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Globalisation Trends in Australia's Advertising Industry

This year's takeover of Australia's largest advertising agency, George Patterson Partners, by the British-based global group WPP is just the most recent and dramatic event in a longer-term trend towards globalisation and a complex concentration of ownership in the advertising business. Global advertising groups like WPP, along with their global advertiser clients, are seeking strategically to align the same advertiser with the same agency in each major national market: the phenomenon of ‘global alignment’. Australian agencies are necessarily drawn into the resulting process of consolidation, so much so that it becomes not merely difficult to distinguish between national and international ownership, but almost meaningless. At the same time, there is emerging a greater differentiation of functions amongst agencies, although often coordinated under the one corporate umbrella. Certain agencies are specialising in media buying — that is, the tactical purchase of advertising time and space on behalf of clients — while ‘creative’ agencies provide the content to fill them. Others again are positioning themselves as experts in the burgeoning field of internet advertising. Other current trends include the breakdown of the once-strict boundaries between clients, agencies and media. Advertisers are setting up their own in-house agencies, agencies have acquired their own media outlets, and media are carrying ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’ content which has been prepared by agencies for their clients. Thus even the boundary between advertising and editorial or program content is also breaking down. This paper provides an overview of all these trends, as advertising scrambles to secure its place in the contemporary era of globalisation in a deregulated, post-mass media world.