for. If anything, I may attribute the work of advertisers as "collective authorship". In fact, collective authorship may be too strong of a term; maybe something more like "collective production" or "collective work" would be more suitable, because it is really a stretch for me to say that advertisers really author anything at all - in many ways, they can be categorized as what Negus calls "cultural intermediaries". They are more involved with the translation and facilitation of ideas from author to consumer. From this perspective, they are simply relaying a message, and moreover, they are relaying it in a way that must be approved by the author themselves. In other words, I see advertisers as more of the telephone than the speaker, as merely an instrument.