ABSTRACT
Socialists have never liked the advertising industry. There must be many people working in advertising in the West who would consider themselves to be socialists; but this does not seem to have helped in any ideological rapprochement. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to describe the present organisation and recent development of advertising in some of these countries; to try to measure the size and recent growth rates of their advertising expenditure and compare it to that of the UK, and to assess the purposes that their advertising serves. The book starts with a study on Soviet advertising and given it a more detailed and extensive treatment than that of the other three countries. The first part of this study uses a steamhammer to crack a nut; the second part, unfortunately, uses a lot less power on a somewhat larger nut.
