Undressing the Ad

The Editor: Katherine Toland Frith is associate professor and past chair of the advertising department in the College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University. She has a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. Before joining academia she worked in New York as an advertising copywriter for J. Walter Thompson, N.W. Ayer, and Grey Advertising. She taught advertising as a Fulbright Professor in Malaysia in 1986-1987, in Indonesia in 1993, and recently published her first book, Advertising in Asia: Communication, Culture, and Consumption.

• Contents: Katherine T. Frith: Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in Advertising – Elizabeth Pauline Lester: Finding the Path to Signification: Undressing a Nissan Pathfinder Direct Mail Package – Matthew P. McAllister: Sponsorship, Globalization, and the Summer Olympics – Morris B. Holbrook/Barbara B. Stern: The Paco Man and What is Remembered: New Readings of a Hybrid Language – Ernest M. Mayes: As Soft as Straight Gets: African American Women and Mainstream Beauty Standards in Haircare Advertising – Linda K. Fuller: We Can’t Duck the Issue: Imbedded Advertising in the Motion Pictures – Chemi Montes-Armenteros: Ideology in Public Service Advertisements – Michael J. Ludwig: The Cultural Politics of Prevention: Reading Anti-Drug PSAs – Daniel R. Nicholson: The Diesel Jeans and Workwear Advertising Campaign and the Commodification of Resistance – Christian Vermehren: Cultural Capital: The Cultural Economy of U.S. Advertising – Angharad N. Valdivia: The Secret of My Desire: Gender, Class, and Sexuality in Lingerie Catalogs.

«Katherine Frith’s ‘Undressing the Ad’ is a richly engaging and refreshing collection of essays on advertising and contemporary life. Throughout, the contributors steadfastly point us beyond the sometimes rarefied air and mythopoetic world of cultural criticism to the unequal and stratified social worlds in which advertising participates as a powerful and kinetic cultural force. A major feature of this volume is the concerted efforts of Frith and her collaborators to avoid the narrow-minded parochialism and insularity that has marred a good deal of recent writing on the cultural forms of life. ‘Undressing the Ad’ is a rare treat: an anthology of essays written against the grain of mainstream and radical discourse on popular culture.» (Cameron McCarthy, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Champaign)«Teachers will find that its eleven essays provide common ground for the introduction and examination of ideas about what ads mean and how they shape their meanings. All of the chapters in this book are original and written with undergraduates in mind - and it shows. From Frith’s opening titular chapter through Angharad N. Valdivia’s analysis of gender, class, and sexuality in lingerie catalogs, the audience is clearly kept in mind and spoken to with intelligence and insight.» (David Slayden, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly)