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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.
List of contents
Introduction: Enter "Don Draper"
Prelude: The Con-Man, the Adman, and the Trickster
1. The Huckster’s Game
2. The Rise of the Advertising Agent
3. Chronicles of Struggle
4. A Worrisome Hegemony
5. The Gospel of Creation
6. A Tyranny of Signs
Conclusion: Deception and Its Discontents
Afterword: The Triumph of the Huckster
The Moral of the Biography
Endnotes
Name Index
About the author
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).
Summary
Engaging with literature on advertising, philosophy, psychology, and cultural theory, as well as a range of fictional and nonfictional "texts", The Adman’s Dilemma traces the trajectory of the adman from the late nineteenth century to the present.
