Academic analysts and practitioner-theorists of advertising draw on rich and innovative multidisciplinary resources where cultural and media analysis meet economics, anthropology, semiotics, gender studies, social psychology, linguistics, and applied neuroscience. This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. The collection connects researchers and advanced students to the best in contemporary social and cultural theory, while maintaining a stringent focus on advertising—as industry, as cultural form, and as evolving (multi-) media technology.

With the economics of media cultures in flux, the four volumes bring together a comprehensive collection of the best scholarship on advertising communication, tracking the evolution of the essential themes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection is also attentive to the global development of advertising, and incorporates various academic responses to advertising in, for example, Japan, India, China, Latin America, and Africa.

Advertising qua commercial pop art form, and as professional practice, cuts through crucial questions in the history and theory of modern media. Advertising exists as the pre-eminent object for the critical scrutiny of media culture, and presents a high-profile everyday cultural site for the emergence and rehearsal of questions around, for example, gender, cultural value, ethnicity, and representation. This Routledge collection gives ready access to the major landmark and cutting-edge work engaged in such dizzying debates.

In the near future, the industry dismissed by George Orwell as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket’ will confront intense pressure to change and redevelop. There will, it is widely thought, be a complex restructuring in the provision and reception of commercial–cultural brand communications. Navigating this terrain will demand a heightened alertness to a wider range of thinking than has typically informed the advertising business to date. Both inside and without the academy, old questions will be posed anew, and this collection will enable users to draw on a unique database of the very best canonical and contemporary scholarship.

With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Advertising is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and practitioners as a vital work for research and reference.