Review: Contemporary Advertising

Relating to my basic advertising-studies, the next book in the queue was the best-selling “Contemporary Advertising” by William F. Arens. I thought it would provide a thorough basis for understanding advertising from many different angles and I’m pleased to report that it did that job well.

While Contemporary Advertising is generously sprinkled with example ad campaigns, it takes a very methodological and theoretical approach to teaching advertising – much more so than the “Advertising is dead – long live advertising” that I reviewed some time ago. Still, on the example-side, lots of campaigns are given a superficial glance and some covered in more detail – most chapters begin with a case study. In particular, Mastercard gets good coverage in the epilogue of the book which is entirely dedicated to their priceless “Priceless”-campaign.

Contemporary Advertising is physically a very big book and at over 600 tightly-packed pages, there’s massive amounts of information in there; as someone without a work history in advertising, I’d want to say it covers everything you need to know about advertising. Obviously it doesn’t, but I think there’s more stuff in here than even many people who work in advertising know.. Seriously, there’s that much stuff. However, at least the tenth edition I read (being from 2006) was understandably a little light on the cutting edge technologies like mobile advertising – but then again, some areas of that are so new that authoritative books are impossible to come by on that topic. Other new but already entrenched things like Internet-related topics were covered decently and links to further information are plentiful.

Starting from the background knowledge of advertising like history, the socioeconomic impacts, regulatory aspects and evolution of advertising, Contemporary Advertising then covers the entire process of advertising in striking detail. From basic consumer behavior and the models of consumer perception processes to market segmentation and product positioning, from quantitative and qualitative research methods to the importance of IMC (Integrated marketing communications), from media planning to meticulously covering all the basic media, there’s definitely more information than you can immediately chew.

One thing I especially liked was the existence of small sidebars on ethical issues in every chapter; they brought in some very welcome viewpoints on some of the less respectable facets of advertising – for example, covering topics like exploitation of consumers, political advertising and sex appeal. Something that I would’ve wanted more of were international examples; there are some, but there could be even more. As it stands now, the book is still very much an American book about advertising and not everything will be directly applicable to all other countries.

One of the more memorable (to me, anyway) of the ad examples used in the book was this great billboard by Chick-fil-A. Probably doesn’t appeal to everyone but I thought it was rather funny

Overall, I would say Contemporary Advertising is a wonderful book for anyone who wishes to get a solid foundation for dealing with the world of advertising. It’s not a guide to fully exploiting the cutting-edge technology per se, but the theoretical background, the lingo learned and the processes described will inevitably help in that, too. It’s not a light and quick read by any standards, but it’s nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting book on a topic that’s becoming more and more important as the underlying business model for many new services is ad-based – therefore, advertising is something that’s crucial to thoroughly understand in the modern economy.

And even if you’re not in the business itself, it brings some kind of comfort as a consumer to be able to decipher and understand the methods, motivations, processes, reasoning and influence attempts of anything the advertisers throw at you. Therefore, Contemporary Advertising is highly recommended reading if you can stomach a substantial introduction to the topic.