More than a means of moving merchandise, advertising has been increasingly recognized not only as an art form all its own, but also as a central, defining element of popular culture. Advertising Today provides a thematic overview of the evolution of advertising around the world over the past thirty years, charting influences ranging from the political and social upheavals of the 1960s to the appropriation of cinematic production techniques and special effects in the 1980s, to the influence of the internet in the 1990s. Each chapter includes an interview with a key figure in advertising-including Italy's Oliviero Toscani of the controversial Benetton campaigns, the award-winning Brazilian Nizan Guanaes, American comedian and American Express spokesperson Jerry Seinfeld, and British adman John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, creator of world-famous Levi's ads. In analyzing specific advertisements and ad campaigns, the book acts simultaneously as a history of global pop culture and a record of the social, cultural, and geopolitical changes that affect the image-saturated environment around us. Included are more than 400 advertisements originally seen in a wide range of media-print, television, billboards, and the Internet-as well as the recent, so-called guerrilla advertising, in which practically anything (pieces of fruit, sand dunes on a beach, stenciled sidewalks) can art as a surface for promoting a product.

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