【正文】 t advertising is a cultural artifact reflecting social currents (Rotzoll et al., 1996). Advertising is also viewed as a carrier of cultural values (Cheng, 1997), which “tends to reflect the prevalent values of a culture in which it exists, insofar as those values can be used to shape consumption ethics” (Mueller, 1987, p. 52). Cultural values, norms, and characteristics, which are embedded in advertising appeals, have been used to study “differing degrees in the advertising messages of various cultures” (Mueller, 1992, p. 17). Accordingly, this study focusses on cultural values as manifested in advertisements to explore culture’s influence on advertising standardization. Differing from personal values, cultural values are defined as “the governing ideas and guiding principles for thoughts and action” (Srikandath, 1991, p. 166), which tend to permeate a culture (Chan and Cheng, 2002). Cultural values have long been debated as the core issue of international advertising practices (Okazaki and Mueller, 2008), especially the issue of standardization. As Mueller (1996) argued, cultural differences could pose formidable hurdles to standardization if international advertisers fail to understand the culture of local markets. Numerous crosscultural studies have focussed on advertising content, explaining the differences in relation to the culture values of the society in which the advertising appeared, by investigating paired countries such as the USA vs Japan (Mueller, 1992), the USA vs China (Cheng and Schweitzer, 1996), or the USA vs the UK (Katz and Lee, 1992). To measure cultural values as manifested in advertising systematically, past studies of several scholars have generated some insights, the most prominent of which are those from Pollay (1983) and Pollay and Gallagher (1990). Drawing on previous advertising literature and value research in other disciplines, Pollay (1983) developed a coding framework of 42 mon advertising appeals, which were considered as effective to “shed much light on the nature of cultural values manifest in advertising messages” (Chan and Cheng, 2002, p. 387). Furthermore, Pollay and Gallagher (1990) conducted an empirical test and identified 25 cultural values frequently depicted in advertisements in North America. Their study led to numerous followup studies (. McIntyre and Wei, 1998). In the same vein, scholars (Cheng and Schweitzer, 1996。 Mueller, 1987, 1992) have applied Pollay’s framework to the crosscultural context and derived a coding framework paring western with nonwestern cultural values that were manifested in advertising messages. Findings shed some light on the issue of standardization in international advertising. For example, Cheng and Schweitzer (1996) examined the cultural values reflected in 1,105 Chinese and US TV mercials and found that Pollay’s framework as equally applicable in the Chinese context. They suggested that Chinese advertising also merely reflected those cultural values that could help sell products and ignored those that could not benefit advertisers. Therefore, the studies have provided the sufficient ground for this study in how to measure cultural values in advertisements. However, other scholars (. Alden et al., 1999) argued that increasing globalization has led to the emergence of a GCC in which the global segments of consumers in countries around the world use a particular product or brand, or the brand may serve as “a conduit to feeling at one with global culture” (GCCT。 Okazaki and Mueller, 2008, p. 773). As GCCT further states, brands and consumers are facing deterritorialization and instead are connected to global, national, or other geographic boundaries in an intertwined fashion (Cayla and Arnould, 2008。 Okazaki et al., 2010). In other words, “consumers’ social interaction with brands increasingly transcends territorial boundaries and bee increasingly global” (Okazaki et al., 2010, p. 21). Distinctively different from the argument of homogenization of consumers as previously envisioned by some of the leading scholars such as Levitt (1983), GCC reflects “the global diffusion of consumption signs and behaviors, predominantly from Western and Asian developed countries。 . hamburgers and sushi as fast food” (Akaka and Alden, 2010, p. 38). As a driving force of the transitioning global culture as well as an important domain of research in cultural changes, international advertising reflects the global diffusion of cultural signs and symbols as well as cultural values (Akaka and Alden, 2010). Under the traditional globalization framework, cultural values are expected to converge。 however, from the GCC framework perspective, cultural values are expected to diffuse from the mature consumer countries to the others. Examining the concept of advertising appeals in relation to cultural values as well as the larger GCC, past crosscultural studies have proposed that cultural values manifested in advertising would transcend territorial boundaries. For example, Wang et al. (1997) explored Taiwanese print advertisements from 1982 to 1992 and found messages in Taiwanese advertisements tend to bee more westernized. In a more recent study, Okazaki and Mueller (2008) reported that American advertising appeared to have bee significantly more Japanese, while Japanese advertising might have bee somewhat more Americanized. In light of GCCT, some of the cultural values used in international advertising that belong to one type of culture (. western culture) are diffused through international advertising campaigns to other cultures (. nonwestern culture), and they somewhat became what Akaka and Alden (2010, p. 42) called “universal values.” Thus, in this study we expect that western cultural values will be prevalent in Chinese sampled ads or in the sampled ads targeting the market. To test this proposition, the following hypothesis was proposed: H2. Operating in the age of GCC, cultural values as manifested in both the