Drawing on interviews with advertising practitioners, this article explores the circulation of understandings of research in the advertising process. These understandings flow between advertising practitioners, their clients, and academics, and function to constitute important power-knowledge formations. Focusing on agencies’ imperative for self-promotion in a competitive, unstable market, I argue that attention to this circulation of knowledges is crucial for a fuller understanding of advertising as a commercial and social force. In the last section, I explore the interface between academia and the commercial realm and argue for a most subtle analysis of its inherent power-knowledge relations.