This accessible and comprehensive textbook explores the role of advertising in the marketplace. It investigates how firms’ advertising strategies are informative, persuasive or add value to the product advertised. The book explains in detail empirical methodologies used to identify the impact of advertising on consumer demand and on market structure and reviews some recent empirical findings. It concludes with an in-depth exploration of digital advertising and auctions along with a framework for current antitrust investigations into two-sided platforms (Google, Facebook) that are funded by advertising revenues.

Revised edition of Social communication in advertising, 2005.

By the time you reach eighteen years of age, there is every chance that you will have already watched more than a quarter of a million TV adverts. That is just the start. Researchers estimate that moving around a busy town or city, a person will be bombarded by more than 3,000 different examples of advertising every day.

Newly updated for the digital era, this classic textbook provides a comprehensive historical study of advertising and its function within contemporary society by tracing advertising's influence throughout different media and cultural periods, from early magazines through to social media. With several new chapters on the rise of the Internet, mobile, and social media, this fourth edition offers new insights into the role of Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube as both media and advertising companies, as well as examining the role of brand culture in the 21st century.

This book explores the history and practice of testimonial advertising in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, addressing a surprising lack of scholarship on this enduring and pervasive marketing tool. Treating consumers as neither the victims nor the empowered foes of corporate practices, the authors gathered here contribute to new scholarship at the intersection of cultural and business history by examining how testimonials mediate negotiations between producers and consumers and shape modern cultural attitudes about social identity, advice, community, celebrity, and the consumption of brand-name goods and services.

The world's preeminent word-of-mouth marketing experts demonstrate how in-person social networking, not online marketing, is the secret to soaring revenues.