Old ads look funny to us today in part because advertisers believed the purpose of ads was to educate consumers about the product. Direct hard sell didacticism resulted in repetitious ads, heavy with product attributes. Today few ads include product information; most ads work by creating associations, such as with celebrities, making emotional appeals, or…
Mad Men fever continues. AMC hopes to capitalize on the interest in advertising with its new reality program, The Pitch, which follows two different agencies every episode as they compete for an account by proving how creative they are. Click here to read my blog post about The Pitch at the University of Wisconsin’s media blog,…
Recommending the surprisingly lively narrative of Albert Lasker’s life: The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Industry, by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz. Lasker ran the advertising agency Lord & Thomas from the 1910s through the 1930s, promulgating “reason-why” advertising, or…
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