ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how the advertising industry’s ‘golden age’ gave way to an ‘age of uncertainty’ over the 1990s and early 2000s. It explains the abiding sense of uncertainty that permeated this period grew out of the social, cultural, economic and technological changes sweeping through the industry, as well as their impact on the infrastructure that had created and maintained the ‘golden age’. The book illustrates the importance of adopting glocal perspectives in order to identify and, indeed, reassess various factors that were integral to the dawn digital age. It examines the advertising industry’s uncertain embrace of new information technology systems and equipment in the early 1990s. The book also explains the rise of the consumer, and traces the roots of uncertainty back to the Recession of the early 1990s.
