Small town, big campaigns: the rise and growth of an international advertising industry in Amsterdam

This paper presents an historical analysis of international advertising by describing four waves of advertising from early twentieth-century Western capitalism. This analysis is necessary to understand the dynamics within the organizational structure of the global advertising industry, with a tendency both of concentration in global network advertising agencies and of de-concentration, as small, flexible, and independent international advertising agencies came to the fore as innovative players. It is particularly this emerging group of smaller independent agencies that use Amsterdam in the Netherlands as a hub to create advertisements for the international market, and thereby have contributed to the increasing international importance of Amsterdam's advertising industry from the early 1990s and onwards. The difference between the different types of advertising agencies in terms of their market position is best reflected by their project networks. The global network advertising agencies turn out to be highly locally orientated, whereas the independents turn out to be much more international.