Selected Print Sources

The following print sources represent a selection of interesting and useful advertising titles. To find additional titles, use the Advanced Search function in the CAT and add terms for media type, for example, "Advertising" and "TV" to your search.

Advertising : A Cultural Economy, Elizabeth Rose McFall
Advertising is often used to illustrate popular and academic debates about cultural and economic life. This book reviews cultural and sociological approaches to advertising and, using historical evidence, demonstrates that a rethink of the analysis of advertising is long overdue. Liz McFall surveys dominant and problematic tendencies within the current discourse. This book offers a thorough review of the literature and also introduces fresh empirical evidence. Advertising : A Cultural Economy uses a historical study of advertising to regain a sense of how it has been patterned, not by the "epoch", but by the interaction of institutional, organisational and technological forces. (Amazon.com)

Culture and the Ad : Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising, William M. O'Barr
"The main argument developed in this book is that the representations of foreigners and other categories of outsiders who appear in advertisements provide paradigms for relations between members of advertising's intended audience and those defined as outside it. [...] I focus on those defined as outsiders (foreigners in particular, but also Americans who are sometimes treated like foreigners: African Americans and Native Americans)." (from the author's introduction)

Advertising Progress : American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing, Pamela Walker Laird
Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and why — in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority — the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture. (Amazon.com)

Edsels, Luckies & Frigidaires : Advertising American Way, Robert Atwan, Donald McQuade, John W. Wright
"This collection has been put together on the basis of several related premises. Advertisements frequently contain two kinds of information: a verbal or pictorial description of the product or service being sold, and the effects — real or imagined, stated or implied — such products or services will have on the purchaser's private or public life. As such, advertisements tell us in miniature a great deal about an entire civilization, its actual material life and interlocking collective fantasies. Our criterion throughout has been to select ads that amply represent this comprehensive approach to people and products." (from the authors' preface)

Advertising to the American Woman : 1900-1999, Daniel Delis Hill
"The first step in a marketing strategy was to identify and understand who the customers were and how to target them. Nineteenth-century manufacturers, distributors, and retailers (all overwhelmingly male) had only to look to their own homes for answers. Their mothers, wives, and daughters were unquestionably the consumers in their households, even if not necessarily the end users. [...] [A]cross the entire twentieth century, the target for a considerable majority of manufacturers of consumer products was the American woman." (from the author's preface)