Awards
- Winner of CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles of 2019 awarded by the American Library Association 2019 (United States)
Overview
The Adman's Dilemma is a cultural biography that explores the rise and fall of the advertising man as a figure who became effectively a licensed deceiver in the process of governing the lives of American consumers. Apparently this personage was caught up in a contradiction, both compelled to deceive yet supposed to tell the truth. It was this moral condition and its consequences that made the adman so interesting to critics, novelists, and eventually filmmakers. The biography tracks his saga from its origins in the exaggerated doings of P.T. Barnum, the emergence of a new profession in the 1920s, the heyday of the adman's influence during the post-WW2 era, the later rebranding of the adman as artist, until the apparent demise of the figure, symbolized by the triumph of that consummate huckster, Donald Trump. In The Adman's Dilemma, author Paul Rutherford explores how people inside and outside the advertising industry have understood the conflict between artifice and authenticity. The book employs a range of fictional and nonfictional sources, including memoirs, novels, movies, TV shows, websites, and museum exhibits to suggest how the adman embodied some of the strange realities of modernity.
Full Product Details
Author: Paul Rutherford ,
Norman Davies ,
Marcel Martel ,
Andrew McDougall
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.700kg
ISBN: 9781487522988
ISBN 10: 1487522983
Pages: 480
Publication Date: 23 August 2018
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Temporarily unavailable
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Reviews
Through a selective, chronological succession of literary and film/television analysis...Rutherford traces the evolution of the American adman (later accompanied by the adwoman, though not quite as late as one might assume) from an opportunistic, showboating rascal to today's somewhat more sinister and thoroughly institutionalized figure. - Eric J. Ianelli - Times Literary Supplement, Jan 25 2019
Through a selective, chronological succession of literary and film/television analysis...Rutherford traces the evolution of the American adman (later accompanied by the adwoman, though not quite as late as one might assume) from an opportunistic, showboating rascal to today's somewhat more sinister and thoroughly institutionalized figure. -- Eric J. Ianelli * Times Literary Supplement, Jan 25 2019 *
Author Information
Paul Rutherford is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of several books published by UTP, including When Television Was Young (1990), The New Icons? (1994), Endless Propaganda (2000), Weapons of Mass Persuasion (2004), and World Made Sexy (2007).
