The major difficulty with this book is that it is mistitled. It really isn't about advertising, it's about the advertising corporation. We learn about business structures, agency positions, job descriptions, and procedures to develop advertising campaigns. Only cursorily, and briefly, do we learn anything about advertising itself.

An obvious example: one could expect a book of this nature to discuss the difference between advertising to convince users of a product to select one brand over another, and advertising to convince nonusers that they really need to start buying this product in the first place. Although the author acknowledges the problem, we learn very little about this or any other questions about advertising itself as a sociocultural exercise. Nothing is said about the impact of pushing first world products in third world societies. Perhaps worse, when in the final chapter he intends to argue that advertising is a moral exercise, the most he say is that it generates profits and provides employment. In a certain sense, this book conforms to all the stereotypes one would expect from an advertising executive when writing about his own profession.

But if your interest is in a descriptive summary of the business organizations that create advertising (whatever that may be), rather than the service they are generating, this may be the one for you. ( )

Most VSIs are written by professors or other third-person experts. This one is written from a much more first-person perspective: Fletcher is an expert on advertising largely because he's an expert advertiser.

This makes the book interesting: I picked it up expecting a more humanities-based explanation & critique kind of thing. Instead, it's a full throated defense of advertising as a grand social good. I am not a likely audience for that view, so Fletcher did very well to even hold my attention. And he's good on the logical hair-splitting: his argument is something like "to attack advertising as socially harmful makes no sense. Consider the following advertisements: classifieds, advertising for charities, advertising for public goods. They are part of advertising. They are not socially harmful. Therefore, 'advertising' is not socially harmful, although some advertisements could be."

Fair enough. We then get an explanation of how advertising firms work, their history, and the ways they judge their own success. The book closes with his "advertising is a grand social good" claim, which is much shakier. he lists the following as reasons for his claim:

i) it subsidizes media like as paper, TV and so on.
ii) ad agencies function as art patrons, and develop the creativity of the society. Moreover, they provide free art to the public.
iii) they benefit consumers by pushing prices down and help us make our choices better (both due to improved information about products and competitors' prices).
iv) it helps employers by increasing demand for products and thus increasing the demand for labor.

Now, of course,

i) media sponsored by advertizing is almost always worse than media that is purchased (HBO), or sponsored by government or community organizing (PBS; BBC). It is also much more often slanted towards the interests of advertisers in mass media; those advertisers are, overwhelmingly, huge businesses.*
ii) seriously? Ads are sometimes entertaining. They are almost never intellectually or emotionally gripping.
iii) this could be equally well achieved by a database.
iv) he had previously stated that advertising does *nothing* to affect overall demand, and that it only affects market share. So... one or the other.

But the fact that he made me think is a good reason for recommending this to others. Now if someone could just explain to me why Americans change the 's' to a 'z' in every word *except* advertising, I'll be happy.

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* Of course, the actual content of such mass media would probably be slanted towards those interests even without the influence of the advertisers' money. I doubt we can blame GE for the awfulness that is 'Anger Management,' for instance. ( )