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
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/7485 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Leslie, Deborah Ann |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 7644615 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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