This edition of Contemporary Advertising commemorates the book’s silver anniversary. By many measures 25 years is a very long time. Consider the world in which the first edition appeared back in 1982. President Ronald Reagan, still in his first term, was confronted with an unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent, the U.S. faced a brief but severe recession, and the Berlin Wall still partitioned Germany. A more business-friendly FTC revised of the definition of deceptive advertising, Sony released the first portable CD player, the film ET showed marketers the power of product placements, and Johnson & Johnson effectively used public relations to cope with a poisoning tragedy. In the world of media, Tom Brokaw moved from the Today show to the NBC news anchor desk, CNN was not yet two years old, and the primetime soap Dallas topped the Nielsen charts. Less than one third of all U.S. households received cable television. The World Wide Web did not exist. Finally, in 1982 the St. Louis Cardinals were World Series champs. Well, perhaps some things don’t change all that much.

For all of these 25 years Contemporary Advertising has introduced students to the remarkable field of advertising. Through 10 revisions, the book has evolved to stay abreast of changes in practice and the industry, as well as in the broader society that advertising serves. Even a brief mention of some of these changes—viral marketing, agency consolidations, cell phones, the Internet, IMC, globalization, consumerism, legal and policy changes, demarketing, the emergence of alternatives to the big three broadcast networks, HDTV—demonstrates how different the world of just 25 years ago was from our own. The challenge then, both for those who teach advertising and for a text that aims to illuminate it, is to accurately reflect important changes while remaining true to the principles and practices that endure. We would like to think that one reason Contemporary Advertising continues to be among the most adopted advertising texts in higher education is that it strikes such a balance.

This edition of the book also marks an expansion of the authoring team. William F. Arens has authored the book since its fi rst edition. Joining him on this 11th edition are Mike Weigold, an award-winning academic from the University of Florida, and Bill’s son and frequent collaborator, Christian Arens, an agency professional. In expanding our roster, we continue to be guided by the belief that Contemporary Advertising should present the fi eld as it is actually practiced—to put flesh on the bones of academic theory—and do so with clarity and verve. We believe that advertising is best taught by presenting it as it really is—as a business, as a marketing tool, as a creative process, and as a dynamic, hybrid discipline that employs numerous elements of the arts and sciences.