Expanded and updated from the successful first edition, Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture, second edition is an engaging cultural studies critique of advertising and its impacts on American society. Arthur Asa Berger looks at marketing strategies, sex and advertising, consumer culture, political advertising, and communication theory and process to give an accessible overview of advertising in America. The new edition features additions to flesh out earlier topics as well as new theoretical material. New discussions include classified advertising, advertising agencies in the recent economy, postmodern perspectives on advertising, new consumer cultures, metaphor and metonymy, product placement, and the 2002 California campaign for governor. A new chapter raises questions about prescription drug advertising and advertising to children.
I was born in Boston and kept moving west as I got educated: western Mass (the University of Mass at Amherst), Iowa (the University of Iowa in Iowa City), Minnesota (The Univ. of Minnesota) in Minneapolis). I landed a job teaching at San Francisco State and have been in the Bay Area since 1965. I've been married for 49 years, but it only seems like 47 or 48 years, to a former philosophy professor. I've kept a journal since 1956 and all my books have come out of the journals. I'm an artist and illustrate my books and books by other writers from time to time. I have two children and four grandchildren. Now, in 2009, I've got five books in various stages of publication:
1. Bali Tourism. Routledge. To be published in March, 2011 (I hope).
2. Japan Tourism: An Ethno-Semiotic Analysis. Published in 2010.
3. The Cultural Theorist's Book of Quotations. Published in 2010.
4. The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture. 2010.
5. Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication. 4th
edition. To be published in 2011.
