Advertising is ubiquitous. Read the newspaper in the morning, in print or online, and you are confronted with ads. Billboards line the highway on your drive to work. If you use public transportation to get to work there are ads at the station or shelter. Get on the metro or bus and ads become convenient focal points away from the eyes of strangers. Heck, duck in to use the restroom and you are likely to have advertising in your face.
As Mark Tungate puts it in his new book, Adland: a Global History of Advertising, "advertising agencies and their clients have an immense impact on our lives," and as new technologies give us not only multiple entertainment options, but also the ability to bypass ads, "brands are forcing their messages onto every blank space, into every crack in the urban landscape." Because we live in a society "over-supplied with brands, they can't afford to stop trying to imprint their names on our minds."
Whether you see advertising as a fascinating and colorful part of modern life in a consumer economy, or as visual pollution and an intrusion into our mental space, this book goes a long way towards showing us how we got here. Mark Tungate is a British freelance journalist and author based in Paris, specializing in media, branding, travel, and lifestyle trends. He is the Paris correspondent for WGSN (Worth Global Style Network) and Campaign, the British advertising and communications magazine; a columnist for the French communications magazine Strategies; and a lifestyle writer for various magazines and newspapers. Tungate is the author of Epica – The Best of European Advertising, (Kogan Page, May 2004), Fashion Brands: Branding Style From Armani to Zara (Kogan Page, UK, July 2005), and Fifty: The Amazing World of Renzo Rosso and Diesel, (Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin, January 2006), in addition to Adland. He is currently working on another new book, Branded Male, to be published in 2008.
In the introduction to Adland Tungate provides a brief description of how he came to write the book and what it is about. When asked if he could recommend a book on the history of advertising, he was unable to think of any. While many books have been written about advertising, most were largely focused on individual approaches, or on particular national industries. None had taken a global perspective. There is an archive, The History of Advertising Trust, but it is, it need hardly be said, not very digestible. Tungate is quick to disclose - and it's good that he does so - that this book has a somewhat European slant. That is only to be expected, he says, of a Brit living in France. Besides, four of the six biggest agency groups in the world are based outside of America.
Because advertising is so in one's face and has the potential to be so irritating, Tungate spends a little time on the offensive, offering reasons to love advertising. There is, for one, the sheer curiosity factor that makes one itch to take a peek beneath the covers. Advertising is also the necessary "intermediary between a product and a potential customer," stimulating competition, creating demand, and encouraging new product development. Hence it is, thus far, the most "effective means of financing a free, varied and democratic media."
Most of those points can, of course, be contested. Tungate concedes the possibility that "advertising agencies provoke avarice, obesity and lung cancer," but he claims we increasingly have the ability to ignore them. He also provides a long list of writers and film directors who have worked in advertising, leading to the argument that it can be a springboard for creative talent.
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