GaWC Research Bulletin 215

This Research Bulletin has been published in E. Kofman and G. Youngs (eds) (2008) Globalization: Theory and Practice 3rd ed., New York: Continuum, pp. 205-220.

Please refer to the published version when quoting the paper.

(Z)

Advertising and Cities: A Relational Geography of Globalization in the Early Twenty First Century

P.J. Taylor

 

INTRODUCTION: CITIES AND SERVICES

One of the most important functions of cities has always been to operate as service centres. They are where you go to access facilities for provision of all manner of services – economic, political, social, cultural - that help to sustain the myriad of projects that are our lives. Cities are characterised by the services they offer: they are shopping centres, administrative centres, cultural centres and much else besides. In other words they are foci of the everyday lives of billions of people. In this chapter I concentrate upon one type of service, advanced producer services, and within this sector, one service industry, advertising. The reason for this choice is that advanced producer services, and advertising in particular, provide specific insights into the processes that have generated and are sustaining contemporary globalization. Today many cities can be categorised and analysed as global service centres in a world city network (Taylor 2004).

Advanced producer service firms provide for the needs of other firms, hence they are sometimes called, simply, ‘business services’. Corporate law, management consultancy, investment banking and advertising are all service sectors that provide high value-added professional, creative and/or financial services for their company clients. Under conditions of contemporary globalization many of these service firms have chosen, or felt compelled, to ‘go global’ in the provision of their services. Always traditionally associated with larger cities, in recent decades they have been implicated in the rise of world or global cities (Sassen 2001). In studies at GaWC, these services have been treated as the agents of world city network formation, a skeletal structure through which globalization operates (Taylor 2004).

This paper is divided into seven sections. First, the importance of advanced producer services for globalization is described and explained. Second, one particular service, advertising, is condidered as particularly apt to provide insights into globalization; its American origins make it specifically interesting. Third, the adverting industry is depicted in the early twenty first century, its specific and unusual organization is outlined and its globality affirmed. Fourth, cities are treated as market places for the industry’s products: leading cities are identified. Fifth, cities are treated as network nodes wherein firms use of cities beyond their local markets is analysed. Sixth, combining city roles as places and network nodes, profits are estimated across cities to indicate the geography of firms’ ‘revenue-take’. Finally in a conclusion that focuses on using the results to inform the geography of globalization, both the borderless world concept and the simple core-periphery model are found to be wanting.

Advanced Producer Services in Globalization

Business services are as old as business and therefore many advanced producer services are older than the modern world-system - maritime insurance, commercial (merchant’s) law, audit accountancy and some financial instruments for example. But other such services are strictly modern such as advertising and management consultancy. To provide their particular service, these firms require close relations with their clients. A successful firm builds up a client-base over time and it is this that defines the worth of the company. Thus traditionally firms have been quite local, typically single city-based. In fact firms would normally be identified by their city: a ‘ New York law firm’, a ‘Liverpool insurance company’, an ‘ Amsterdam bank’, etc. From the late nineteenth century onwards, through mergers and acquisitions and stimulated by national regulation of professions and companies, many such firms began to operate at a national scale. Varying to some degree with the physical expanse of countries, big city banks became national banks, big city insurance companies became national insurance companies, and so on. With this geographical change the firms changed, like their public service counterparts expanding at the same time, going beyond a single locality could only be coped with through bureaucratisation. Instead of being customised for a known local client, products had to become relatively standardised in a national market. Many advanced producer services were not that ‘advanced’ by the mid-twentieth century. All this changed with globalization and the final up-scaling of business services.

