Intercultural Communication in the Advertising Industry

Organisations are under pressure to keep pace with a fast changing, highly competitive, and increasingly global business. To continue to grow and thrive in this environment, global players need to make use of the new technologies; recognise knowledge and knowledge workers as their most important asset; maximise cross-cultural and cross-border knowledge exchange to find innovative solutions for their clients; and encourage their organisational learning process. The present empirical study takes up the chance to explore how one single cross-border communications agency, StrawberryFrog (SF), herein defined as a technology-enabled, geographically dispersed organisation overlaid by a community of practice, maximises its position in the volatile international advertising industry by making use of the new information technologies, recognising intellectual capital as a key asset, treating cultural diversity as a resource, and leveraging the functionality and benefit of communities of practice to encourage their organisational learning and knowledge sharing processes across geographical borders, cultural boundaries, and time zones.