ABSTRACT
Perhaps one of the most important debates in relation to knowledge-intensive business services and globalization has centred on the role of cities in the postindustrial knowledge economy. The topic has been the subject of books (see for example, Bryson et al. 2004; Daniels 1993), most notably under the guise of work on world or global cities (see for example, Hall 1966; Sassen 2000, 2006a; Taylor 2004; Taylor et al. 2006). Here our interest lies in analysing the way global advertising agencies ‘use’ cities as part of their contemporary globalization strategies. To do this analysis, we draw on work on knowledge-intensive business services and world cities, and also clusters, regions and, because advertising can be considered to be a creative industry, the relationship between creative cultural economies and cities. The latter especially has been the subject of numerous books (see for example, Cooke and Lazzeretti 2008a; Power and Scott 2004; Scott 2000), with some becoming key policy handbooks for regional economic development (Florida 2002; Landry 2000; Porter 1998). In summarizing this extensive literature, the aim is to reveal the processes by which cities become strategic basing points for global advertising work, and use this to explain the geography of advertising work in, and through, cities in the twentyfirst century. Adopting the terminology introduced in the previous chapter, we will consider how global advertising work is territorially embedded and the implications of this for different cities, and their strategic role and powerfulness in global agencies’ networks. Indeed, whilst we do not repeatedly use the phrase territorial embeddedness in this chapter, most of the arguments are explicitly about the way global agencies are territorial embedded in cities.
