This article presents an approach to cross-cultural studies of advertising audiovisual material that departs from the typical rigid marketing models. It favours a more qualitative inductive approach to corpuses, in which audiovisual texts are not approached or compared through the use of standardised American tools. After reviewing the usual marketing tools, the article focuses on the steps researchers can usefully take, from the gathering of audiovisual texts from two different environments to their classification, two important steps that are critical in such studies.