How rhetoric theory informs the creative advertising development process: reconciling differences between advertising scholarship and practice

Advertising scholars have been hesitant to identify creativity as the heart and soul of advertising, and that has produced a chasm between themselves and practitioners. One cause of this division is an erroneous perception that advertising is a subset of consumer psychology. To solve this misidentification, the current authors offer rhetoric theory. Although many advertising academics believe that advertising theory is a discovery of 20th-century scholars, the striking resemblances between canons of rhetoric (“invention,” “style,” “arrangement,” “memory,” and “delivery”) and stages of the advertising-development process (“message strategy,” “idea generation,” “execution,” “media,” and “production”) clearly define advertising as a rediscovery of rhetoric.