ABSTRACT
A political economy of advertising explores advertisings funding, production, distribution and regulation. This requires study of economic dimensions how advertising and media sectors function in the production, circulation and consumption of goods and services political dimensions how marketing and communications are organised and regulated and symbolic dimensions meaning and ideology to explore the contribution of advertising to the production of meanings, social relations and material practices. The advertising industry has experienced the same core processes of corporate reorganisation that have occurred in media businesses and more generally across advanced economies. Advertising agency growth accompanied that of transnational corporations and their expansion into foreign markets. The pioneer Critical Political Economy scholar Dallas Walker Smythe established a distinctive theory of media and advertising focused on the creation of audiences as commodities. Smythes analysis was advanced as part of a wider effort to develop a materialist analysis of communications.
