Advertisement may be the thing we like to hate, but it remains an ideal tool for questioning ideas and beliefs we too easily take for granted or that we simply forget to think about. This neglect starts of course with advertisement itself, both the object (the item that is meant to sell something else but that can be quite self-reflexive and self-promoting as well) and the process (the set of social and economic actions and mechanisms that eventually has the advertisement product as its output)—a distinction that is the starting point of this book. Like any other cultural product and process, advertisement is at the same time culture—and medium-sensitive (and thus determined by countless constraints) and permanently changing (and thus no less permanently transgressing, that is transforming, these constraints).
Co-written by three researchers from Sweden and Switzerland, two of them based in Germany, one in Sweden—an interesting constellation that opens...