Rating: 
Summary: Advertising drives cultural evolution, so better enjoy it !
Review: AdCult is about culture and advertising; both the culture of advertising and the influence of advertising on culture. This is not something we see explored very often or very deeply. As the author points out, one of the main reasons for this is similar to the reason dairy farmers tend to drink proportionately less milk than other groups. We are so immersed in advertising that we stop thinking about it as a topic of study for its own sake. It becomes just another object to sometimes attract our momentary attention, as when we stop to watch an award show treating advertisements as entertainment or when Saturday Night Live runs parodies of commercials. Twitchell does take a close, inside look at culture of advertising and that in itself makes this book very valuable. He also makes an argument about advertising and culture. The unique memorability of advertising, acknowledges Twitchell, allows it to take on the function of shared cultural memory, and has therefore has inevitably replaced less memorable literature and science. This is a valuable if unoriginal insight, which many of the old-fashioned types refer to as the "dumbing down" of culture. But wait, there's more! The twist in AdCult is that Twitchell, while admitting that advertising culture is mindless and superficial, compellingly argues that this "dumbing down" is really a good thing. It's good that we are inundated with superficially memorable images and phrases rather than literature and science? Yes, says Twitchell, and the old fogies who think otherwise just aren't getting it, they are mainly just feeling threatened by how advertising is "stealing their thunder." No, Twitchell is not some cyberpunk, he is (by profession) a university professor who did the research for this book in order to teach a class about advertising. It's not that he never believed advertising was powerful, it was that he originally thought that power was a good thing, and then came to believe it was harmless anyway. Twitchell was apparently very impressed by advertising critics of the 50's like Vance Packard and Bryan Wilson Key, and took home the message that if advertising was so powerful, the advertisers must be doing something right. He later seems to have decided that advertising has lost most of its impact through constant immersion, familiarity, and increasing superficiality for ever wider appeal. So now, there is no reason to despise this aspect of culture which has redefined the way we speak and what we desire. Now it has become the source of our very substance, Twitchell argues, and bless it for that. Twitchell characterizes pomo philosophers as intellectuals in a matter-of-fact way, while taking pains to point out how terribly quaint and old-fashioned are the culture critics who imagine there to be some basis for value in human life beyond what attracts our attention or feels good. Ed Hirsch's populist attempt to foster cultural literacy is to Twitchell hopelessly "whitebread." There is nothing of special value in what we traditionally think of as literacy. The main problem is that Hirsch's terms make hopelessly poor ad copy. Rather, Hirsch should have used phrases from commercial jingles as his basis for cultural literacy, since that's what really defines our culture at this time in history. Twitchell reminds me a lot of the anthropologist who got too close to her subjects and couldn't report on them objectively any more. No, he doesn't see advertisers as kind, gentle, or noble savages. He accurately sees them accurately as promoting "commercial discourse" for a variety of self-interested reasons, including but not limited to trying to move products and create markets. It is his view of culture that is wrong (or at least a collection of half-truths) and adopted from the twisted mindset of advertising culture. Twitchell completely ignores (or disavows?) any relationship between culture and the capacity for human thought. In the pomo tradition, he treats human thought as if it springs in final from individual heads, connected to each other by whatever arbitrary superficial ideas happen to be floating around and catching our attention at the time. In the advertising tradition descended from an idiot cousin of Freudian theory, he fully buys the argument that people are instinctively aquisitive but need to be told what to acquire by others. More subtly, Twitchell encourages the view that cultural literacy plays no role in facilitating complex human thinking processes, except that it makes ideas "memorable" and that advertising is good because it does this really well. To discover why this view is wrong from a scientific perspective, a good start is Merlin Donald's "A Mind So Rare." Memory is certainly central to thinking, but literacy changed our minds in a very real and very fundamental way that is not independent of the content of culture, nor is it bound to Ed Hirsch's "whitebread" version of cultural literacy by means of key terms. Put simply, humans are a symbolic species and the content of literate culture is part of what supplies the meaning of the symbols that enable us to think the way we do. We know that people don't think completely differently as a result of different kinds of cultures or languages. We can translate a great deal between cultures and still understand each other to a great extent. However the content of culture does play a central role in what kind of ideas are generated and accumulated over time, and so the path of cultural evolution. Twitchell's conclusion that AdCult is superficial mind candy, but good enough for shared meaning, and his assumption that social order is independent of the content of culture (or even improved by superficially memorable images) will probably pass most people by without much thought in this slick advertising-like presentation. That powerfully supports half of the author's argument, that our minds do soak up slick memorable images like a sponge. It also reveals the dark side of Twitchell's perspective, the one that relentlessly wants to believe that there is nothing being lost except a few quaint stories.
Rating:
Summary: Advertising drives cultural evolution, so better enjoy it !
Review: AdCult is about culture and advertising; both the culture of advertising and the influence of advertising on culture. This is not something we see explored very often or very deeply. As the author points out, one of the main reasons for this is similar to the reason dairy farmers tend to drink proportionately less milk than other groups. We are so immersed in advertising that we stop thinking about it as a topic of study for its own sake. It becomes just another object to sometimes attract our momentary attention, as when we stop to watch an award show treating advertisements as entertainment or when Saturday Night Live runs parodies of commercials. Twitchell does take a close, inside look at culture of advertising and that in itself makes this book very valuable. He also makes an argument about advertising and culture. The unique memorability of advertising, acknowledges Twitchell, allows it to take on the function of shared cultural memory, and has therefore has inevitably replaced less memorable literature and science. This is a valuable if unoriginal insight, which many of the old-fashioned types refer to as the "dumbing down" of culture. But wait, there's more! The twist in AdCult is that Twitchell, while admitting that advertising culture is mindless and superficial, compellingly argues that this "dumbing down" is really a good thing. It's good that we are inundated with superficially memorable images and phrases rather than literature and science? Yes, says Twitchell, and the old fogies who think otherwise just aren't getting it, they are mainly just feeling threatened by how advertising is "stealing their thunder." No, Twitchell is not some cyberpunk, he is (by profession) a university professor who did the research for this book in order to teach a class about advertising. It's not that he never believed advertising was powerful, it was that he originally thought that power was a good thing, and then came to believe it was harmless anyway. Twitchell was apparently very impressed by advertising critics of the 50's like Vance Packard and Bryan Wilson Key, and took home the message that if advertising was so powerful, the advertisers must be doing something right. He later seems to have decided that advertising has lost most of its impact through constant immersion, familiarity, and increasing superficiality for ever wider appeal. So now, there is no reason to despise this aspect of culture which has redefined the way we speak and what we desire. Now it has become the source of our very substance, Twitchell argues, and bless it for that. Twitchell characterizes pomo philosophers as intellectuals in a matter-of-fact way, while taking pains to point out how terribly quaint and old-fashioned are the culture critics who imagine there to be some basis for value in human life beyond what attracts our attention or feels good. Ed Hirsch's populist attempt to foster cultural literacy is to Twitchell hopelessly "whitebread." There is nothing of special value in what we traditionally think of as literacy. The main problem is that Hirsch's terms make hopelessly poor ad copy. Rather, Hirsch should have used phrases from commercial jingles as his basis for cultural literacy, since that's what really defines our culture at this time in history. Twitchell reminds me a lot of the anthropologist who got too close to her subjects and couldn't report on them objectively any more. No, he doesn't see advertisers as kind, gentle, or noble savages. He accurately sees them accurately as promoting "commercial discourse" for a variety of self-interested reasons, including but not limited to trying to move products and create markets. It is his view of culture that is wrong (or at least a collection of half-truths) and adopted from the twisted mindset of advertising culture. Twitchell completely ignores (or disavows?) any relationship between culture and the capacity for human thought. In the pomo tradition, he treats human thought as if it springs in final from individual heads, connected to each other by whatever arbitrary superficial ideas happen to be floating around and catching our attention at the time. In the advertising tradition descended from an idiot cousin of Freudian theory, he fully buys the argument that people are instinctively aquisitive but need to be told what to acquire by others. More subtly, Twitchell encourages the view that cultural literacy plays no role in facilitating complex human thinking processes, except that it makes ideas "memorable" and that advertising is good because it does this really well. To discover why this view is wrong from a scientific perspective, a good start is Merlin Donald's "A Mind So Rare." Memory is certainly central to thinking, but literacy changed our minds in a very real and very fundamental way that is not independent of the content of culture, nor is it bound to Ed Hirsch's "whitebread" version of cultural literacy by means of key terms. Put simply, humans are a symbolic species and the content of literate culture is part of what supplies the meaning of the symbols that enable us to think the way we do. We know that people don't think completely differently as a result of different kinds of cultures or languages. We can translate a great deal between cultures and still understand each other to a great extent. However the content of culture does play a central role in what kind of ideas are generated and accumulated over time, and so the path of cultural evolution. Twitchell's conclusion that AdCult is superficial mind candy, but good enough for shared meaning, and his assumption that social order is independent of the content of culture (or even improved by superficially memorable images) will probably pass most people by without much thought in this slick advertising-like presentation. That powerfully supports half of the author's argument, that our minds do soak up slick memorable images like a sponge. It also reveals the dark side of Twitchell's perspective, the one that relentlessly wants to believe that there is nothing being lost except a few quaint stories.
Rating:
Summary: thorough, comprehensive, good writing style
Review: I hate ads and haven't watched commercial TV or listened to commercial radio in many years now due to the relentless and frenzied assault of advertising. I credit the feeling people now have that silence is somehow strange with the immersion they have in endless stimulation. We don't know what it means to mentally sit still. Mr. Twitchell finds advertising a fascinating cultural phenomenon, the very bedrock of modern culture and I find that hard to deny. He interest prods him to go deeply into all sides of advertising and he seems at pains to deflate any pretensions about high art and culture, claiming that ads are to our time what cathedrals and the paintings of the old masters were to the Middle Ages. While this may be plausable, at least in the Middle Ages you could get away from the cathedrals and paintings now and then! When you finish with this book you will have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the field. The author goes into great detail about the industry and the history of advertising with plenty of illustrations you will recognize from TV and print. He looks at the subject with wit and insight but doesn't attempt much examination of what ad saturation might be doing to us with it's direct attempt to guide fantasy to alight on the material. He identifies every trick in the adman's book and believes we may be reaching a limit (my heart beats faster!) to advertising as the content of many ads now show irony in the message itself, a winking agreement with the targeted consumer that the whole act of selling through ads is psychologically bankrupt and no more than nonsensical entertainment...like the emperor having no clothes and clearly pointing it out himself while mugging and giggling for the amusement of all. As Twitchell says, the link between advertising and sales has never been conclusively made. But that's OK because we claim an equally tenuous link between our rationality and our behavior. The only question is who is fooled more, the consumer or the advertiser? As knowledge and intellect fall back before feeling and fantasy, are we now in a very comfortable, convenient and attractive fools paradise?
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointing dance around a complicated topic
Review: I was so excited to get my hands on a copy of this book -- an analysis that promised to expand the debate of the over the goods vs. evils of commercialism and its consumers. Unfortunately, it fell way short. Twitchell seems to think that his audience is (like a commerical audience?) satisfied by brief, unreferenced anecdotes as evidence of a dynamic, give and take between advertisers and their audience. While seeming lofty (and at times arrogant), Twitchell fails to back up his claims that media culture is, indeed, akin to art and religion, and responds to, rather than preempts and sets, cultural trends. I would love for another edition of this book to be released with expanded facts and figures (for which Twitchell only adds a sprinkle here and there, when they back up his arguments), and certainly some documentation of his sources. A real unconvincing disappointment. Save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: Leads you to better know what is going on in our minds!
Review: In the time of fragmentation and frantic search for answers and patterns of what is going on in contemporary society, Twichell's book is a must read for every thinking person. Not just for advertising people (although it's of crucial value for getting the philosophy of modern advertising) but for educated person in general. For, it's not possible to understand why modern people behave the way they do if you don't know what is the role of modern advertising in their lives. Twichell's book is sharp-minded dissection of the strongest cult known today: advertising.
Rating:
Summary: Adcult USA: Just do it!
Review: It may seem like an exageration to say that a book about advertising fundamentally changed the way I view the world... but it did (and 9 out of ten dental hygenists agree). Anyways, this book is sensational. It give an interesting historical overview, and then goes on to analyze the way advertising has shaped modern society. I'm going to read all of Mr. Twitchell's books. He is a really clever and witty writer, and obviously has some great insights on modern culture. Plus, this book has lots of pictures of the ads/trends he discusses-- this is a real asset to the text.
Rating:
Summary: Adcult USA: Just do it!
Review: It may seem like an exageration to say that a book about advertising fundamentally changed the way I view the world... but it did (and 9 out of ten dental hygenists agree). Anyways, this book is sensational. It give an interesting historical overview, and then goes on to analyze the way advertising has shaped modern society. I'm going to read all of Mr. Twitchell's books. He is a really clever and witty writer, and obviously has some great insights on modern culture. Plus, this book has lots of pictures of the ads/trends he discusses-- this is a real asset to the text.
Rating: 
Summary: "A virtuosic survey" --Kirkus Reviews
Review: James Twitchell, author of the highly acclaimed CARNIVAL CULTURE, explains why advertising has become the dominant meaning-making system in American culture: it satisfies our deepest desires in fundamental ways.
Rating:
Summary: Advertising History and its Politics gets a fair shake
Review: Now its not just because I make a living in the world of advertising that I say this, Twitchell's book goes a long way to say that advertising is not the evil, subliminal, dark force that many claim it to be. If you feel this way after reading the book, you might be a professional student at a liberal arts college or you failed to read what I believe to be the overall thesis: He sees advertising as the principle meaning maker in contemporary society. Do not be confused, this book is not about how the evil geniuses of Madison Avenue plot to separate us from our hard earned money. Though the book does have some fine examples of the advertiser taking advantage of the public trust. Advertising, for better or worse, works to unify our culture and communities, albeit at the expense of increased consumerism. I think you give those of us who are proud to work in advertising way too much credit when you state that we infiltrated your thought process and somehow forced you to buy junk that you don't need because you consumed our ad. I like the fact that he says the average American may see up to 3,000 advertising images each day. It is getting harder and harder to be noticed. He says this early on in this book and it helps set the stage for his exploration of different advertising strategies that have evolved through time.
Rating:
Summary: Catchy and entertaining as the commercials...and scarier
Review: Rick Dagwan's teaching opened my eyes and made me realize how a mass medium such as movies or television can be used to manipulate the beliefs, desires, and feelings of a great many people -- often to the point where an expert at media manipulation can become rich, or powerful, or both. (Is it just a coincidence that we end up electing the politicians who run the best TV commercials?) Advertising is one of the most insidious tools of the Conspiracy, in that it is so omnipresent ithat many of us don't even realize just how much of an effect it has on us. This is where books like Adcult USA come in. This book is a searing jolt of truth that wakes ups up and shows us just how much of our culture is shaped through advertising (the entire Christmas holiday season, for starters), while at the same time reminding us that we like to be advertised to. Because we've been bombarded with advertising for our entire lives, we've become used to it and this makes us receptive to short messages that insinute themselves into our culture. Adcult USA can be seen as a wake-up call or just a hell of an entertaining read, but it's likely to make you think twice when you watch TV or read.
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