Abstract The term cultural industries was first coined in the 1980s as a comprehensive means to understand production, distribution, and consumption in the traditional information and entertainment industries—press, radio, and television—and others such as film and recorded music. Closely related industries, such as advertising, marketing, and public relations, were also included. With the subsequent popular embrace and commercialization of the internet, especially the social media platforms, the concept was necessarily expanded to incorporate such “new” media of the digital age. The relevance of these cultural industries for racial and ethnic groups living within the nations of the developed world is significant in at least two contexts: national and transnational. Within the frame of the nation, the issues concern the status of these groups as minorities; and in a global perspective, the groups come to be seen as members of transnational communities, with ties both to a putative nation of origin and to their counterparts in other nations. Most theoretical and research attention has focused on media representations—that is, on how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed in the content of the cultural industries’ outputs, seen both in a national context, such as the perpetuation of stereotypes in news and television series, and globally, as in film. Yet such a focus on representations tends to position minorities as passive victims of the media. Less common is research in which minorities are viewed as active agents producing their own information and entertainment, as they do, with local, national, and even transnational distribution. Minorities’ own media can range from local community radio to globally available television channels and internet platforms serving vast diasporas, the largest of these being those of non-resident Indians (NRIs) and the Chinese-speaking world (the “Sinosphere”). Each of these provides a case in which the industrial structure of the huge home media market provides the basis for far-flung consumption in all those countries in which members of the respective ethnicities have settled. In situations in which they attain a certain critical mass, such racial and ethnic minorities form a market for the cultural industries and consumer goods industries more broadly. Also to be taken into account is the phenomenon of racial and ethnic minorities having an impact on the cultural industries of the dominant cultures of the nations in which they dwell. The most striking case in that regard is how African American popular music made the profound cross-over from segregated radio stations and live venues to infuse the commercial mainstream of music recording and performance in the United States and, ultimately, the world. Although such creativity is valued, there remains a diversity issue about the actual participation of racial and other minorities in executive, management, and production roles in the major cultural industries.

The digitisation of advertising has profoundly altered the comfortable accommodation between advertisers, agencies and media which characterised the latter half of the last century, in spite of the advertising industry having been pro-active in building up its ad-tech expertise to meet the disintermediation challenge offered by Google and Facebook. The holding groups that oversee the several agency networks that constitute the global industry also have had to adopt defensive strategies in the wake of the global financial crisis. The groups have had to accept the cost disciplines imposed upon them by advertisers and to consolidate their services. Furthermore, at the same time as they deal with disintermediation and the effects of financialisation, the holding groups must struggle to demonstrate their continued functional relevance for consumer capitalism in the face of two major institutional threats: clients setting up their own advertising agencies in-house and management consultancies offering advertising services to their clients.

Whatever the cryptic title might suggest, the clear strength of this book is its timely interrogation of the conventional dichotomy between humans and machines, developed through a nuanced and wholly theorized study of how algorithms are bringing about a new era of relations between people and technology. “If … then” is a conditional control flow expression in computer programming, drawn upon here by Taina Bucher as a metonym for algorithms. She despairs that “algorithm” has become a buzzword of the digital age, a mythologizing discourse, and “sloppy shorthand” (p. 38) for the wider and more complex sociotechnical landscape that she intrepidly sets out to examine this book. Although the “power and politics” formulation of the subtitle is used repeatedly throughout, she makes it clear at the outset that the book is not about “politics with a capital P,” nor even political communication (p. 3). Rather, she sees politics as “ways of world-making” and, with a nod to the “ontological politics” of the Science and Technology Studies school, argues that algorithms are political, to the extent that “they help make the world appear in certain ways rather than others” (p. 3). As for power, Bucher takes the Foucauldian view of power as immanent, with the power of algorithms being so diffuse as to be “indistinguishable from life itself,” yet productive rather than repressive (p. 34). In this perspective, algorithms become “technologies of government” (p. 37).

