Introduction

Advertising is the archetypal ‘modern’ industry. As a key knowledge-intensive business (professional) service, it is innately bound up with processes of contemporary globalization. Indeed, the globalization of the advertising industry has been fuelled by an ever-increasing reliance on advertising to develop, sustain and spread markets for products in a ‘global consumer world’. In this book, we develop a new and highly innovative investigation of contemporary trends relating to the advertising industry and its spatial division of labour in globalization. We examine the key actors in processes of globalization in the advertising industry – global agencies – and assess the impacts of their restructuring on the geography of advertising work worldwide and in three US cities: New York, Los Angeles and Detroit. We explore the advertising industry and spatial division of advertising work through a conceptual framework in the first part of the book focused on the firm, cities and restructuring, and then through primary research based empirical analyses of the business of advertising and associated city based labour process in the second and third parts. Conceptually we draw on three interrelated bodies of theoretical work. First, we use theoretical work on knowledge-intensive business services (also referred to as advanced producer or professional services) to theorize the structure and spatial organization of advertising agencies (for example, Alvesson 2004; Beaverstock 2004; Bryson et al. 2004; Daniels 1993; Empson 2001; Faulconbridge 2006; Nachum 1999). The globalization of knowledge-intensive service industries, and in particular accountancy, advertising, architecture, law and management consultancy, has acted as the basis for a number of significant debates in the academic disciplines of economics, geography, management, sociology and others over the past twenty-five years or so. In particular, interest in corporate strategy (Dunning and Norman 1987), the sociology of professionals (Burrage et al. 1990; Faulconbridge and Muzio 2007), the management of knowledge workers (Alvesson 2001; Cooper et al. 1996) and knowledge generation, capture and exploitation (Empson 2001) have all been developed with explicit reference to the spatial organization of global knowledge-intensive business services firms. In this book, we theorize, through reference to these areas of research, how global advertising agencies manage their office networks and skilled labour to develop advertising campaigns in particular spatial jurisdictions.