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.
The introduction also includes a helpful little lexicon, helpful to those new to the terminology of advertising. As Tungate is quick to point out, however, for an industry specializing in the creation of memorable brands, advertising has, until recently, had a remarkably short-sighted naming policy when it comes to its own agencies. The practice has been to string together the initials of last names, making it very difficult to remember the names of the agencies and even more difficult to distinguish among them. Nevertheless, this section provides the novice reader with some useful terminology.
Contrary to my initial expectations, Tungate's global history of advertising is largely confined to the last 200 years. He makes only very brief mention, in very informal and vague terms, of early examples of advertising found in the ruins of Pompeii and, according to some, in prehistoric cave paintings. "But it's safe to say," he writes, "that advertising has been around for as long as there have been goods to sell and a medium to talk them up - from the crier in the street to the handbill tacked to a tree."
His global history of advertising really begins with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1447, and more concretely with the French doctor Theophraste Renaudot. In 1631, Renaudot established the first French newspaper, La Gazette, so that he could reach a broader audience for his job notice board. In the UK, the first advertiser was probably William Tayler, in 1786. From there we move rapidly into the Victorian era. "Everyone agrees that advertising got into its stride with the industrial revolution - aided and abetted by the rise of newspaper as a mass medium." I find it interesting that newspapers and advertising have been in bed from the beginning. It is only relatively recently that some of us have become concerned about the ways in which news content can be distorted and limited by powerful advertisers.
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