This chapter identifies who are the biggest advertisers, which advertising agencies are serving in each of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), having special regard to their national, regional or global provenance, and also their field of service or production. Similarly, information is presented on the top ten largest advertising agencies in each of the nations, and their local and global connections. For each country, the distribution of advertising expenditure across the different media is also noted, with particular regard to the relation between television and internet advertising.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to account for the remarkable proliferation of Mexican restaurants and tequila bars in contemporary urban Australia, in the absence of any geographical contiguity, historical connection or cultural proximity between Australia and Mexico. Design/methodology/approach - The paper traces how the particularities of direct cultural contact, interpersonal networks and grass-roots entrepreneurism can open up new markets, and how the ground is, thus, prepared for subsequent large-scale international corporate entry to those markets. This research is based on interviews with key figures in the development of the Mexican food industry in Australia, interpreted in terms of the extant literature on cultural globalisation. The first-hand accounts of these participants have been interpreted in the light of available secondary sources and relevant theory. Findings - The most striking theme to emerge in the study is the relative absence of Mexicans, or even Mexico-experienced Australians, in the making of a market for Mexican food in Australia. Rather, initially, Americans were prominent, as entrepreneurs and in forming a consumer market, while in later decades, entrepreneurs and consumers alike have been Australians whose experience of Mexican food has been formed in the United States, not Mexico. The role of hipster subculture and travel is seen as instrumental. Also of interest is the manner in which the personal experiences and interrelationships of the Americans and Australians have shaped the development of the Mexican food industry. This is not to ignore the much more recent participation of a new wave of immigrants from Mexico. Research limitations/implications - While the scope of the study is national, the sharper focus is on the experience of Melbourne; it would be useful for future researchers to investigate other major cities, even if Melbourne has been the most pivotal of Australian cities in the history of Mexican food in Australia. The study has conceptual and theoretical implications for debates around cultural globalisation and "Americanisation". Originality/value - The paper provides a close-grained and suitably theorised account of how a particular consumer trend has become extended on a global basis, with particular attention to both individual experience and agency, and corporate activity.

This chapter outlines how globalisation has arisen in the advertising industry, and how it is manifested in its structure today. The profound transformation of advertising in the digital age must also be considered, along with related changes in modes of belonging, such as nationhood and minority status. Looking at the globalisation of the advertising and marketing communication industries in historical perspective, this occurred as the US- and European-based consumer goods and services corporations spread themselves into foreign markets in the 1960s and 1970s. For globalisation to occur in a meaningful sense, there needed to be a discourse about globalisation that could facilitate and legitimise the process, and a structural change which would make the world advertising industry truly internationalised. Advertising enables brands to acquire cultural meanings, such as hierarchies of status, associations with certain kinds of people, and even something like their own personalities.

This article examines the disruption that the global advertising industry is undergoing as it struggles to adapt to the extraordinary opportunities for marketing over the Internet and still maintain its former hold over "legacy" media. The "fresh" global media players, particularly Google, have risen quickly to claim unprecedented influence over the flows of advertising revenue that are the lifeblood of the media, obliging advertising agencies to compete in the new digital space that Internet advertising has opened. However, U.S.-based new media companies are having to deal with strong local competitors in major developing markets, at the same time as they face social criticism and regulatory intervention for their practices in exploiting users for marketing purposes in their more established markets.

This article examines the disruption that the global advertising industry is undergoing as it struggles to adapt to the extraordinary opportunities for marketing over the Internet and still maintain its former hold over “legacy” media. The “fresh” global media players, particularly Google, have risen quickly to claim unprecedented influence over the flows of advertising revenue that are the lifeblood of the media, obliging advertising agencies to compete in the new digital space that Internet advertising has opened. However, U.S.-based new media companies are having to deal with strong local competitors in major developing markets, at the same time as they face social criticism and regulatory intervention for their practices in exploiting users for marketing purposes in their more established markets.

The rise of China has brought about a dramatic increase in the rate of migration from mainland China. At the same time, the Chinese government has embarked on a full-scale push for the internationalization of Chinese media and culture. Media and communication have therefore become crucial factors in shaping the increasingly fraught politics of transnational Chinese communities. This book explores the changing nature of these communities and reveals their dynamic and complex relationship to the media in a range of countries worldwide. Overall, the book highlights a number of ways in which China's going global policy interacts with other factors in significantly reshaping the content and contours of the diasporic Chinese media landscape. In doing so, this book constitutes a major rethinking of Chinese transnationalism in the twenty-first century.

