This book provides a thorough account of contemporary trends in advertising and media industries. It examines the role of advertising in the globalisation of consumer culture, taking an empirical, region-by-region approach. Advertising attracts much public criticism for the commercialisation of culture and its apparent impact on social and personal life. This book outlines and assesses the issues involved, with regard to how they are manifested in different regional, national and global contexts. Topics covered include: advertising as an object of studyglobal trends in the advertising industryadvertising and the mediaissues in advertising and societyadvertising, globalisation and world regions While maintaining a contemporary focus, the book looks over the whole of the 20th century as background to the globalisation of what it calls the manufacturing-marketing-media complex. There is specific emphasis on the 1980s, a crucial decade for advertising as a global institution; the 1990s, as the decade which gave rise to the discourse of globalisation; and the decade recently ended, as the era of new media.