Tungate's coverage is global in that it includes France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Japan, China, India, and Thailand, in addition to the UK and US. What I found wanting, however, was coverage of indigenous advertising, for lack of a better term - advertising in China and India, for example, that has its roots in those countries. There is much colorful homegrown advertising there, and in Latin America and Africa too. Yet Tungate's coverage is mostly of modern Western agency-driven advertising. And I don't recall any discussion of advertising in Middle Eastern countries. Surely they have advertising as well.
The book also lacks sufficient coverage of the serious opposition to advertising in certain quarters. There is one brief mention of 'publiphobes' in France, but not much else. Tungate could have mentioned Adbusters, the Bubble Project, Naomi Klein and No Logo, Sut Jhally and the Media Education Foundation, or the various places such as Sao Paolo, Brazil and a few American states that have outlawed billboards. Even brief mention of some of the forms of protest and opposition to advertising, and the industry's reaction to them, would have rounded out and balanced the book.
At the close, Tungate speculates about the agency of the future. He states, first of all, that "[f]or almost 30 years, the advertising landscape evolved remarkably slowly," with the biggest technological changes being the adoption of FM radio. Beginning with the 80s and 90s, however, and accelerating now with the diffusion of new media, there is a real technological drive for change. I'll leave you with this clever and comical image Tungate uses to characterize this challenge: "The advertising industry is in danger of looking like a fat kid playing tag with a group of nimbler opponents who remain tantalizingly out of reach. It will end up red-faced, exhausted and undignified."
Adland is an excellent resource for anyone interested in getting into advertising or in learning about its history, stories, and major players.
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