Paid and earned influence — targeting, brand and crisis communication, and the effectiveness research rarely cited.
9 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Scientific Advertising
Claude Hopkins · 1923
Argues advertising should be judged solely by whether it sells, not by whether it is admired, and that every claim and layout choice should be tested…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Propaganda
Edward Bernays · 1928
The founder of public relations arguing openly that manufacturing consent is necessary in a democracy — the field's most candid document.
+6 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The History and Development of Advertising
Frank Presbrey · 1929
Traces advertising from town criers and handbills to the agency system of the 1920s, arguing the discipline's real history is the century-long…
+4 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Claude Hopkins
Argues advertising should be judged solely by whether it sells, not by whether it is admired, and that every claim and layout choice should be tested against results the way a salesman tests a pitch.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Claude Hopkins
Recounts how Hopkins built the reason-why, sampling and money-back-guarantee techniques that turned advertising copy into an experiment rather than an art, offering his own career as proof the method works.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Zeynep Tufekci (TED)
Argues that advertising-funded machine learning builds persuasion architectures nobody designed and nobody can inspect, because the systems optimise for attention without anyone specifying how.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward Bernays
The founder of public relations arguing openly that manufacturing consent is necessary in a democracy — the field's most candid document.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Sampson
Surveys advertising from Roman auction notices to Victorian newspaper columns and argues the trade has always run ahead of the law regulating its claims, not behind it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Federal Trade Commission
Establishes that an endorsement must reflect the endorser's honest opinion and that any material connection between endorser and advertiser — payment, free product, employment — must be disclosed to the audience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vakratsas & Ambler
Reviews decades of competing advertising-effect models and argues none of the simple hierarchy-of-effects theories survives the evidence, because affect, cognition and experience influence each other in no fixed order.
W. Timothy Coombs
Argues an organisation's best crisis response depends on how much responsibility the public assigns it for the crisis, and matches specific response strategies to that assigned responsibility rather than to the crisis's severity alone.
Federal Trade Commission
Sets out the FTC's standard that a disclosure, including that content is sponsored, must be clear and conspicuous within the specific medium it appears in, not merely present somewhere on the page.
link checked 17 Sept 2026De Veirman, Cauberghe & Hudders
Finds influencers with a moderate follower count are often seen as more likeable than those with huge followings, because a very large following can read as inauthentic rather than aspirational.
Frank Presbrey
Traces advertising from town criers and handbills to the agency system of the 1920s, arguing the discipline's real history is the century-long professionalisation of persuasion rather than any single clever campaign.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Kevin Lane Keller
Defines brand equity as the differential effect brand knowledge has on how a consumer responds to marketing, and splits that effect into two components — brand awareness and brand image — that must be built and measured separately.
link checked 17 Sept 2026