In the 1970s two distinct advanced technologies, computers and communications, combined to create a new enabling infrastructure for global organisation. As it became more pervasive and sophisticated, this global infrastructure was able to provide a semblance of the immediacy of the original city business service for transnational service activities: the loss of old relations based upon contiguity replicated by new relations based upon simultaneity (Castells 1996). Thus up-scaling to the global would not mean simply building bigger bureaucracies than existing national firms, advanced producer services could enhance their being as expert, customised service providers, but now at a global scale. Of course, there was nothing inevitable about this up-scaling, economic circumstances had to be right. The possibilities of this infrastructure were first exploited by large multinational corporations creating the new international division of labour – commodity production in the ‘third world’, command functions and product development in the ‘first world’. However, it was these corporations who were major clients of the leading business service firms, and as the corporations became more global so also did their service needs. Hence service firms were threatened with losing important clients unless they could provide a ‘global service’. Many responded in the 1980s by creating new offices where their clients did business but this highly dependent strategy soon gave way to business service firms developing their own global locational strategies (Kim 1995; Leslie 1995, Tharp and Jeong 2001). By 1990 the thinking was: if you are going to invest in providing a transnational service it is dangerous to remain dependent on a few old clients, rather take the opportunity to gain more new clients in new markets. The resulting organisation of global service firms is a multiple location office strategy so that a ‘seamless service’ (i.e. as was once offered in a single locale) is provided across the world.

It was Sassen (1991) who first associated this new global dispersal of services with concentration in key cities, which she termed ‘global cities’. She interpreted these cities - the archetypal cases are New York, London and Tokyo - as postindustrial production sites: ‘The “things” that a global city makes are services and financial goods’ (p. 5). This involves four key functions, corporate headquarters (command centres of the world economy), service provision of advanced producer services, sites of production of innovation in these services (requiring face-to-face interaction), and markets for these products and innovations (via headquarters) (p. 3-4). The literature deriving from this work has been criticised for focussing on just the major metropolitan areas in globalization. In fact all cities have been affected by ubiquitous globalization processes – there can be no such thing as a ‘non-global city’ - and this is reflected in studies incorporating a wider range of cities as ‘globalizing cities’ (Marcus and van Kempen 2000) or simply ‘cities in globalization’ (Taylor et al 2006). The latter approach has expanded Sassen’s concern for advanced services in a few ‘global cities’ to the office networks of global service firms across many cities worldwide (Taylor 2004).

It is these global service firms that are located in the ubiquitous office tower blocks that dominate contemporary world cities (Taylor 2004). These very visible offices constitute the invisible nodes of myriad electronic networks. The ‘office work’ generates flows of information and knowledge - advice, instruction, planning, design, strategy (supplemented by air travel for face-to-face meetings as necessary) - that are the product they are selling to service global capital in today’s intensely integrated world-economy. This professional/creative/financial knowledges behind expert services generates such products as multiple inter-jurisdictional law contracts, financial instruments in 24-hour money markets, global advertising campaigns, multiple tax jurisdiction accountancy audits, investment banking advice on multinational acquisitions, and numerous management consultancy activities. Thus have advanced producer services come to be a critical cutting edge economic sector in globalization since 1990.

Advertising: from Americanization to Globalization

Within advanced producer services, advertising has become a key facilitator in contemporary globalization (Bagchi-Sen and Sen 1997). The industry has been fuelled by ever-increasing consumer expenditure that relies on advertising to develop, sustain, and spread markets for the products of capitalism. It is through the success of advertising campaigns that capital is realised globally. This ‘global consumer world’ is a projection of a consumerism that was largely pioneered in US society in the first half of the last century – many of the features that today we identify as globalization (e.g. ‘global brands’) were originally experienced trans-nationally as ‘Americanization’ in the mid-twentieth century. The modern advertising industry was both a creator of, and created by, this original US mass consumerism and advertising continues to be the archetypal American advanced producer service in contemporary globalization.

As a relatively new producer service, advertising was a central player in the creation of a new framework for capitalism that we call American hegemony. With US advances in manufacturing building upon British industrial hegemony to create new mass production, a need was generated for a complementary mass consumption. The advertising industry developed as a major service sector in the 1920s to meet this need ‘to speed the flow of goods through the national market place’ (Marchand 1986, 2). This was the ‘American speciality’ industry (Mayer 1991, xv) that created a ‘consumer modernity’ as the cultural face of American hegemony ( Taylor 1999). Advertisers were the arch agents of this new modernity, the promoters of new fashions and ideas in the ‘new American tempo’ (Marchand 1986, 4): ‘they brought the good news about progress’ (p.1). Today, no longer so American-dominated but still ‘selling modernity’, advertising’s contemporary role can be seen as speeding the flow of goods through the global world market.