The article begins with the concept of advertising, defining it as a cultural industry carried out in agencies which mediate between the whole range of marketing practices pursued by advertisers, and the media which carry advertisements. The significance of this relation for the commercial media is noted. A very brief history of advertising is provided, with emphasis on the twentieth century, including the forces impelling the internationalization of the advertising industry. This leads into an outline of the rise of social criticism of advertising and its perceived effects, and governmental response in the form of regulation. A brief resume is given of academic approaches to the study of advertising, including that of advertisements themselves. The article concludes with some consideration of advertising within an anthropology of consumption and a postmodern commercial aesthetic.

Advertising is a crucial media industry, not only in its own right but also because of the intermediary structural relation it holds between the commercial media on one hand and the consumer goods and service industries on the other. This can be conceived as a manufacturing-marketing- media complex. However, the traditional business model that facilitated this relationship in the mass media era is now under challenge from the new forms of social communication afforded by the internet. Accordingly, such a fundamental transformation forces a critical review of how advertising has been understood. This essay explains how former approaches such as the semiological analysis of advertisements, the Marxist political economy of value, ethnographic studies of advertising practice, and the “ cultural turn ” in social theory have all been superseded to a greater or lesser extent by the reorientation of advertising within a broader conceptual landscape of consumer culture, and by contemporary theory and research on branding. Furthermore, attention is given to the historical globalization of the corporations that own the brands and the advertisi ng industry’s response, which has been to consolidate into a small number of global umbrella corporations that coordinate and manage a host of specialist divisions across the whole field of “ integrated marketing communications. ”

This chapter provides an overview of the contrasting structure of the media industries in Australia and Latin America, and outlines some of the technological and corporate trends associated with globalisation. In Australia, there is a small commercial market of print and electronic media for people of Latin American origin, but this has inherent limitations, the advantages endowed by a common language, on one hand, being offset by the internal diversity of national and other kinds of difference on the other. In such circumstances, government plays a benign and supportive role as both a broadcaster and an advertiser. There is also a grass-roots community sector. By contrast, the media in Latin America have developed on a mass commercial basis, and have had to continually negotiate their relative independence from governments always anxious to circumscribe media influence.

Conceptualisations such as cultural imperialism or global culture which concern themselveswith supposed homogenising tendencies in cultural globalisation fail to accountfor the gravitational pull and heterogenising effect of the local. Just as McDonald’sfind they absolutely must offer vegetarian hamburgers in India, in global televisionstudies we have become familiar with a full-blown transnational trade in formats, inwhich homogenisation proceeds through heterogenisation: that is, in the adaptationof program formulas in accordance with the imperatives of local cultures. This actiondemonstrates the management of an irreducible paradox of transnationalisation: homogenisationversus heterogenisation.

Across Asia, the past three decades have been marked by shared experiences of hyper-accelerated social, cultural and economic transformation. Consumer culture plays an increasing role in countries once dominated by socialism, and neo-liberal economic and social policies increasingly are being adopted by authoritarian statist regimes. More and more, governments address their citizens as individualised, sovereign consumers with reflexive 'choices' about their lifestyles and identities. One of the correlates of these processes of (neo-) liberalisation has been the emergence of new formations of consumption-oriented middle classes with lifestyle aspirations that are shaped by national, regional and global influences. How are everyday conceptions and experiences of identity and citizenship being transformed by rearticulated cultures of modernity across the region? This article draws upon the insights of existing Euro-American research on lifestyle culture and consumption, but extends its focus by relocating such concerns within the context of Asia and within a trans-national comparative frame. Examining how the rise of lifestyle media and culture is involved in a series of complex, local-level ideological contestations around emergent forms of sociality and identity across a range of geo-cultural sites, including India, China, Singapore and Taiwan, the authors challenge reductive assumptions about the global translatability and mobility of 'Euro-modernity'.