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Advertising is an institution of economic, cultural and spatial regulation. This thesis examines the role of the advertising industry in mediating the geographies of markets and identities. In the same way that Stuart Ewen (1976) links the structure of the advertising industry in the 1920s to its role in the consolidation of national markets, mass consumption patterns and consumer identities congruent with Fordism, I tie the restructuring of the industry in the current period to the new regime of flexible accumulation. There is an increased need for information about consumers and a heightened design-intensity in flexible production. Institutions of power/knowledge such as advertising play an important role in linking production and consumption and in establishing a “just-in-time” consumption. In addition, through the process of “branding”, advertising agencies attach images to goods. Branding involves matching consumer identities with the “identities” of products. An important component of this process encompasses the formation of “brandscapes”, places where the product is sold and consumed. Advertising both responds to the location of consumers and situates consumers in space. At the same time that advertising has grown in importance, I find that the advertising industry is experiencing a crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. This crisis reflects a weakening of the industry’s ability to regulate the formation of markets and identities. The increasingly discontinuous and fluid spatial and temporal nature of consumer identities, combined with “reflexive modernization”, have made it increasingly difficult for advertisers to locate consumers in terms of both identity and space. In response to this crisis and under new conditions of flexible accumulation, U.S. agencies have reoriented both their organizational structure and their methods of operating. In terms of the reorganization of agencies themselves, I focus on two divergent tendencies in the 1980s and 1990s: the concentration! transnationalization of agencies on one hand, and the increased polarization/flexibility of agencies on the other. I draw upon trade journal literature and 55 interviews with employees. With respect to changing methods, I examine the role of agencies in processes of globalization, market segmentation and shifting gender identities. Increasingly sophisticated methods of monitoring consumers’ use of commodities, forms of resistance and places of consumption point to an escalation of surveillance in the current period. My thesis presents a contribution to debates over both flexibility and identity. I argue that the distinction between producer and consumer has become increasingly blurred, and that the two have come closer together at the site of advertising. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

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This study addresses the question of cross-country standardization of advertising by identifying existing cross-national differences in magazine advertisements. A content analysis of 1,983 advertisements in business, women's and general interest magazines was performed. The sample included 1989 and 1990 magazine issues from the United States, United Kingdom, France, India and South Korea.

The study determined how Thai and U.S. advertisements reflected women's attractiveness. Advertisements from the Thai and U.S. editions of Elle and Cosmopolitan magazines from January 2005 to January 2006 were analyzed using the content analysis method. The author created a code book with definitions of all categories to be used as guidelines for the analysis, an itemized code sheet, and training criteria. Two coders who were proficient in both Thai and English collected the data for the study. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was utilized as a tool to analyze the data gathered. Results indicated that there were both similarities and differences in the specifics, but what remained constant is the use of beautiful women to sell clothing and beauty products. The findings suggest that Thai and U.S. advertisers should apply the similiarities found in the study in their cross-cultural advertising campaigns. In addition, advertisers should be aware of differences and create advertisements that reflect attractiveness values of each culture.

Typescript, etc.

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