cloth 1-56639-244-6 $61.50, Nov 94, Out of Stock Unavailable
paper 1-56639-245-4 $31.95, Nov 94, Available
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368 pp
6x9
54 halftones
"Savan straps one ad campaign after another to here lab table and dissects each with humor, insight and a healthy dose of rage....This thoughtful collection will appeal to anyone concerned with how ads work, what they're hiding and why they have such a hold on us."
Publishers Weekly
How does a blatant lying in TV commercialslike Joe Isuzu's manic claimscreate public trust in a product or a company? How does a company associated with a disaster, Exxon or Du Pont for example, restore its reputation? What is the real story behind the rendering of the now infamous Joe Camel? And what is the deeper meaning of living in an ad, ad, ad world? For a decade, journalist Leslie Savan has been exposing the techniques used by advertisers to push products and pump up corporate images. In the lively essays in this collection, Savan penetrates beneath the slick surfaces of specific ads and marketing campaigns to show how they reflect and shape consumer desires.
Savan's interviews with ad agencies and corporate clientsalong with her insightful analyses of influential TV sportsreveal how successful advertising works. Ads do more than command attention. They are signposts to the political, cultural, and social trends that infiltrate the individual consumer's psyche. Think of the products associated with corporate mascotsthe drum-beating bunny, the cereal-pushing tiger, the doughboythat have become pop culture icons. Think cool. Think of the clothing manufacturer that uses multiracial imagery. Think progressive. Buy their worldview, buy their product. When virtually every product can be associate with some positive self-image, we are subtly refashioned into the advertiser's concept of a good citizen. Like it or not, we lead "the sponsored life."
Excerpt available at www.temple.edu/tempress
"[A] smart, stingingly funny collection.... Ms. Savan brings to bear a pithy style, a peppery wit and an unerring moral compass that enables her to score hits on the corporate fictions that increasingly structure our world view.
New York Times Book Review
"Her delectably sarcastic analyses offer disturbing insights into the images that millions of citizens seek to adopt."
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Savan has a keen eye for baloney, and she peels off layers of it to reveal the moldy Wonder Bread of corporate greed-without losing her sense of humor."
UTNE Reader
"When, decades from now, historians look back and try to understand how advertising overwhelmed our culture in the 1980s, they will surely start by reading Leslie Savan's bright and trenchant reportage. For those likewise concerned right now, The Sponsored Life is an indispensable collectionas well-informed as the account of any cool insider, yet powerfully critical throughout."
Mark Crispin Miller, Johns Hopkins University, author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV
"This is one of those books you see, and say, Oh! And just reach for and purchase without even thinkingthe ultimate dream, no doubt, of the advertisers who generated the TV commercials she so crisply analyzes inside."
Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Life After God
"Original. Provocative. Breathtakingly insightful."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
"Savan is one of the best new cultural criticsher voice is strong, clever; her writing has verve, passion; her quick and feisty rejoinders talk back to commerce.... By paying attention to social issues, particularly women and race, she makes us notice the politics at work in the spaces between news and entertainment."
Patricia Mellencamp, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Acknowledgments
The Bribed Soul
1. Too Cool for Words
This Typeface Is Changing Your Life
The Neo-Calvinists
Timekeeping Is Money
In Living B&W
Honest Engine
Avant-Hard Sell
Guess Again
The Lifestyle Lifestyle
On Background
The Fat Lady Sings
It's the Rote Thing to Do
Titular Head
Listless is More
Local Anesthetic
Bookends, Pods, and Piggybacks
The Sound of Nine Ads Hyping
Sneakers and Nothingness
Heaven Can Bait
Burying Messages
2. Corporate Image Adjustments
Soldiers of Fortune
Born-Again Dow
Real Forced
Mr. Liberty
Hands Down
Touch-Feely, Inc.
Defense Spending
Rock of Agents
Car-nal Knowledge
Big Apple
Mass Mascot
Takeover Makeover
Anxiety Calls
Bull
God's Little Agency
The Tie-Ins that Bind
The Brand with Two Brains
Whom Ma Bell Tolls
Beam Me Up
Let's Face It
Getting Carded
Gotta Hack It
3. Real Problems, Surreal Ads
Du Pontificates
Point of Purchase
Forget the Dead Babies
Uniform Standard
Where the Boycotts Are
30 Seconds Over Washington
A Piece of the Wall
Don't Leave Romania Without It
The Face of the People
Stay Hungary
Puff Piece
Toxic Moxie
Hawking War
Green Monsters
War Is Bell
Watts Nuke?
Ad-Free Ads
In the Red Again
The Off-Road to Rio
4. Our Bodies, Our Sells
At the End of a Sentence
The New, 1985 Crotch
The Sound of Sexism
A Hard Man is Easy to Find
Wipe Out
Wild Thing, I Think I Smell You
Women Will Be Gals
Flow Jobs
The Trad Trade
Cockers
Ragtime
Getting Olayed
Leggo My Ego
Demagaga
Friend of Faux
Operation Miscue
Fear of Buying
Boys Under the Hood
5. Shock of the Hue
Down and Out on Mad Ave
Little White Lies
Constructive Engagement Ring
Cri de Coors
Gut Reaction
Cereal Rights
Rube Barbs
Addictions and the Drug War
Shock of the Hue
Be-Twixt and Be-Tween
Rubber Sold
Bash & Cash
Buy-It Riot
Logo-rrhea
Generation X-Force
6. The Sponsored Life
On the Rox
Rock Rolls Over
Jean Pool
Inner Tube
Desperately Selling Soda
The Afterschlock
Hip Hop
TV in Its Underwear
Lemon-Fresh Apocalypse
Miles to Go
Modern Times
Adblisters
TVTV
New Word Order
Everything Must Go
The Ad Mission
Pop Culture
Index
Leslie Savan is the advertising columnist for The Village Voice and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. |
General Interest
Mass Media and Communications
Culture and the Moving Image, edited by Robert Sklar.
The Culture and the Moving Image series, edited by Robert Sklar, seeks to publish innovative scholarship and criticism on cinema, television, and the culture of the moving image. The series will emphasize works that view these media in their broad cultural and social frameworks. Its themes will include a global perspective on the world-wide production of images; the links between film, television, and video art; a concern with issues of race, class, and gender; and an engagement with the growing convergence of history and theory in moving image studies.
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