ABSTRACT
No one would claim, not even Charles Saatchi, that advertising has all the answers. As a form it is more capable than most of being misleading, deceitful, exploitative, demeaning, irritating and wasteful. There is also something deeply suspect about its characteristic tones of voice, its oscillation between arrogance and servility, especially when pretending to be in some sense genuinely participatory. As an industry it produces loathing – and self-loathing – in abundance. But it has also managed to shrug these things off, to make them look like the sour grapes of an anti-entrepreneurial elite no one is listening to any more.
