ABSTRACT
Advertising has never been short of enemies, usually though, people secure in their sense of superior self-worth; academics, artists, tax accountants. But the most relentless, systematic and vitriolic scourge of Madison Avenue has been Hollywood, a case of Sodom cocking a snook at Gomorrah. This is a doubly wounding blow to the advertiser’s vanity, not just because nobody likes to have their spotted soul explored in cinemascope, but because adland is besotted with movies.
Cinema despises advertising. It treats the industry and its practitioners with derision, it holds them up as objects of mockery and satire, it lambasts them for the sins of cynicism, deception, greed and contempt for the public (sins which quite justifiably could be laid on the doorstep of its own foyer). 1
