Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban - (Consumption and Public Life) by Anne M Cronin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Providing a detailed account of contemporary outdoor advertising and its relationship with urban space, this book examines what the outdoor advertising industry tells us about the commercial production of urban space, what industry practices reveal about contemporary capitalism, and how ads and billboard structures interface with spaces of the city

Review Quotes

'Challenging the conventional critique of advertising as a process that saturates and commercialises space, Anne Cronin focuses on the ubiquitous hoardings, notice-boards and bus-stop panels that constitute outdoor advertising to produce a stimulating, highly original, sophisticated account that significantly extends understanding. Cronin demonstrates that it is a far from exact science as those in the advertising industry acknowledge, for along with many contemporary capitalist endeavours, it is improvisational, intuitive, processual and performative, continually changing as part of the fluid, lived city. Moreover, rather than being simply a means of producing dominant meanings and signs, and persuading consumers to spend money on things they neither need nor want, outdoor advertising is ingeniously conceived as an urban vernacular, a resource through which the city is known, sensed and practised, continuously reproducing forms of the 'public' and public space.' - Tim Edensor, Reader in Cultural Geography, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

About the Author

ANNE CRONIN is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. She has previously published Advertising Myths, Advertising and Consumer Citizenship, and Consuming the Entrepreneurial City (co-edited).