But this is a naïve interpretation of advertising. Although the industry would peddle itself as the consumer’s ‘ambassador’ providing information on goods to buy, in reality advertising practitioners operated as ‘consumption engineers’ (Marchand 1986, 29). Their purpose was never simply to expand markets, they operated on behalf of their clients to create partial monopoly rents through the branding of commodities. By developing and maintaining brands, advertisers added value to products allowing their clients either to sell more at the same price or sell about the same at a higher price (Mayer 1991, xi-xii). Trademarks, like patents and copyrights, provide monopoly powers but in the former case without the time limits. Thus American hegemony has created ‘a world of brandscapes’, to extend Mayer’s (1991, 27) evocative description geographically to contemporary globalization.

Initially, when US producers in the 1920s were concerned about overproduction, advertisers were hailed as ‘guardians of uninterrupted growth’ (Marchand 1986, 2), as the solution, no less, to capitalism’s propensity for disruptive economic cycles. Obviously this accolade only lasted to the next severe downturn but the 1930s in no way eclipsed advertising. By now the industry was embedded into the new social matrix that was American consumer capitalism. This is reflected today, ironically given the 1920s beliefs, in advertising’s particular sensitivity to cyclical changes. In fact this illustrates the industry’s continued centrality to modern capitalism: it is widely used as a key indicator of either signs of rise or decline both in national economies and in the world-economy. In more recent times advertising has kept consumer capitalism going through good times and bad. By creating wants and converting them into needs it has stimulated a huge growth in personal debt that has sustained a massive growth of the world-economy through the 1990s, and which has been credited with the ‘soft landing’ in the early 2000s. In the contemporary period, the industry appears almost (but only almost) to be living up to its supposed power identified by its promoters in the 1920s (Monle and Johnson 1999; Coopers and Lybrand 1992).

The Advertising Industry in the early Twenty First Century

Nachum (2000, 27) points out that advertising firms ‘are in a unique position in which there is a separation between those who buy their services and those who “consume” them’: their customers are commodity producers who pay for adverts, their ‘consumers’ are the potential commodity buyers. This ‘in-between position’ has several important ramifications.

The advertising industry is distinctive in its organisational structure. As it has grown, major transnational corporations have emerged through the usual processes of mergers and acquisitions (Ducoffe and Smith 1993; Kim 1995). However, this growth process causes problems for advertising practice because the value of a business being taken over is largely a function of its client list. But acquisitions and mergers will often bring the accounts of rival clients together into one advertising firm. Obviously advertisers cannot service clients that are in competition, but neither does it make commercial sense to choose between clients and lose a lucrative contract. The solution to this conundrum has been to create a dual-level organization structure (Banerjee 1995; Tharp and Jeong 2001).

All global advertising firms operate in practice under the umbrella of ‘holding companies/groups’ (e.g. WPP) that constitute a collection of ‘Advertising Agencies’ (e.g. BBDO Worldwide) with ‘firewalls’ between them so that clients in competition can be serviced within the same group but by different agencies. There is a division of knowledge work: the holding companies do the strategic managerial work, and the Advertising Agencies provide the creative design producer services. The vast majority of the literature of advertising treats the agencies and their creative work. However, here I am concerned for the economic geography of advertising and therefore the focus is on the consolidated financial results of holding companies.

