For a decade, journalist Leslie Savan has been exposing the techniques used by advertisers to push products and pump up corporate images. In the lively essays in this collection, Savan penetrates beneath the slick surfaces of specific ads and marketing campaigns to show how they reflect and shape consumer desires.
Ads do more than command attention.
They are signposts to the political, cultural, and social trends that infiltrate the individual consumer's psyche. Think of the clothing manufacturer that uses multiracial imagery. Buy their worldview, buy their product. When virtually every product can be associate with some positive self-image, we are subtly refashioned into the advertiser's concept of a good citizen. When, decades from now, historians look back and try to understand how advertising overwhelmed our culture in the 1980s, they will surely start by reading Leslie Savan's bright and trenchant reportage.