Undressing the Ad: Reading Culture in Advertising

Undressing the Ad aims to empower readers to become media literate through the work of deconstructing the consumer culture that surrounds them. By introducing critical scholarship on advertising in a way that is accessible, the book attempts to show how issues of race, class, and gender are expressed in contemporary advertising. The readings in this book take a decidedly critical political perspective and explore how representation in advertising upholds certain economic and political structures and subverts others, and exposes the myth that advertisements are merely messages aimed at selling goods and services. Rather they are texts that shape contemporary culture and shape our images of ourselves.

The Editor: Katherine Toland Frith is associate professor and past chair of the advertising department in the College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University. She has a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. Before joining academia she worked in New York as an advertising copywriter for J. Walter Thompson, N.W. Ayer, and Grey Advertising. She taught advertising as a Fulbright Professor in Malaysia in 1986-1987, in Indonesia in 1993, and recently published her first book, Advertising in Asia: Communication, Culture, and Consumption.