A typical transaction in this industry involves a minimum of three firms – manufacturing (client) company, advertising company (agency within holding company), and media company (e.g. TV corporation). The basic unit of the transaction is an advert created by the advertising firm about the manufacturing firm’s product to be transmitted by the media firm. The sale to the media is recorded as the billings for the advertising company. It is commonly used as a measure of the size of advertising companies: Table 1 lists the 18 holding companies in 2001 that had billings above a billion dollars.¹ These data on advertising firms are reported in the Advertising Age’s Annual Reports. This is the data source used for this study. For some years billings are reported for leading city markets but this ended in 2002 so that the final city data is reported for 2001 (in the 2002 Report). This is the reason for providing a cross-sectional analysis of advertising in 2001, the early twenty first century geography of my subtitle. In Table 1 the ranked list companies is fairly typical of corporate concentration processes producing contemporary globalization: there are a few very important companies tailing off to many smaller companies all vulnerable to further acquisition.² In this case there are four dominant companies and a further 5 important companies; these nine will be one focus in subsequent analysis.

The conventional way in which advertising firms are paid is 15% of the billings (The Economist 1990, Natchum 2000). This is called the commission and constitutes the revenue accruing to the company. This practice can be interpreted as ensuring the integrity of the profession: competition is not reduced to the cheapest but choice is made on creative product preferences. However, like all such control of professional remuneration, it also provides a gross monopoly position for the service providers, ensuring no undercutting and therefore good profits for all work (Johnson 1972). Nevertheless, this arrangement is not always strictly adhered to and may be negotiable. In addition, holding companies bring together more than just advertising, incorporating services such as provided by PR agencies where the payment is by negotiated fee. Advertising Age Reports provide data on the income derived from billings which, as billings minus costs (salaries, estate, etc.), are typically between 10% and 15% of billings. These data will be used to estimate differences in advertisers’ ‘take’ across cities to see whether the globalization processes described in this paper incorporate any core-periphery tendencies.

Place: cities as markets

As noted above, Sassen (1991/2001) has highlighted cities as markets of advanced producer services as key features of her ‘global cities’. Advertising Age Reports have provided data on selected cities for their ‘local shop billings’ for cities. These are city markets for advertising. In 2001, Advertising Age reported its fullest set of cities in two lists, for the USA and for the rest of the world. From these data the top 40 city advertising markets in the world can be identified and they are listed in Table 2.

The advertising market is very uneven across cities but the latter are reasonable worldwide in distribution. Clearly New York dominates followed by Tokyo and then London. These are Sassen’s (2001) three global cities, the leading cities of the three main globalization regions: northern America, western Europe and Pacific Asia. Other cities are unevenly distributed among these regions; in all there 17 in northern America (all but one in the USA), 14 in western Europe, and 5 in Pacific Asia (if we include one from Australia). In addition, non-core zones are represented through Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Mumbai.

Although US cities dominate the list, they constitute only 40% of the total cities and, overall, cities from 24 different countries are listed. This reflects first, the ascendancy of the US in this industry, and second, beyond the USA, the pattern of concentration of the advertising market in large metropolitan regions dominating individual countries (the only country outside the USA to have more than one city in Table 1 is Germany). In the US, there is a similar pattern: large metropolitan regions are featured as major advertising markets.

In conclusion the top 40 advertising ‘local shop’ markets consist of large affluent cities in the ‘global north’ and mega-cities in the global south with relatively large proportions of middle class consumers.

Network: cities as nodes

If, as indicated above, some cities do work beyond their local market for global campaigns, then local market place billings do not constitute all the work done in a city. Advertising Age Reports only provide ‘local shop’ data for cities, there are no data on extra-local work. However, for 2001, there is a breakdown of the top 30 advertising firms in terms agencies, which list all their offices. Further, billings are provided for offices and therefore these can be summed city by city to provide estimates of a city’s overall work. For this exercise there is no reason to stick with the cities with the largest 40 city markets; in Figure 1 all cities accruing billings above $100 million from for top firms are depicted. These 98 cities are displayed by total billings across major world regions. The pattern is highly centralised in a few major advertising centres but there is also representation across all regions – even Sub-Saharan Africa has Johannesburg (and, in addition, Nairobi, Cape Town and Harare just miss the cut). This is the basic relational geography of advertising in the early twenty first century.

To separate out local and non-local work requires return to cities for which there is data on local shop billings: I focus the 25 cities with the largest top 30 billings. In Table 3 these cities are listed in rank order for top 30 firms’ billings and top 9 firms’ billings (the latter nine are leading firms in Table 1 above). Several features clearly emerge. First Tokyo and London are much nearer to New York in these statistics compared to just local billings (Table 2). Second, this relative reduction of New York’s position is complemented by a general reduction in rank for other US cities – they dominate the bottom half of the Table 3’s two rankings. This tendency can be directly expressed by computing the ratio of firm billings sums to local shop billings: cities are ranked by this ratio in Table 4. Here we see nine US cities in the bottom 12 ranks for the top 30 ratios (the exception is Atlanta) and all 10 cities ranked in the bottom 11 for top 9 ratios. This is intriguing … and complex.

There are two counter tendencies producing the results in Table 4. First, as regards the position of US cities, this relates to its being the origin country of the modern advertising industry. As noted previously the advertising industry developed in American cities in the first half of the twentieth century and diffused from here to other parts of the world. As a diffusion centre it generated a complex mixture of local companies, some grew and became international and contributed to the growth of advertising in cities in other countries. Although some companies from other countries came to be international as well, the USA remained the country least penetrated from outside. It remained a rich mixture of local and international companies with the local remaining more prominent than cities elsewhere. Thus there are relatively less extra-local billings: local firms are dominant. The limiting case in Table 4 is Philadelphia where none of the top nine global firms even have an office (i.e. they record zero billings). This indicates a market embeddedness of local firms leading to global firms not attempting to enter that particular local city market. Why more ‘local’ firms in the USA? It is here that city markets are especially well-developed in advertising and local knowledge leads to good profits. In these circumstances there is less incentive for such firms to expand beyond the local: outside New York, there have been relatively less global firms originating in the US from equivalent cities outside the US. (This feature of a large lucrative US service market not encouraging global expansion is found generally in advanced producer services – see Taylor and Lang 2005.)

Second, beyond the USA, there are cities that have billings beyond their ‘local shop’ to encompass larger national or even trans-national markets. In Table 4 the classic case is Toronto’s dominance of the Anglo-phone Canadian market that results in top 30 companies billing more than four times the city’s local market. The cities in the top half of both lists in Table 4 are the media capitals (TV, main national press, etc.) of relatively large national advertising markets, with Germany having two centres, and including third world examples. Mexico City actually records higher billings for the top 9 firms than for its whole local market, and for seven other major media centres their billings are almost as large as the local shop (i.e. over 90%). There is an interesting exception and that is Atlanta for the top 30 firms whose billings are over twice the local city billings. This indicates the city’s media dominance over the US South East region attracting global firms but outside the top 9.

In conclusion the results from this section show a distinctive multiple-centred US advertising market such that there is a greater distinction between USA/non-USA than the usual global north/global south contrast. The origin of the modern industry as an American invention continues to feature in its geography under conditions of contemporary globalization.

Place and Node: cities in globalization

Does this US distinctiveness indicate that the market for advertising products has not really globalised? A very good way to answer this question is to compare profit rates across cities. If the advertising industry constituted separated markets then profits would presumably vary greatly depending on local circumstances. On the other hand, globalization of markets (resulting from opening up service markets) should smooth out differences through the usual supply and demand processes. Unfortunately there are no data available of overall profit rates in cities but they can be estimated from information provided in Advertising Age Reports.

