Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue?: Advertising in the '90s

Mayer ( The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry ) here describes with his customary authority how advertising in America has evolved from a creative art-of-persuasion industry based in mid-Manhattan to a ``fact-based'' product-moving service in a score of U.S. cities and around the world. Originally sellers of print-media space, ad agencies successively became space buyers, creators of romantic soap and auto ads, producers of early TV network programs, and their clients' became buyers of individual TV ``minutes.'' Advertising people in the electronic age became research analysts who identified product niches and consumer trends using data automatically culled from supermarket checkout counters, all in a new world of locally independent and special-interest media, including TV's proliferating cable channels. Mayer draws richly on interviews with industry giants (Rosser Reeves, David Olgilvy, Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett) while appraising the effects of explosive new sight-and-sound graphics, remote management and possible conflicts of interest among world agency conglomerates, and discusses an upcoming ``single-market'' Europe sure to be complicated for the ad trade by local language and custom. (June)