A contribution to the political-economy of the advertising sector in the postwar United States economy

Advertising is situated at the intersection of business activity, consumption norms and popular culture. Businesses generate advertising as a strategy in the pursuit of profit. In acting to stimulate demand for their products, businesses (via advertising) play a key role in shaping cultural norms of consumption. This dissertation is a work empirical description and theoretical investigation concerning the role of advertising in the accumulation process in general, and in the historical development of capitalism within the U.S. over the postwar era.;At the level of inter-firm competition, successful advertising allows producer firms to capture an extra increment of surplus-value, in the form of a brand rent, from other firms in the same sector. At the level of the circuit of capital as a whole, advertising works to reduce the turnover time of capital by accelerating the velocity of capital from commodity stock to final realization in the form of profit. Within U.S. capitalism over the postwar era, advertising has contributed to the creation and maintenance of consumption norms amenable to the institutional patterns of Fordism and Flexible accumulation respectively. Under Fordism, advertising was instrumental in creating and maintaining consumption norms associated with the homogenous mass market. Similarly, under the current Flexible accumulation regime, advertising is a leading force in promulgating market segmentation. Finally, the geographic distribution of advertising agencies over the postwar periods suggests a pattern of sustained concentration for the largest and leading firms in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, even as new growth in advertising has led to a moderate trend of growing geographic dispersion.