Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue: Advertising in the '90s - Hardcover

Mayer, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316551546 ISBN 13: 9780316551540

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1991

Synopsis

Surveys the current state of the American advertising industry, describes its role in international trade, and explains how it must adapt to the changing business environment

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Mayer ( The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry ) here describes with his customary authority how advertising in America has evolved from a creative art-of-persuasion industry based in mid-Manhattan to a "fact-based" product-moving service in a score of U.S. cities and around the world. Originally sellers of print-media space, ad agencies successively became space buyers, creators of romantic soap and auto ads, producers of early TV network programs, and their clients' became buyers of individual TV "minutes." Advertising people in the electronic age became research analysts who identified product niches and consumer trends using data automatically culled from supermarket checkout counters, all in a new world of locally independent and special-interest media, including TV's proliferating cable channels. Mayer draws richly on interviews with industry giants (Rosser Reeves, David Olgilvy, Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett) while appraising the effects of explosive new sight-and-sound graphics, remote management and possible conflicts of interest among world agency conglomerates, and discusses an upcoming "single-market" Europe sure to be complicated for the ad trade by local language and custom.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Mayer, author of The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry ( LJ 10/1/90), is refreshingly readable and opinionated in this analysis of the advertising industry. He longs to return to the days when ad agencies were more independent and richly creative, not controlled by the MBA mentality. His major thesis is that the role of the ad agency should be to develop and reinforce the long-term image of branded products, and that owning solid brand names with good reputations can significantly increase corporate value. Mayer sees various factors as contributing to the decline in Madison Avenue's influence: the agencies' switch from private to public ownership; the greater reliance on research and computerized data; the increasingly servile role of ad agencies as more corporations develop their marketing plans in-house; and the growing emphasis on short-term sales gain. Mayer has done his homework with strong evidence for his theories. This is for business collections.
- Sue McKimm, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Cleveland
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0316551546
• ISBN 13: 9780316551540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256