Commercials enjoy a privileged place in one of the most important institutions of everyday life - television. Such is their prominence that a comparison can be made to the icons gracing the walls of a much older institution, the medieval cathedral. Paul Rutherford admits that the analogy can be carried too far, but he sees commercials as 'the art of our times' and approaches them as an art historian would. Like icons, commercials can be 'read' for particular styles or for the myths of a national culture; like icons, they are instruments of cultural power. Rutherford is an aficionado of fine commercials, more interested in what commercials are than what they do, and his love of the subject infuses this illustrated cultural history. Tracing commercials from the late 1940s, when they made their first appearance, to the early 1990s, Rutherford focuses on the shape and character of actual commercials as well as on what we do with them. He has studied roughly six thousand commercials, from Sweden to Hong Kong, Canada to Ecuador, France to South Africa. This book concentrates on 'commercials of distinction,' or ads that have been singled out for special merit: the Classic Clios of the 1950s, the 'Marlboro Country' campaign of the 1960s, Coca-Cola and Pepsi ads, Canada's best (the Bessies), and the world's best (the Cannes Lions). Rutherford looks at the most celebrated pieces of work to understand the creativity and significance of this truly modern art form. The breadth of Rutherford's treatment is unique. He explores such diverse topics as the aesthetic response to commercials; how ads mirror viewers' anxieties, aspirations, and ideology; the importance of gender and age in the adworld; the prevailing ethos of consumption; the emergence of a global repertoire of images; and the persistence of national styles. This is a story of one kind of cultural power.; how it has been generated and stored, articulated and exercised, resisted as well as maintained.

The New Icons? the Art of Television Advertising

Rutherford, Paul

Business & Money

Toronto

Is there any public discourse left, or has advertising, with its aggressive sales techniques, usurped the role of democratic, civil debate? Beginning in the 1960s, there was a proliferation of social, political, and corporate advertising in affluent, developed nations that spoke to the "public good" on everything from milk to family values. Surveying over 10,000 advertisements from the past 40 years, "Endless Propaganda" underscores the presence of advertising rhetoric, even in the context of apparently non-partisan collective health issues such as cancer.
The public sphere, argues Paul Rutherford, has been transformed into a huge marketplace of goods and signs. Civil advocacy has become a special art of authority that subjects politics, social behaviour, and public morals to the philosophy and discipline of marketing. Without suggesting that there is one simple way to understand the transformation that democracy has undergone because of this phenomenon, the author introduces and applies the cultural theories of several important philosophers: Habermas, Gramsci, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Baudrillard. The reader is thus given the necessary tools to critically examine the examples at hand and many others that exist beyond the pages of this study.

Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods

International

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada.

Univ of Toronto Pr

A decade after the first Canadian telecasts in September 1952, TV had conquered the country. Why was the little screen so enthusiastically welcomed by Canadians? Was television in its early years more innovative, less commerical, and more Canadian than current than current offerings? In this study of what is often called the 'golden age' of television, Paul Rutherford has set out to dispel some cherished myths and to resurrect the memory of a noble experiment in the making of Canadian culture. He focuses on three key aspects of the story. The first is the development of the national service, including the critical acclaim won by Radio-Canada, the struggles of the CBC's English service to provide mass entertainment that could compete with the Hollywood product, and the effective challenge of private television to the whole dream of public broadcasting.The second deals with the wealth of made-in-Canada programming available to please and inform vviewers - even commercials receive close attention. Altogether, Rutherford argues, Canadian programming reflected as well as enhanced the prevailing values and assumptions of the mainstream.The final focus is on McLuhan's Question: What happens to society when a new medium of communications enters the picture? Rutherford's findings cast doubt upon the common presumptions about the awesome power of television.Television in Canada, Rutherford concludes, amounts to a failed revolution. It never realized the ambbitions of its masters or the fears of its critics. Its course was shaped not only by the will of the government, the power of commerce, and the empire of Hollywood, but also by the desires and habits of the viewers.

When Television Was Young: Primetime Canada, 1952-1967

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

A Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada (Heritage)

University of Toronto Press

A decade after the first Canadian telecasts in September 1952, TV had conquered the country. Why was the little screen so enthusiastically welcomed by Canadians? Was television in its early years more innovative, less commerical, and more Canadian than current than current offerings? In this study of what is often called the 'golden age' of television, Paul Rutherford has set out to dispel some cherished myths and to resurrect the memory of a noble experiment in the making of Canadian culture. 
He focuses on three key aspects of the story. The first is the development of the national service, including the critical acclaim won by Radio-Canada, the struggles of the CBC's English service to provide mass entertainment that could compete with the Hollywood product, and the effective challenge of private television to the whole dream of public broadcasting.
The second deals with the wealth of made-in-Canada programming available to please and inform vviewers - even commercials receive close attention. Altogether, Rutherford argues, Canadian programming reflected as well as enhanced the prevailing values and assumptions of the mainstream.
The final focus is on McLuhan's Question: What happens to society when a new medium of communications enters the picture? Rutherford's findings cast doubt upon the common presumptions about the awesome power of television.
Television in Canada, Rutherford concludes, amounts to a failed revolution. It never realized the ambbitions of its masters or the fears of its critics. Its course was shaped not only by the will of the government, the power of commerce, and the empire of Hollywood, but also by the desires and habits of the viewers.

When Television was Young: Primetime Canada, 1952-1967

The New Icons?: The Art of Television Advertising

Marketing & Sales

With nearly sixty percent of Americans initially against a pre-emptive war without sanction from the United Nations, and even higher anti-war numbers in most other nations of the world, the 2003 war against Iraq quickly became an enormous public relations challenge for the George W. Bush administration. The subject of Weapons of Mass Persuasion is a war in which American patriotism became so mired in commercial jingoism that the demarcations between entertainment and political conduct disappeared completely.
In this engaging and disturbing book, Paul Rutherford shows how the marketing campaign for the war against Iraq was constructed and carried out. He argues that not only was the campaign a new chapter in the presentation of real-time war as pop culture, but that its deeper implications have now come to constitute part of the history of modern democracy. Situating the war against Iraq within an existing tradition of war as narrative, spectacle, and, more broadly, commodity, Rutherford offers a brief overview of the history of civic advertising and propaganda, then examines in detail the different dimensions of three weeks of war presented to North Americans as it became a branded conflict, processed and cleansed to appeal to the well-established tastes of veteran consumers of popular culture.
Including incisive analyses of visual material - speeches, editorial cartoons, and media political commentary, but particularly news reports of such sound bite events as the bombing of Baghdad, the toppling of the Hussein statue, and the rescue of captured soldier Private Jessica Lynch - as well as extensive polling data from around the world and interviews with the actual consumers of war, Weapons of Mass Persuasion chronicles the making of a Hollywood war: fast-paced and heroic, pitting the forces of good against the forces of evil to achieve a triumphant, sanitized, and commodified outcome. Not since Naomi Klein's No Logo have the gods of marketing and the art of commercialism been so thoroughly disrobed.

Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq (Heritage)

History

Military

Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq

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