Introduction

There is nothing rare about books on advertising. There are dozens and dozens of them, all written from two sides of an unscalable wall. On the one side there are books like James Webb Young’s How to Become an Advertising Man, full of hints and professional advice, hectoring, unselfconscious, anecdotal, telling us ‘like how it is’:

Advertising, rightly seen, is all about people. And about how to use words and pictures to persuade people to do things, feel things, and believe things. Wonderful, mad, rational and irrational people. … About their wants, their hopes, their tastes, their fancies, their secret yearnings, their customs and taboos. Or in academic language, about such things as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics. ¹