Books
Kevin Goldman, Conflicting Account: the Creation and Crash of the Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Empire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998) A history of the spectacular rise and fall of an ad agency. A modern business horror story.
Jackson Lears, Fable of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995). An analysis of "the improvisational confidence game of early advertising" - including advertising's infancy in the 1860s, and its first great boom in the 1930s.
Peter Mayle, Up the Agency: The Funny Business of Advertising (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) This former advertising executive examines the culture of Madison Avenue, "where the tribal customs and rituals are as wondrous to behold as the sights on any anthropological expedition."
James Twitchell, AdCult USA: the Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) Explains why and how ads have become the dominant "meaning-making" system in the American culture. As far as Twitchell is concerned, advertising has become a Western canon of its own.
Leslie Savan, The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV and American Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994) As a journalist, Leslie Savan has exposed the psychological techniques used by advertisers. In this sharp collection of essays, Savan takes us beyond the surfaces of ads to show how they both reflect and influence the consumer's desires. She says that ads do more than capture the consumer's attention; they invade the psyche, attaching themselves to some aspect of positive self-image.
Films, Videos, DVDs
Sell and Spin: A History of Advertising (1999, the History Channel/ A&E Network) This documentary, narrated by Dick Cavett, includes insightful interviews with advertising professionals and scholars, and lots of examples tracing advertising from ancient times to the World Wide Web.
Crazy People (1990, rated R) Dudley Moore as a creative director who is stressed-out and tired of the general lack of truth in advertising. He comes up with a series of brutally honest (and very funny) ads, which results in his confinement in a mental institution.
How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989, British, rated R) It sounds like a training film, but it's actually a weird comedy about an ad man who is under so much pressure that he develops a talking boil (who is also a critic) on his shoulder (thus the pun of the title). What results is a heavy-handed satire of the ad industry, circa the 1980s.
