ABSTRACT
New York City, since the invention of mass consumerism in the USA, has been synonymous with advertising, ‘Madison Avenue’ being the home of many leading global agencies from the 1920s until the 1980s (Leslie 1997a). But, the role of New York City in advertising globalization is not simply one of firstmover advantage and the continued hegemony of the city. Rather the story is one of flux and evolution. After initially being the centre of global advertising, the ‘imperial command and control centre’ when campaigns were designed in New York and ran worldwide, from the early twenty-first century the city has become one amongst many global advertising centres, which collaborate and cooperate to deliver multi-market campaigns. In this chapter, we analyse the evolving role of New York City and use the insights gained from the research to further develop our conceptual argument about the transnational organization of advertising agencies and the role of territorial and network assets in determining the importance of a city in the global geographies of advertising work. Drawing on ideas about the role of transnational collaboration and embeddedness, agglomeration, localization, project ecologies and the evolving geographies of the advertising production process outlined in Chapters 2, 3 and 5, we argue that New York City acts as an exemplar of a world city that has seen its role reconfigured as a result of the development of the transnational agency form. But, through the optimum exploitation of both territorial and network assets, New York City has, we contend, manufactured itself a continued and leading role in advertising globalization, albeit a different role in the twenty-first century from the role played for much of the twentieth century.
