ABSTRACT
The historical implantation in the twentieth century of the ‘Big Three’ motor manufacturers (General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler) in Detroit unsurprisingly turned the city into one of the major centres for the US advertising industry as many of the leading global agencies set up offices in the city to service the accounts of these giants. At the turn of the Millennium this led to Detroit being in seventh position in the list of US advertising cities with billings reaching US$8336.80 million, as shown in Chapter 4. Some of the major global advertising agencies operating in Metropolitan Detroit at the turn of this century included Leo Burnett, Campbell-Ewald, J. Walter Thomson, Young & Rubicam, Olgilvy & Mather and BBDO as well as a number of large independent agencies such as Doner and Mars Advertising. Detroit’s role in the geography of the US advertising industry, and the geographies of advertising globalization more broadly, reflects its specificity as a single industry town with a few large and powerful clients in the shape of automobile manufacturers. This has, however, led to a downwards spiral in which Detroit has been stuck over recent years as a result of its failure to develop a post-industrial urban economy to replace continually falling levels of manufacturing employment. To understand the position of Detroit in the US and on the global map of advertising, this chapter considers the territorial and network assets of the city, focusing in particular on the strong dependency that its advertising agencies have on the automobile industry, the specificities of car advertising in relation to consumer expectations and preferences, Detroit’s ability to develop advertising that addresses these expectations and preferences, and the way the special relationship with automotive clients shapes the nature of the creative and strategic work conducted by Detroit agencies and the network assets associated with global work.
