John Philip Jones, bestselling author and internationally known advertising scholar, has written a textbook to help evaluate advertising “fables” and “fashions,” and also to study the facts. He uses the latest trends and cutting-edge research to illustrate their occasional incompleteness, inadequacy, and in some cases total wrongheadedness. Each chapter then attempts to describe one aspect of how advertising really works.

Unlike most other advertising textbooks, Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising is not written as a “how to” text, or as a vehicle for war stories, or as a sales pitch. Instead, it is a book that concentrates solely on describing how advertising works. Written to be accessible to the general public with little or no experience studying advertising, it makes the scholarship of an internationally renowned figure accessible to students taking beginning advertising courses.