The profit estimation method requires the assumption that profit rates are relatively smooth across the office networks within a company. Obviously it is at this decision-making level that profit differences will be addressed: withdrawing work from low profit offices, increasing work in high profit offices. Using this premise, if we have profit rates of firms and the mix of firms in a city, these two pieces of information can be combined to estimate the profit generated in a city. In fact Advertising Age Reports provide company data on income as well as billings and their ratio can be interpreted as a gross measure of profit; I will term it a firm’s estimated revenue rate’ (for a more detailed discussion of profit in this industry, see Taylor 2006). I will focus on just the top nine advertising companies since they are definitively global in their scope. However this entails omitting Philadelphia and Minneapolis from the 25 cities due to their zero and very low presences of top nine companies respectively (Table 4). ‘Estimated global revenue rates’ are computed for the remaining 23 cities using proportions of billings each company has in each city. These figures are interpreted as the ‘revenue-take’ across cities and are reported in Table 5.

The main point that Table 5 illustrates is the low range of revenue-take percentages across the cities and, unlike Table 4, US cities are distributed across the range. This suggests that the major holding companies are operating a reasonably unified world market: clearly the 15% commission rate method of billing is reflected in these takes resulting in figures a little below the commissions received. However, like all markets, the global advertising market is not a perfect market and this is reflected in the small differences in revenue-takes. These market differences will be the result of both local and non-local influences. The top and bottom of Table 5’s ranking illustrate this. The Tokyo market is a seller’s market: it is largely serviced by Japanese companies with resulting ‘monopolistic tendencies’ creating high revenue-takes. In contrast, the Detroit market is a buyer’s market: a market where a few (motor company) customers dominate to hold down revenue-takes. This simple supply/demand contrast between two cities on opposite sides of the world suggests that place and network market affects are operating globally. Further the fact that the two global south cities in the table, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, are at opposite ends of the ranking suggests there is no north-south contrast in revenue-takes in this particular industry.

Conclusion: geography of globalization

I have dealt with one particular industry in some detail, justifying my choice by its importance for consumer modernity as represented by contemporary globalization. In this conclusion I will draw out specific findings that provide insights into this globalization. Of course, advertising is just one industry, and a peculiar one at that as discussed, and therefore it is necessary to be careful in drawing more general conclusions. Nevertheless there are some simple notions about the geography of globalization that require comment and for which advertising does provide a glimpse of a more complex geography. These are the notions of a borderless world and elemental application of core-periphery ideas.

The findings in this paper clearly show the continuing importance of the ‘national’ in a global industry. Although with its propagation of global brands advertising appears to be the epitome of contemporary globalization, its practice is anything but ‘a world without borders’ however well known the brand. Advertising is a cultural pursuit and as such has to be mindful of cultural differences: the same product has to be presented in different ways in different national contexts (Kanso 1991; Leslie 1995; West 1996; Natchum 2000). Furthermore the main media for advertising, TV, and also press and radio, have remained largely national in organization across the world (Morley and Robins 1995).

To provide a seamless global service for a client, an advertising firm requires a two level approach. In selected cities, typically New York, global strategy is devised with the client and much of the creative work is done. But in rolling the campaign out across the world, the product has to be adapted country by country. This requires a very nation-state based distribution of offices, usually one office per country. There is little need for trans-national regional offices or intra-national regional offices (outside the US) because this is not the way the media is organized. Thus there are offices in the ‘media city’ (usually capital city or largest city) of countries across the world (Taylor et al 2004). Overall, production is through a combined national-global economic geography: borders remain important in advertising.

The findings in this paper look superficially similar to the “new international division of labour” but this is emphatically not the case. The latter is about using cheap labour in poor countries for production organised and consumed in richer countries. But in advertising the labour is professional and creative, in the media cities across the world high value added work is carried out, and it has been shown that company’s revenue-takes vary little. Interpretation of these findings for remuneration is complicated; we have to go back to the fact that the industry is a service provider and that the service being provided is itself quite unusual. As an expert knowledge service, the professionals are not only the labour, they embody the industry’s ‘raw material’ in the knowledge they input into the production of the commodity. Thus labour ‘loyalty’ is essential and is reflected, not only in high renumeration, but also through ‘hand-cuff’ contracts to stop labour movement that would lead to client movement. The fact is that the value of an advertising company is ultimately dependent on its professionals and their client portfolios. Obviously the labour costs in this industry cannot be treated in same way as for industries producing more tangible commodities (Natchum 1996, 2000).

