We’re firm believers in that if you’re going to devote your life to something, even something as “banal” as advertising, you should commit. Let yourself go. Fall in love with it. Learn it inside and out.
After reading Adland over the weekend, we’re thinking, here’s a book that finally lets you do that.
It’s really hard to find a book on advertising that doesn’t come off as worshipful and jam-packed with debauched ad men and images of half-naked women, or overly critical and almost caustic. These are all attempts to simplify the profession and shove it into a box it doesn’t really belong in.
We get a sense that author Mark Tungate has as much of a love/hate relationship with advertising as anybody. Without ignoring or embellishing those feelings, he examines the industry as a chartable landscape with a unique history.
But there’s a kind of fondness, too, as he recounts the history of major agencies, describes why Pears Soap left a resonant impression, and outlines the actions that made the first “on-record” ad men who they are.
While advertising is a business filled – like any other – with talented creative, technical and business people, it’s also got more than its fair share of passion.
That’s because advertising is largely the business of examining people in a passionate way, then using what you discover to tell them stories about themselves.
Granted, to sell them stuff. There’s just one oft-overlooked aspect of this equation: that the great portfolio-toting people who advertised the “culture” of advertising to the masses, fell just as much in love with their creation as the outside world.
And in love, of course, there’s plenty of pain.
