The Age of Persuasion
How Marketing Ate Our Culture
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Stop to consider the culture of the 21st century: Each morning, you might hear a half–dozen ads on the radio before your feet touch the floor. Staggering out of bed, you'll pass brand logos on your clothing and in your bathroom. By the end of the day, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of marketing messages have targeted you. And yet so little is understood about how marketing affects our lives, our society, and our world.
Enter Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant, the ad men behind The Age of Persuasion, the popular radio show broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Sirius Radio. They have made it their mission to share the back–room story of modern marketing, entertaining asides and all.
"Think of advertisers as millions of ants in a colony, each working hard and each with its own objective. Except that in this colony, every single ant is competing against the others. That's the ad business. Almost every ad you see, hear, and otherwise experience is competing for a piece of your imagination. And like any cross–section of humanity, the vast, worldwide advertising community is diverse: composed of geniuses and idiots, saints and buffoons, and everything in between."
From the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond, O'Reilly and Tennant offer insights into a rapidly evolving industry. Smart and funny, The Age of Persuasion provides an entertaining — and eye–opening — look at a world driven by marketing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Reilly and Tennant, the ad men team behind the Canadian radio series The Age of Persuasion, offer a witty and insightful look at the perpetually evolving advertising industry. With an eye-catching page design, featuring interchanging text formats, dictionary entries, and full-page shaded myth debunkers, the authors keep readers engaged through technical passages with servings of fun factoids on what Clark Gable's lack of an undershirt, Star Wars, John Mellencamp, and John McCain have to teach us about advertising. The authors are gifted communicators, and their conversational narrative covers successful advertising tactics, such as how to effectively market to Yoots (anyone in that Holy Grail demographic of under age 20), the impact of YouTube, the power of song, and multisensory experience. Appealing and informative, this ragbag of pop culture references, jokes, anecdotes, solid research, and advice will be indispensable to marketers or anyone curious about the power and ubiquity of advertising in modern culture.