This Author Meets Critics conversation focuses on Tony Kelso's book The Social Impact of Advertising: Confessions of an (Ex-)Advertising Man (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Kelso meets with other advertising experts from several fields to discuss the following topics: what is meant by the social impact of advertising, the wealth of social and cultural topics covered in the book, using personal reflections in a textbook, the importance of history in understanding advertising, the effectiveness of digital advertising, the applicability of the book in teaching various survey courses, the ideologies and values supported by advertising, and advice for professors and industry practitioners. The book covers a brief history of modern advertising in the United States, advertising's influence on the so-called non-advertising content of the media and digital surveillance, the ideological themes advertising inadvertently delivers, how advertising can privilege or marginalize various social constructions of identity, the controversial practice of targeting children, and how corporations often use advertising to present a positive face while masking some of their profoundly darker sides.

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Advertising is an effective way to teach college students in United States history courses about American culture. This article outlines how I use advertisements to help students understand the developing aims of advertising as an omnipresent industry by the 1920s, its relationship to the consumerism of the emergent white-collar class, and their connection to changing notions of baseline material comforts in American life. It demonstrates the ways that students learn how advertising aimed at single and married middle-class women in that era sought to tap into their insecurities using both age-old ideas about women's roles, more novel "scientific" reasoning, and new ideas about women's beauty and sexuality. Finally, this article illustrates how students might engage the contemporary relevance of advertising, consumerism, and sexism in women's representations in the media in consideration of how it impacts their own lives.

Advertising in Popular Culture articles provide an in-depth discussion of how a popular culture text, such as a television show, film, or short story, represents and reflects on advertising's place in society and culture. In this article, a group of scholars talk about "The Friend," a television episode from The Doris Day Show that aired on CBS on October 8, 1968. Panelists provide a close reading of the episode, discussing many topics: advertising and media around 1968; race, ethnicity, and gender in the 1960s and 1970s; race in advertising in the 1960s and 1970s; least objectionable programming; racial integration; inauthenticity and deception in advertising and media; and the power of advertising and media to solidify social norms and ways of thinking about gender, race, and ethnicity.

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