Advertising today and tomorrow / William Arthur Evans

Includes index.

1. Advertising Yesterday -- 2. Advertising Today -- 3. The Search for protection -- 4. Agency Anomalies -- 5. Ivory Towers -- 6. The Winds of Change -- 7. Advertising man -- 8. Advertising tomorrow.

There has been at the same time both too much and too little written about advertising. On the one hand, the personal memoirs of some of the more successful practitioners, often sensational and almost inevitably the result of a desire to promote the interests of their own companies, have produced a bibliography of the business which, though much more interesting, is of only slightly higher value than the ghosted reminiscences of preeminent idols of sport. In attempting to propound what are euphemistically referred to as advertising philosophies, such men have succeeded, unwittingly, in writing what can only be described as a sort of nonfiction version of The Carpetbaggers. This is no fault of theirs, of course. As practising advertising men they were perhaps far too centrally concerned with the problems of winning and keeping business (and there is no doubt that both Rosser Reeves and David Ogilvy, to quote but two, gained a lot of new clients through their books); they were too much on the inside and not sufficiently committed to the functions and responsibilities of advertising as only one of many pieces in a much greater puzzle, the puzzle of industrial activity, of planning, producing and promoting products. Advertising people, for all their protests to the contrary, tend to be a very inbred bunch; clever, yes, but frequently divorced from the realities of business life. The result is that whenever one of them writes a book this rarefied atmosphere shows through and their readers go away with the feeling that it is all rather a game. Advertising is its own worst enemy and its own worst advocate, which is an appalling paradox.