This can be interpreted as the latest expression of what Wright (1997, 15) refers to as ‘the problem of the “middle class” among employees’. Specific powers in the labour market through managerial or professional skills lead to ‘loyalty rents’ (p. 17) leading to new privileged class locations. These are what Wallerstein (1984) has called the ‘cadres’ of the world economy, the middle class facilitators of capitalist accumulation. But the question now arises whether ‘global cadres’, reinforcing their power on the back of new enabling technologies to expand their geographical reach, are qualitatively different from their predecessors. Have they moved from privileged non-capitalist class position to becoming part of the capitalist class itself? This is what the literature on trans-national class formation suggests. This alternative interpretation, or rather ‘upgrading’, of ‘cadres’ appears to be a good fit of the global advertising results.

Sklair (2002, 98) premises his identification of a ‘trans-national capitalist class‘ with the assertion that ‘(d)irect ownership or control of the means of production is no longer the exclusive criterion for serving the interests of capital, particularly not the global interests of capital’. He goes on to specify ‘globalizing professionals’ as one of four components of this contemporary capitalist class: they are the ‘technical fraction’ (p. 99). Of course this does not mean that ownership is longer relevant; it has also changed towards what Clark (2002) terms ‘pension-fund capitalism’. The up shot is that the ‘capitalist interest’ in advertising accounts is reflected not in ‘profits’ alone, the revenue takes, but in their combination with renumeration of globalising professionals. The key point is that the geography of this trans-national capitalist class, while concentrated in the global north, is distributed across major metropolitan areas throughout the world. There is no longer a simple core-periphery pattern, rather there is a new complex geography of interweaving core-making and periphery making processes operating through all major cities across the world. The advertising industry shows a new relational geography of core-making processes straddling the old, seemingly static, north-south divide. Contemporary globalization is not making a more equal world, quite the opposite in fact, but it is reshuffling geographies of inequalities in quite remarkable ways that were hardly imaginable a generation ago.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Asli Ceylan Oner (Virginia Tech) collected the Advertising Age data.

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Table 1. Major Advertising Firms in 2001

Source: Advertising Age Annual Report 2002

Table 2. Top 40 City Advertising Markets

Source: Advertising Age Annual Report 2002

Table 3. Leading firm’s city billings

Source: Derived from Advertising Age Annual Report 2002

Table 4. Leading firm’s city billings in relation to city markets

Source: Derived from Advertising Age Annual Report 2002

Table 5. Notional ‘takes’ from billings

CITIES	Takes %
Tokyo Dusseldorf San Francisco Seoul Brussels Atlanta Chicago New York Toronto Los Angeles Amsterdam Hong Kong Dallas Mexico City Sao Paulo Madrid London Paris Frankfurt Boston Milan Sydney Detroit	12.85 12.29 11.94 11.86 11.63 11.62 11.54 11.52 11.48 11.38 11.38 11.25 11.18 11.12 11.08 11.02 10.98 10.91 10.88 10.72 10.63 10.51 10.42

Source: Derived from Advertising Age Annual Report 2002

Figure 1. The Distribution of top Advertising Companies Billings across World Regions, 2001

City codes: AH Athens; AM Amsterdam; AT Atlanta; BA Buenos Aires; BR Brussels; CH Chicago; DT Detroit; DU Dusseldorf; FF Frankfurt; HK Hong Kong; LA Los Angeles; LN London; MC Mexico City; MD Madrid; MI Milan; OS Oslo; PA Paris; SF San Francisco; SG Singapore; SP Sao Paulo; SY Sydney; TK Tokyo; TO Toronto

NOTES

1. Billion here means one thousand million

2. For instance in 2005 WPP kept its number 1 spot by adding Grey’s companies to its ownership portfolio.

Note: This Research Bulletin has been published in E. Kofman and G. Youngs (eds) (2008) Globalization: Theory and Practice 3rd ed., New York: Continuum, pp. 205-220