Mad for Ads: How Advertising Gets (and Stays) in Our Heads

Explained in the introduction, the goal of Mad for Ads: How Advertising Gets (and Stays) in Our Heads is to help readers understand the complex and creative business of advertising. It seeks to explore the effect of advertising on a person’s internal world: their thoughts, feelings, and sense of self. This may seem like a lot to pack into a heavily illustrated book for junior readers, but the creative team delivers. Mad for Ads is a great introduction to advertising and marketing, and kids will be hooked from the beginning as the book opens having them think about their own personal brands and roles in North American consumption-crazed society.

One of the core structures used to optimum effect are two fictional advertising campaigns that illustrate the concepts presented in the book. A product, Bubblarious Bubble Gum, and a service, Scrap Heap Fleet: E-waste Recycling Service, are effectively used to model ideas like the claim of a product, slogans, taglines, advertising copy, call to action, testimonials and other aspects of an advertising campaign. One chapter explores the psychology of advertising. Another chapter delves into the digital technology and its use to track potential consumers and perhaps infringe upon privacy. One of the occasional sidebars explains that, in the USA, an act concerning the security of children’s online data outlaws social media accounts for anyone under the age of 13 without parental or guardian consent. Canada’s PIPEDA Act governs the agreement of collection of personal information.

Turner’s colourful and playful illustrations illustrate concepts appropriately while also emphasizing diversity in representation of peoples of all colours (white, brown, yellow, red, turquoise) and abilities (a person in a wheelchair makes a couple of appearances). In fact, the author makes a special point of noting the importance of representation in advertising immediately following the introduction.

Additional features of the book are a two-page timeline of advertising focused mainly on the 20th and 21st centuries, a two-page glossary with definitions explaining words introduced in the text in bold fonts, an index, and a bibliography that includes mostly age-appropriate books, a few articles, five websites and even two CBC radio citations, one being the excellent Under the Influence hosted by Terry O’Reilly.

By the end of Mad for Ads: How Advertising Gets (and Stays) in Our Heads, readers should be better consumers of advertising in addition to understanding techniques and strategies that they can use in planning their own ventures in advertising and marketing.