ABSTRACT
The ‘big manipulator’ made way for a paradigm of communication-oriented reasoning about advertising, conceiving of it as a process of ‘encoding-decoding’ in which existing needs and desires are reinforced instead of being created. The most frequent way to deal with advertising as an economic activity in the literature is to classify it as a knowledge-intensive business service. The value chain model reveals that one of the agency’s main jobs is to accompany the whole process of advertising campaign development in close interaction with the advertiser. The chapter focuses on a very interesting national case, due to both the specific structure of the space-economy and a pronounced disarticulation between the size of its advertising market and the poverty of the domestic agency structure: Germany. The changes of the whole industrial world made the German advertising market be caught by the ‘second wave’, implying the need for a more creative and entertaining advertising style.
