ABSTRACT
Globalisation is not a total and uniform process, equally affecting every part of the globe, as the word might imply. When it comes to taking a close look at what is actually happening with advertising, the media and globalisation at ground level, it becomes apparent that in fact there are not many truly global advertisers, agencies or media. Although the concept of ‘globalisation’ flags the territorial ambitions of the manufacturing/marketing/media complex and reflects the fact of their presence in ever more parts of the world, it remains very much a figure of speech, a strategic exaggeration in the ideological rhetoric of globalism. At the beginning of the 2000s, one baseline study showed that the major ‘global’ corporations at that time made most of their sales within their own world-regional domicile, or within what Kenichi Ohmae called the ‘triad’ of North America, the European Union and Asia. Even then, of all the companies in the Fortune 500, only Coca-Cola had more than 20 per cent of its sales in Asia, while McDonald’s had less than 14 per cent (Rugman and Verbeke 2004, 8–9). One might think, then, so much for fears of ‘Coca-Colonization’ (Kuisel 1991) or ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer 1993). To take another measure, Procter & Gamble, the world’s biggest advertiser by far, with over 300 brands (such as Hugo Boss, Max Factor, Olay, Vicks, Braun and Gillette), was spending only 20 per cent of its global advertising expenditure in Asia at that time, even though it appeared amongst the top ten advertisers of most major markets of the region (Endicott 2005). On such evidence, and as Table 5.1 shows, with the singular exception of Japan, the present century began with North America and Europe still the regions with the largest national markets, even if there was already much corporate interest and activity in cultivating fast-growing markets elsewhere in Asia, and in the developing world, notably Brazil, Russia, India and China, as we shall see.
