ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson remarked that advertising was so "near to perfection'' that no further improvements in it could be imagined. The dramatic innovations in advertising practice since that time have proved him wrong, keeping advertising production in the public eye and prompting neverending debate and controversy about its evolving social role. From its origins in the nineteenth century, the advertising industry owes its survival to its ability to negotiate relations between media outlets on the one hand and manufacturers needing to advertise on the other. We have referred to this as a bridging function between those domains-and implicitly, between the economy and the culture in which they are embedded.
