advertising's influence
...ry believed the figure was 90 per cent, “because of [advertisers’] selfish purposes brazenly displayed”. If you drive your car across a bridge, you expect the bridge to stand up; if you buy a Hoover, you expect it to work. There are few areas of human activity – art, philosophy, and economics are the exceptions – in which there is no generally accepted measurement of functional performance. Advertising, uniquely in business, has none. As a result most of the money spent on advertising is probably wasted, and there is little accountability. Why? Because people in advertising like it that way. Does advertising influence people? Of course it does. The evidence, though anecdotal, is incontrovertible. In 1991, a surprise UK bestseller during the Christmas book-buying season was a heavily advertised volume on the art of fly-fishing, by J. R. Hartley. The advertising had appeared well before the work was written. The book was a copywriter’s invention, the object of a sentimental search of secondhand book shops by its elderly a...