Paul Feldwick

The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising

How does advertising work? Does it have to attract conscious attention in order to transmit a ‘Unique Selling Proposition’? Or does it insinuate emotional associations into the subconscious mind? Or is it just about being famous... or maybe something else? In Paul Feldwick’s radical new view, all theories of how advertising works have their uses – and all are dangerous if they are taken too literally as the truth. The Anatomy of Humbug deftly and entertainingly picks apart the historical roots of our common – and often contradictory – beliefs about advertising, in order to create space for a more flexible, creative and effective approach to this fascinating and complex field of human communication. Drawing on insights ranging from the nineteenth-century showman P.T. Barnum to the twentieth-century communications theorist Paul Watzlawick, as well as influential admen such as Bernbach, Reeves and Ogilvy, Feldwick argues that the advertising industry will only be able to deal with increasingly rapid change in the media landscape if it both understands its past and is able to criticise its most entrenched habits of thought. The Anatomy of Humbug is an accessible business book that will help advertising and marketing professionals create better campaigns.

About the author

Paul Feldwick

More than forty-five years since I joined the ad business, at the legendary London agency Boase Massimi Pollitt, I still find advertising fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.

How does it work?

What is its place in society?

Why does it seem so difficult to do it well?

Throughout my career I've explored these questions in theory and practice, through writing and studying and arguing about them.

I've studied organisational behaviour (Hult Ashridge), corporate responsibility (Bath), and psychology and communications theory, to try and find some answers. And my first degree (Oxford) was in English Literature.

But I suspect that neither science nor art is enough - and perhaps the most useful way to think about advertising, or at least, the one we've most forgotten about, is that it's showbusiness.

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