Advertising, brands and markets

Michael Waterson

Earlier ideas about how advertising works have been superseded by new views based on the considerable amount of empirical evidence now available.

Advertising, brands and markets

Michael WatersonThe Advertising Association

INTRODUCTION

Advertising has been criticised on the grounds that advertising not only sells brands but also supports and expands the overall level of consumption of such products. Views of this nature, which essentially portray the consumer as a rather helpless being, hardly able to resist the manipulative skills of the advertiser, were popularised alongside views of advertising as economically wasteful by a number of influential writers in the 1950s and 1960s.

A fairly typical summary of some of the better-known views of this period is as follows:

Vance Packard in his...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands