Media Literacy: Advertising

Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture by Arthur Asa Berger The sixth edition of this approachable text draws on both academic and applied perspectives to offer a lively critique of contemporary advertising's effects on American character and culture. Berger explains how advertising works by employing a psycho-cultural approach, encouraging readers to think about advertisements and commercials in more analytical and profound ways. The sixth edition features updated statistics, two new chapters, and new discussions of the role of brands, social media, non-binary perspectives on gender, advertising and the 2020 election, the problem of self-alienation, and how all these elements relate to consumption. Berger also considers the Values and Lifestyle (VALS) and Claritas typologies in marketing. Distinctive chapters examine the "1984" Macintosh commercial, a Fidji perfume advertisement, and a moisturizer advertisement from semiotic, psychoanalytic, sociological, Marxist, mythic, and feminist perspectives. Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture provides an accessible overview of advertising in the United States, spanning issues as diverse as sexuality, politics, market research, consumer culture, and more, and helps readers understand the role that advertising has played, and continues to play, in all our lives.

The Social Impact of Advertising by Tony Kelso Composed with a touch of the panache of a former advertising copywriter, Kelso challenges readers to reflect on the social impact of advertising from multiple angles. The book uniquely combines personal anecdotes with a penetrating look at some of the most critical perspectives toward the field advanced by media scholars. A play on David Ogilvy's legendary Confessions of an Advertising Man, the text disrupts the creative guru's account with a highly accessible critique of advertising suitable for classes in disciplines as various as cultural studies, marketing, media studies, political science, and sociology. The book reflects the latest industry trends, especially the migration from legacy to social media vehicles like Instagram and Snapchat. Topics covered include a brief history of modern advertising in the United States, advertising's influence on the so-called non-advertising content of the media, the ideological themes advertising inadvertently delivers, how advertising can privilege or marginalize various social constructions of identity, the controversial practice of targeting children, and how corporations often use advertising to superficially present a positive face while masking their profoundly darker sides. Incorporating a media-literacy approach, Kelso also offers an insider's overview of the typical procedures advertising agencies take in strategizing, conceptualizing, and delivering campaigns.

Provocateur by Anthony J. Cortese In the fourth edition of Provocateur, sociologist Anthony J. Cortese offers an up-to-date, critical analysis of modern advertising. Though we often hear that we live in a period of unprecedented gender and racial equality, both racism and sexism persist in a most telling area--the ads with which we are inundated every day in newspapers and magazines and online. Cortese examines the ideologies surrounding gender and race by delving into the presentation of women, ethnic minorities, children, and anyone who is qualified as "other" in society. Featuring a fresh selection of nearly 400 advertisements, this edition includes new scholarship from gender, racial, and cultural studies, new chapters on gay and lesbian marketing and aggression and violence in the media, an expanded chapter on race in advertising, and more. This edition is ideal for sociology, communication, and gender and ethnic studies courses as well as for use as go-to reference.

The Daily You: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your world by Joseph Turow The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaper The Daily Me—and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflects diminished consumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don’t know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don’t know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a “target” or “waste” or placed in one of the industry’s finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online? Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets—and what can be done to stop it.

Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know by Mara Einstein 3000. That's the number of marketing messages the average American confronts on a daily basis from TV commercials, magazine and newspaper print ads, radio commercials, pop-up ads on gaming apps, to pre-roll on YouTube videos and native advertising on mobile news apps. These commercial messagesare so pervasive that we cannot help but be affected by perpetual come-ons to keeping buying. Over the last decade, advertising has become more devious, more digital, and more deceptive, with an increasing number of ads designed to appear to the untrained eye to be editorial content. It's easy tosee why. As we have become smarter at avoiding ads, advertisers have become smarter about disguising them.Mara Einstein exposes how our shopping, political and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising, and enables the reader to understand howmarketing industries work in the digital age, particularly in their uses and abuses of Big Data. Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising's subtle and not so subtle impact on our lives-both as individuals and as a global society. What ideas and information are being communicated to us - and towhat end?

Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line Between What We Buy, Who We Are, and Those We Help by Mara Einstein Pink ribbons, red dresses, and greenwashing--American corporations are scrambling to tug at consumer heartstrings through cause-related marketing, corporate social responsibility, and ethical branding, tactics that can increase sales by as much as 74%. Harmless? Marketing insider Mara Einstein demonstrates in this penetrating analysis why the answer is a resounding "No!" In Compassion, Inc. she outlines how cause-related marketing desensitizes the public by putting a pleasant face on complex problems. She takes us through the unseen ways in which large sums of consumer dollars go into corporate coffers rather than helping the less fortunate. She also discusses companies that truly do make the world a better place, and those that just pretend to.

Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising by Neal M. Burns; Terry Daugherty; Matthew S. Eastin The Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption bridges the gap between professional and academic perceptions of advertising in new media environments through defining the evolution of consumerism within the context of media change. Containing findings from international experts, this Handbook of Research provides coverage of practical issues related to consumer power shifts, economic issues related to media exposure, and definitions to understand the dynamics involved with consumerism.