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.

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

The purpose of this research is to determine whether optimal ad placement and page context can significantly impact advertising effects, by extending hemispheric processing theory. This study contributes to the marketing literature by 1) addressing theoretical conflicts regarding optimal hemispheric ad placement (more favorable effects with leftward photo ads and rightward text ads; Janiszewski 1988) and page context (matching activation from "priming" of opposing brain hemispheres Janiszewski 1990), 2) by evaluating multiple advertising effects in relation to mere exposure rather than focusing primarily on attitudes (Janiszewski 1988, 1990), and 3) by addressing an important knowledge gap regarding optimal Web advertising (Dahlen, Rasch and Rosengren 2003). A growing amount of money is being spent on Internet advertising, with revenues totaling $12.5 billion in 2005, up more than 30 percent over 2004 (IAB 2006). However, banner ad click-through rates are low (between .1 and .2 percent for standard ads; DoubleClick 2007) and only 10% of business executives believe that banner advertising is highly effective in generating new business (Forrester 2006). Advertisers continue to use banner ads, perhaps because the "branding" benefits are not limited to clickthroughs (Briggs and Hollis 1997). While numerous ad-related factors have been previously studied (e.g., ad context creative factors, recall/recognition effects, repetition), to the author's knowledge no research has examined the effect of banner ad placement on advertising outcomes such as attention, recognition, brand attitude and purchase intention. / A 2 x 2 x 2 between subjects factorial design was implemented, in which the ad type (pictorial or verbal), ad placement (left or right of Web page), and the page type (text or image-oriented) were manipulated in an online environment. While the results only partially support the hypotheses (rank-ordered stimuli groups from "optimal" to "least optimal" effects) matching activation and hemispheric ad placement appeared to differentially affect advertising outcomes. A supplementary data analysis, which directly compared hemispheric ad placement and matching activation, indicates that matching activation has a greater effect on attention, while hemispheric ad placement has a greater effect on purchase intention. The findings suggest that online advertising efforts should be specifically matched with advertising goals. Managerial implications are discussed. / by Kendall Goodrich. / University Library's copy lacks signatures of Supervisory Committee. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2007. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2007 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation addresses three topics on information economics. Generally, information is not perfect or costless as classical economics assumes. Thus, a consumer searches information at his cost or a seller provides information at his cost. First, chapter 2 presents a theoretical model where a consumer searches for local brand information. We show that a national brand providing information has a larger market share. Second, chapter 3 presents a theoretical model where a store randomizes prices and advertises the price changes. We show that at equilibrium the advertising intensity is negatively related to price and price density function is "U" shaped. As advertising costs decrease, average price decreases with more competition. Also as advertising costs decrease from the maximum to zero, price density function changes from monopoly price spike to nonprofit price spike. Thirdly, chapter 4 presents an example where information imperfection is not remedied so information asymmetry remains to cause moral hazard. The deposit insurance rate of a bank is set uniformly regardless of its loan quality because the government cannot discern the quality. Then, a failed bank has higher efficiency in good economic years by spending less on loan monitoring but lending aggressively, but has lower efficiency in difficult years because of its growing non-performing loan. The efficiency of Korean banks between 1990 and 1997 is measured by DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), and the regression shows that the efficiency of the failed bank is affected by moral hazard. / Graduation date: 2003