ABSTRACT
Los Angeles’ advertising industry, collocated with the global motion picture business, would seem to be primed to benefit from globalization. It might be expected, for example, that the Los Angeles offices of global agencies would act as leaders of global campaigns for major motion picture companies. In this chapter we explore whether this is the case by considering the forces driving Los Angeles’ role in advertising globalization and specifically the territorial and network assets of the city. Using our data we reveal that, surprisingly, the cooperation between advertising agencies and the entertainment and motion picture industry appears to be much weaker than expected, the underlying reason being that the approach of filmmakers to advertising is different from other producers of consumer goods. In fact, surprisingly, the data we use shows that automobile clients feature very strongly within Los Angeles agencies’ portfolios. However, Los Angeles demarcates itself strongly from Detroit as these clients are predominantly Japanese car manufacturers such as Toyota and Nissan. Indeed, one of the main ideas put forward in this chapter is that Los Angeles is less ‘global’ than might be expected, its role being as the ‘capital’ of the ‘west coast’ consumer market with networks reaching out to the Pacific-Rim and east Asia as a result of the desire of producers of consumer goods to reach this extraordinarily large market. As a result the city has gained from the increasing decentralization of advertising control from New York as ‘cultural proximity’ to west coast consumers is sought. Again we interpret these findings in the context of the work on the organization of advertising agencies, transnational projects, agglomeration and localization economies and project ecologies reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3,
flagging the way ‘west coast’ consumer markets act as territorial assets that generate important network assets for Los Angeles.
