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The Adman's Dilemma
From Barnum to Trump
Paul Rutherford (Author)
9781487522988
Paperback / softback, published 23 August 2018
480 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.7 kg
"Through a selective, chronological succession of literary and film/television analysis…Rutherford traces the evolution of the American adman (later accompanied by the adwoman, though not quite as late as one might assume) from an opportunistic, showboating rascal to today’s somewhat more sinister and thoroughly institutionalized figure." "Rutherford’s discussions of a final burst of creative energy in the 1960s and the subsequent waning of the ad maker in a world of pure images and brand imperialism are fascinating prequels to a cultural turn through which we are still wandering."
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.
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