The advertising business is radically changing in the new digital society. This new situation makes any book that tries to guide us and give us guidelines to understand the keys to Advertising in new digital environments is more than welcome. In the case of this book, the enthusiasm for its appearance is reinforced by the research and professional strength of its authors, coordinated by the professor and researcher Cristina González- Oñate, PhD in Communication Sciences from the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, in addition Degree in Advertising and Public Relations and Audiovisual Communication from the aforementioned university. The book is entitled The advertising business in the digital society of the Valencia Community and has just been recently published by Editorial UOC, the publishing seal of the Open University of Catalonia.
The book aims to be a study that provides current and usefulness, both for the academic and professional fields, trying to offer keys and approaches that facilitate the effective elaboration of communication in the digital and economic context, as well as the global conception of digital media. This research provides news and benefits for the professional sector of advertising communication since it offers a state of the question, of business reality as a consequence of the exponential growth of digital media and the economic crisis that helps us understand the main reasons for this evolution and changes in this sector of advertising communication.
Thanks to this book, your readers will be able to identify the news and benefits for the professional sector of advertising communication. This research offers a state of the question, of the business reality as a consequence of the exponential growth of digital media and of the economic crisis suffered by the great western economies in the last decade. In the same way, the work helps to understand the main reasons for this evolution and the changes that have occurred in this sector of advertising communication in the Valencia Community, but which can be perfectly extrapolated to other regions of Spain.
In her research, Cristina González-Oñate has managed to surround herself with a group of men and women experts in the field and with extensive experience in the advertising market and in the academy market thanks to their point of union, which is none other than the Jaume I University of Castellón, probably the most leading university in the Valencian Community and one of the most contributing in the field of Communication Sciences in Spain in recent decades. The book reviewed here has a total of 164 pages and is structured in five large chapters, all of them co-authored. The work has among its pages the signatures of great experts such as Elizabeth Lauren Salvador Harsh; Lorena López-Font, María Teresa Benlloch-Osuna and María Pallarés-Renau; Eva Breva-Franch, Magdalena Mut-Camacho and Susana Miquel-Segarra; María Consuelo Balado-Albiol, María del Rocío Blay-Arráez and Daniel Zomeño-Jiménez; Carlos Fanjul-Peyró, Alejandro Rubio-Navalón and Andrea Vaquero-Bachero.
All these authors have participated in one way or another in the research entitled
The advertising business in the digital society: agency structure, professional profiles and new creative trends, an own promotion and research plan of the aforementioned Universitat Jaume I (with code P1-1B2015-27) that spread over time between years 2015 to 2018. Just in those years, people began to talk about the end of the crisis in the advertising market and the first positive data in our economy after a terrible economic crisis unprecedented in recent decades or at least of a severity unknown by the youngest generations in the country. The book reviewed here brings together the conclusions of his research carried out during those years in the provinces of Alicante, Castellón and Valencia.
During the three years that the research lasted, its authors carried out a study on the current situation and a future prospect for the advertising sector in the Valencia Community, the evolution of which has generated substantial changes, both in the services offered and in the market and in the media landscape of advertising communication, in addition to the very structure of companies and organizations in their immediate environment.
Another of the strong points of the work is that both the emergence and evolution of professional profiles as well as work methods are analyzed, all aspects of interest to the academic and professional fields. Proof of this are the interesting conclusions that this research has generated, not only for the academic sector (professors and researchers), but for the professional sector of advertising in general, and in the Valencia Community in particular, but by extension valid for the rest of the national scene.
Two highly interesting chapters stand out particularly from this work, such as chapters one and five. Chapter number one is the work of Cristina González-Oñate and Elizabeth Lauren Salvador Harsh and is titled “The advertising business in the Valencia Community”. In this section, a wonderful overview of the advertising industry in the Spanish Levante is offered, and the rigorous methodological tools used in the different phases of the research, based on field work, selection of representative samples and in-depth interviews, are also disclosed. .
On the other hand, the fifth chapter, by Carlos Fanjul-Peyró, Alejandro Rubio-Navalón and Andrea Vaquero-Bachero, is also of great interest. It is the final part of the book and in it the authors venture to make a future prospect. The chapter is titled “The future of the advertising agency” and it shows us the present and future of the advertising agency in the Valencia Community, the future coexistence of the agency with other business models and the weight of advertising Spanish internationally.
By way of conclusion it can be affirmed without fear of being wrong that the authors leave us three very clear messages. The first of them is that we live before a new advertising reality that translates into the new structures of advertising agencies where there are changes in roles and functions. The main changes that the digitization of advertising has brought about in the organization of business in the Valencia Community focus precisely on the identification and evolutionary analysis of these professional profiles. His work has detected and analyzed the main professional figures that have joined the sector in recent years, among which the role of the community-manager stands out. The second of the main points of interest focuses on the breadth of services offered and adaptation to the demands of advertisers. The book analyzes the services offered by advertising agencies with special emphasis on the changes produced by digitization and an approach to the remuneration of these services. Finally, the book shows us where the shots will go in the future context of the advertising agency. The work gives us a final chapter with an analysis of how the advertising agency has transformed so far and where it is heading in the future.
