Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising: A Study of 28 Enduring Myths
About this ebook
--Philip J. Kitchen, University of Hull, U.K.
"This is a much needed text that puts misinformation to rest with strong evidence to disprove it. Most texts simply show how ads are developed, media plans are implemented, and lots of beautiful advertisements. This book shows how advertising can be and should be effective."
--Jan S. Slater, Ph.D., Ohio University
The workings of advertising have always remained a bit of a mystery; until about 1960 virtually nothing of the effectiveness of advertising was known. There was even some doubt about whether advertising worked at all. In the absence of facts, theories were developed up to fill the vacuum. These were soon developed into doctrines, which became widely followed—fables that became fashions. Not many of these theories were ever subjected to harsh scrutiny based on factual knowledge, mainly because there was not much factual knowledge available until recently.
John Philip Jones, bestselling author and internationally known advertising scholar, has written a textbook to help evaluate these advertising "fables" and "fashions," and also to study the facts. He uses the patterns and trends revealed by the accumulations of data from cutting-edge research to illustrate the occasional incompleteness, inadequacy, and in some cases total wrongheadedness of these fables and fashions. Each chapter then attempts to describe one aspect of how advertising really works.
Unlike most other advertising textbooks, Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising is not written as a "how to" text, or as a vehicle for war stories, or as a sales pitch. Instead, it is a book that concentrates solely on describing how advertising works. Written to be accessible to the general public with little or no experience studying advertising, it makes the scholarship of an internationally renowned figure accessible to students taking beginning advertising courses.
Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising is ideal as a core or supplemental text for courses in marketing, communication, journalism, and related disciplines. This volume should also be useful to the tens-of-thousands of business people whose careers are directly or indirectly concerned with advertising.
About the author
John Philip Jones entered academe in 1981 after a 25-year career in advertising with J. Walter Thompson in Europe, is a tenured Professor in the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and was Chairman of the Advertising Department for seven years. He has published ten books on advertising and numerous journal articles, and his work has been translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Turkish and Arabic. In 1991, John Philip Jones was named by the American Advertising Federation as the Distinguished Advertising Educator of the Year. In the same year he became a member of the Council of Judges of the Advertising Hall of Fame. In 1994, he was elected a member of the National Advertising Review Board. In 1996, he received a major award from Cowles Business Media and the American Association of Advertising Agencies for leadership in the media field. There were two prize winners, the other being NBC Sports. He received the Telmar Award in 1997, for extending the concept of Short-Term Advertising Strength (STAS) from television to print media. In 2001, he received the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement.
