A History of Advertising: The Decade of Globalisation
By Graham Thomas
- Release Date: 2026-07-05
- Genre: History
Description
Alongside the increase in the pace of globalisation in the 1980s, came political change defined by three events - two major and one minor - that affected the advertising business. Of the former the first was the falling of the Iron Curtain and the largely unfettered opening of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc to western companies. Second, and ultimately the more significant, was the introduction in 1978 of China’s open door policy. In the 1980s it gathered paced as China's economic strategy moved from one based on closed self-sufficiency to one of active participation in the global market. By the mid-1980s several hundred foreign companies and financial institutions were operating in China. (Though not all early entrants were successful.) The third and and less significant change was a swathe of modernisation across the Middle East as oil prices increased, rulers decided they needed to invest in their country’s infrastructure, along with an acknowledgement that encouraging the West to invest would be beneficial. However these moves had to be treated cautiously as the greatest fear was that Western brands and their consumption would lead to unnecessary mixing of the sexes, a turning away from religion, and a general lowering of moral standards. None the less, the region would remain the runt in the litter of the advertising market, a place where ex-pat chancers and the ne’er-do-wells would gravitate. Yet the region has unique characteristics that are worth covering even if it had little impact on the global advertising business. This, then, is where this volume starts.
