ADVERTISING TODAY

More than a means of moving merchandise, advertising has been increasingly recognized not only as an art form all of its own, but also as a defining element of popular culture. Advertising Today provides a thematic overview of the evolution of advertising around the world over the past thirty years, charting influences from the political and social upheavals of the 1960s to the influence of the Internet in the 1990s. Each chapter includes an interview with a key figure in advertising – including Italy's Oliviero Toscani of the controversial Benetton campaigns, American comedian and American-Express spokesperson Jerry Seinfeld, and British adman John Hegarty of Bartle Boyle Hegarty, creator of the world-famous Levi's ads. In analysing specific advertisements, the book simultaneously acts as a history of sorts of global pop culture and a record of the social, cultural, and geo-political temperature-changes that affect our image-saturated environment. Included are over 500 advertisements originally seen in a wide range of media: print, television, billboards, the Internet, and even the very recent, so-called 'guerrilla' advertising – in which practically anything (pieces of fruit, sand dunes on a beach, sidewalks) can act as a surface for promoting a product.