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Set in the male-dominated advertising world of Madison Avenue in the 1960s, the critically acclaimed AMC series Mad Men has honed product placement into an art. Focusing on the lives of executives at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, the show’s storylines overtly integrate an array of consumer products. In one episode, Don Draper, the main character, shops for a Cadillac. In another, the agency hires a well-known comedian to hawk Utz’s potato chips. In yet another, the characters debate strategy for their Heineken ad campaign. This integration makes sense, given the show’s setting, but many products featured on the show are brands from the 1960s that are still available today and whose companies have fostered partnerships with AMC—bringing product integration to a whole new level.

Building ads into TV shows and movies has become standard practice—not surprising in an age when advertising is everywhere, from roadside billboards to T-shirt logos to gas-station pump handles. But as advertising has proliferated and become such a taken-for-granted part of our daily lives, it has come to look very different today than it did in its infancy. Compare the carved stone signs merchants placed outside their shops in ancient Babylonia with product placement in TV shows or Google’s AdWords system, which enables individuals and small companies to develop cheap online ads tailored to ever-narrower audiences.

Regardless of how its forms may have changed, advertising has long played a prominent role in contemporary life. For consumers, ads shape our purchasing decisions: Have you ever thirsted for a carbonated beverage after viewing a TV ad for the product? Ads fuel our hopes: “Maybe if I buy that cologne, I’ll get more dates.” They spark debate about companies’ trustworthiness: “Hey! The ad said this hair spray would give my hair body, but it’s still limp. What a rip-off!” And they get us identifying with particular brands: “This Lexus SUV really captures my style.”

For companies, savvy advertising can drive sales, putting a firm far ahead of its competitors. Advertising has also given rise to whole new industries and lucrative business models—from the Madison Avenue ad agencies that produce slick campaigns for high-end clients to the most basic classified ads created by individuals on craigslist to the search-engine industry now led by Google and fueled by online ads. Even industries that were once less advertising-dependent have joined in: Musicians, for example, now stand to make more money from licensing their music to commercials than from traditional album sales.

Indeed, for all players in the realm of advertising, the economic rewards can be huge. About 96 percent of Google’s $37.9 billion revenue in 2011 came from advertising, and they recently bought AdMob, a company that serves ads to mobile screens, to expand their advertising reach. As big players like Google take advantage of these technological advances, the advertising business itself is evolving. Only time will reveal what direction this multibillion-dollar support system for mass media industries will take.

ADVERTISING COMES IN MANY FORMS—from classifieds to business-to-business ads to those providing detailed information on specific consumer products. However, in this chapter, we concentrate on the more conspicuous consumer advertisements that shape product images and brand-name identities. Because so much consumer advertising intrudes into daily life, many people routinely complain about it. And they increasingly find ways to avoid ads; for example, by using digital DVRs to zip through them or by blocking pop-ups with Web browsers. However, because advertising shows up in most media—the Internet, TV, radio, books, newspapers, magazines, movies—it serves as a kind of economic glue holding these industries together. Without consumer advertisements, most media businesses would cease to function in their present forms.

In this chapter, we take a close look at advertising’s evolving role in our lives by: