The Age of Persuasion

“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th  Century.”
 Marshall McLuhan

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside the swill bucket”
George Orwell

Witty, erudite, and irrepressibly irreverent, Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant offer a lively social history of advertising and its impact as a major cultural force in modern life.

Terry O’Reilly is the perfect guide to the age of persuasion. As the host, creator and co-writer with Mike Tennant of two wildly popular CBC Radio series on advertising, he is known as a delightful raconteur and scholar of media literature. But unlike academics, his day job as one of the top directors of radio and TVcommercials, affords him a unique perspective on marketing and how it has driven a change in the way we react to media.

The age of persuasion dawned in the 1880s with the rise of ad agencies. In its fledgling years, advertising was defined as “salesmanship on paper.” That concept was left in the dust with the explosion of media and consumerism. Radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s spawned market research and the idea of persuasion as a “science.” The creative explosion in the 1960s, however, revealed persuasion to be a delicate “art.” In the 1980s, the arrival of a multi-channel universe and MTV’s rapid-fire editing of images and sound, forever altered our attention span and notions of fast and slow, short and long.

The authors also explore such topics as ad clutter, the implied contract advertisers have with consumers and the peril of breaking it. They chart the rise and fall of branded entertainment, disclose new language of persuasion and candidly reveal examples of opportunism and cynicism. But they also appreciate the inventiveness, craft and art in creating the best ads that add colour to daily life.