Your Ad Here
The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
2015 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Media Ecology Association2013 Book of the Year, Visual Communication Division, National Communication Association Amidst the profound upheavals in technology, economics, and culture that mark the contemporary moment, marketing strategies have multiplied, as brand messages creep ever deeper into our private lives. In Your Ad Here, an engaging and timely new book, Michael Serazio investigates the rise of “guerrilla marketing” as a way of understanding increasingly covert and interactive flows of commercial persuasion. Digging through a decade of trade press coverage and interviewing dozens of agency CEOs, brand managers, and creative directors, Serazio illuminates a diverse and fascinating set of campaign examples: from the America’s Army video game to Pabst Blue Ribbon’s “hipster hijack,” from buzz agent bloggers and tweeters to The Dark Knight’s “Why So Serious?” social labyrinth. Blending rigorous analysis with eye-opening reporting and lively prose, Your Ad Here reveals the changing ways that commercial culture is produced today. Serazio goes behind-the-scenes with symbolic creators to appreciate the professional logic informing their work, while giving readers a glimpse into this new breed of “hidden persuaders” optimized for 21st-century media content, social patterns, and digital platforms. Ultimately, this new form of marketing adds up to a subtle, sophisticated orchestration of consumer conduct and heralds a world of advertising that pretends to have nothing to sell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The relationship between brands and consumers is one of great conflict, according to Serazio. This former journalist and assistant professor in the department of communication at Fairfield University uses the term "guerilla" as a war metaphor to describe marketing's new attempt at virtual invisibility. Serazio boldly tosses around phrases like "appearing to abdicate a traditional position of more didactic authority when negotiating consumer behavior" or "thus emerges a regime of governance that accommodates yet structures participatory agency; self-effaces its own authority and intent through disinterested spaces and anti-establishment formats..." In other words, this is a fairly scholarly treatise. Serazio enlists Che Guevara, Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School, and a variety of media studies theorists to fight for his cause. Underneath its dissertation language, the book attempts to resolve the mystery of whether power really has shifted from brands to consumers in the new media, word-of-mouth, consumer-generated, self-publishing promotional environment. Are new audience members "empowered" to choose their brand exposure? Or are marketers using us? The book ends on a cautionary note, with a warning that, despite the concerns of the ad men and women, they still have the upper hand in this newest fight for hearts and minds.