This article discusses the role of creativity, graphic design innovations and tacit knowledge within advertising agency competition processes during the first half of the twentieth century. This period witnessed the arrival of the ‘advertising creative’: the artist-designer, whose output and tacit understanding of consumer tastes became key for the competitive advantage of agencies. Adapting Bourdieu's concept of the social field within which actors create and trade various forms of capital, I show how and why William Crawford's advertising agency in London became a pioneer in promoting the social, cultural and economic role of this new group of agency workers. I argue that Crawford's became the first advertising agency that carved out a unique position within a highly competitive market by defining its visual production and organisational identity entirely through notions of creativity. This places Crawford's at the heart of the emergence of a cultural economy for which creative skills are a paramount source of value creation.
