When Andrew Ehrenberg and his colleagues first proposed the idea that most advertising is ‘mere publicity’ back in the 1990s, the marketing and advertising worlds mostly ignored them. It wasn’t just that Ehrenberg explicitly denied so much of the received wisdom which the industry held as articles of faith – that advertising depended on transmitting rational arguments, product benefits, selling propositions, or at least by communicating unique ‘positionings’ or ‘essences’ which created meaningful differentiation between brands. It was also that ad agencies and their clients just didn’t know what to do with the new theory. It looked far...
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