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What Everyone Needs to Know
Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know
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, pre-roll ads on YouTube videos, and native advertising on mobile news apps. These commercial messages are 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 to see 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. What Everyone Needs to Know® helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing 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 to what end?
Mara Einstein exposes how our shopping, political, and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. What Everyone Needs to Know® helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing 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 to what end?
- GenresBusiness
256 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2017
1 person is currently reading
130 people want to read
About the author
Mara Einstein
17 books26 followersMara Einstein is professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and an independent marketing consultant. She has been working in, or writing about, media and marketing for more than 25 years, and been an executive at NBC, MTV Networks, and at major advertising agencies. Dr. Einstein is the author of a number of books, including Compassion, Inc. (University of California Press), which examines the growing trend of promoting consumer products as a means to fund social causes and effective social change.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 22, 2018
This is a stunningly good book and probably ought to be compulsory reading. The only problem with it is that it is very much US based, but given the US is the heart of the beast it isn't too much to assume what is happening in your own part of the world if it isn't the US probably won't be a million miles from what is described here.
She has structured this around seven chapters: From Advertising to Marketing, The Business of Advertising, Consumer Behaviour, Creative, Advertising and Society, Media: Advertising's Everywhere, and Advertising in the Digital Age. Each chapter has lots of little sections that are answers to questions. Like, why has marketing to children proliferated? Is there a best commercial of all time? Are women more important to advertisers than men? Are there other forms of stealth marketing we might not be aware of? This is excellent, because I tend to think that I think in questions and so having things organised in questions feels right to me. Also, scanning down a list of questions is an easier way to find what you are looking for than trying to look through an index.
And she has filled this with fascinating bits of information. The stuff on branding is particularly interesting. For instance, she says that Marlboro cigarettes were originally branded as a cigarette for women - the coloured filter was designed to hide lipstick stains. This is to help make the point that the brand really is something significantly different from the product itself, that the brand is seeking to be the personality of the product, and that is nearly completely in the head of the customer, rather than in the product per se.
What is particularly interesting is that we are in a period of transition in media. Not only are the old certainties being challenged - even if you have a spare billion dollars or so, this probably isn't a good time to start a newspaper - but what is about to replace the old certainties is anything but clear. In the olden days - a decade or so ago - advertisers put their ads in newspapers or on television and this helped to pay for content - today Google sells advertising and they don't provide any content at all. It isn't clear how that might play out over time - and I admit to being overly pessimistic about most things, but I'm yet to see the great and sunny side of this story.
It also isn't hard to feel that we must be pretty close to saturation point with advertising. And yet, it feels like we are bombarded with more and more in all aspects of our life now. She doesn't mention Channel One in the US - where corporations pump advertising into school classrooms and schools force children to watch - but it fits her argument nicely. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between news and public relations - and that isn't healthy for our society.
This book does what it says it will do - it tells you everything you need to know about advertising and does so in a lively and highly accessible form. Worth getting hold of if you can.
She has structured this around seven chapters: From Advertising to Marketing, The Business of Advertising, Consumer Behaviour, Creative, Advertising and Society, Media: Advertising's Everywhere, and Advertising in the Digital Age. Each chapter has lots of little sections that are answers to questions. Like, why has marketing to children proliferated? Is there a best commercial of all time? Are women more important to advertisers than men? Are there other forms of stealth marketing we might not be aware of? This is excellent, because I tend to think that I think in questions and so having things organised in questions feels right to me. Also, scanning down a list of questions is an easier way to find what you are looking for than trying to look through an index.
And she has filled this with fascinating bits of information. The stuff on branding is particularly interesting. For instance, she says that Marlboro cigarettes were originally branded as a cigarette for women - the coloured filter was designed to hide lipstick stains. This is to help make the point that the brand really is something significantly different from the product itself, that the brand is seeking to be the personality of the product, and that is nearly completely in the head of the customer, rather than in the product per se.
What is particularly interesting is that we are in a period of transition in media. Not only are the old certainties being challenged - even if you have a spare billion dollars or so, this probably isn't a good time to start a newspaper - but what is about to replace the old certainties is anything but clear. In the olden days - a decade or so ago - advertisers put their ads in newspapers or on television and this helped to pay for content - today Google sells advertising and they don't provide any content at all. It isn't clear how that might play out over time - and I admit to being overly pessimistic about most things, but I'm yet to see the great and sunny side of this story.
It also isn't hard to feel that we must be pretty close to saturation point with advertising. And yet, it feels like we are bombarded with more and more in all aspects of our life now. She doesn't mention Channel One in the US - where corporations pump advertising into school classrooms and schools force children to watch - but it fits her argument nicely. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between news and public relations - and that isn't healthy for our society.
This book does what it says it will do - it tells you everything you need to know about advertising and does so in a lively and highly accessible form. Worth getting hold of if you can.
January 14, 2023
As a previous inside sales person for screens at Times Square, Mara Einstein really nails it with this amazing book of what advertising is all about in this digital age. Advertising is so sophisticated now that it’s not funny anymore!
February 2, 2023
If you write a review for this book on Goodreads, you need to go back and re-read the section on data brokers.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews