ABSTRACT
This book introduces some of the many ways that have developed to help people think about ‘advertising’. An aspect of Advertising common to many media-based books, though unusual in most other disciplines, is the inevitable and extensive experience, even before starting, that readers will have had with the main topic. In a media intensive society advertisements are rarely entirely out of sight or mind, and the industry, its personnel and practices frequently feature as objects of casual reflection (direct or indirect) within other media products. The advertising industry and its outputs have provided foci for many kinds of widely consumed analysis. Social satirists, comedians (from Tony Hancock to Bill Hicks and Eddie Izzard), journalists and filmmakers, as well as academic theorists, have often considered the subject. Advertising is culturally emblematic in a way that enables it to become an engaging carrier of various more or less contemporary myths: the greedy shallowness of life; the non-productive emptiness of many kinds of contemporary work; or, in more optimistic views, the excitement and energy of contemporary societies.
