For better or worse, television advertising occasionally becomes a touchstone in our lives. Chevrolet's "Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie," Alka-Seltzer's spicy meatball, the Federal Express fast talker, the Energizer Bunny, "Bo Knows" Nike, Quaker Oats' Mikey--these and a select group of other video campaigns get so embedded in our psyches that we can easily recall them, word-for-word and scene-by-scene, many years after they last were aired. The 100 Best TV Commercials ... and Why They Worked, by advertising and marketing columnist Bernice Kanner, takes a critical but fond look at the best commercials in 15 categories, including "Show and Tell," "The Sound of Music," "Animal Magnetism," "Comparatively Speaking," and "Killer Comedy." While the book unabashedly "honours aesthetics more than effectiveness in moving product," Kanner still seeks to celebrate those "artful and artistic" efforts that manage to push their various objects or ideas more successfully than the competition. One pleasant surprise: more than half of those chosen will be unfamiliar to most Americans, as they aired only in the U.K., France, Japan, Spain, and eight other countries that take their TV commercials as seriously as advertisers do in the U.S. © Amazon.com
 

Book description

Who cares about commercials? All of us, that's who. The television commercial has become a part of the American narrative, as important a signifier of our times as a great work of literature or a blockbuster motion picture. Indeed, we often care more about the commercials than we do about the programming itself (ask any Super Bowl aficionado). The ad is art . . . and some of the art is brilliant.

The hundred commercials in this book are brilliant. They were selected by a team of experts at the Leo Burnett Company, creators of Tony the Tiger and the Maytag Repairman, in collaboration with dozens of advertising pros from around the globe and throughout the industry. Their choices represent the very best that the advertising world has to offer. Together, they portray a half century of human hopes, wishes, and dreams. Bernice Kanner, whose "On Madison Avenue" column in New York magazine was required reading for more than a decade, has taken each of these small masterpieces and analysed what made them work, why they so successfully moved us, and how they broke through the clutter to become a part of the cultural landscape.

From the Marlboro Man to the Energizer Bunny, The 100 Best TV Commercials provides a hundred important lessons in how we communicate and persuade today. It is vital reading for those who create our commercial culture . . . and those who live in it.

 
About the author

Bernice Kanner wrote the "On Madison Avenue" column for New York magazine for thirteen years. Her first-person adventures as a cabdriver, traffic cop, Tiffany's temp, Wendy's counterman, and census taker are among the magazine's most celebrated pieces. She has been a marketing correspondent for CBS News, a marketing commentator for Bloomberg News (print, radio, and television), and a columnist for Working Woman magazine. Her previous books include Are You Normal?, Lies My Parents Told Me, and three children's books endorsed by the National Center for Family Literacy. She lives in New York City and Bridgewater, Connecticut, with her husband, son, and daughter and a menagerie of animals.

Presented here is a journalistic account of the birth and infancy years of the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency in Peru. The Shining Path had carried out its first armed raid in May 1980 around the same time as the South American country was returning to a civilian administration after being ruled for more than a decade by a military regime. The subsequent decade saw the Leftist guerrilla organisation leading the country into a gory civil war. Published originally in Spanish around the same time, this journalistic documentation is now accessible to scholars, analysts and observers of both radical Left as well as Latin American politics.

The problem with most books describing the period in question here is that they are neither probing nor informative about the outfit itself. The Shining Path, as an organisation, was a relatively obscure one. For one, it never went out on a propaganda blitzkrieg. It was seen as an organisation which was born and which grew in isolation. Gorritti bridges the gap here, and contends that the philosophy of Shining Path could have been known had only the previous outsider writers cared to pay attention to what the organisation was trying to convey. To make his point, Gorritti uses interviews, Shining Path publications, and Peruvian government reports to describe the organisations ideology and strategy.

Gorritti debunks previous assertions which portrayed Shining Path having risen in international isolation. The organisation, in fact, had maintained fraternal relations with other Maoist organisations, particularly in France, Albania and Berkeley. Another theory he riddles holes in is that of Shining Path being an outfit of elite urban intellectuals who concentrated on rural areas because of their Maoist obsession of encircling cities. Gorritti, on the other hand, says that for it the city was as important as was the countryside. The Shining Path was also different from many other insurgent organisations where political concerns give in to military concerns. He says ideological correctness always prevailed over military strategies.

There is a big problem with Gorritti though - his rabid anti-communism which robs his book of much objectivity. He leads the reader to believe that had the Peruvian government not set free Abimael Guzman, leader of the Patrido Comunista del Peru - Sendero Luminoso (Peruvian Communist Party - Shining Path) after he was arrested in 1979, the country could have been able to steer clear of the tragedy that befell it. He throughout contends that it was the failure on part of the government which led to the escalation of the civil war. He even fails to explain how and why the Shining Path insurgency was different from those elsewhere in Latin America.

Gorritti makes another mistake in trying to understand the insurgency. The cadres, it seems, are only a misguided and misled lot. His bourgeoisie moorings makes him look at the civil war only from his own point of view. He does not feel the need to probe into hardships faced by those in the countryside. Neither does have he have strong words for the human rights violations perpetrated by the Peruvian police and military. This is all the more shocking and surprising since Gorritti is said to champion human rights causes. The only reason why one might want to buy the book is that it relies more on descriptions and accounts, than on his jaundiced analyses.