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Advertising / Consumer Protection

 

The Great American Blow-Up
Puffery in Advertising and Selling
Revised Edition

Ivan L. Preston


"Ivan L. Preston has created a definitive study sure to be cherished by consumer advocates, but one that should be read by everyone ever influenced by advertising. And that, of course, is every one of us."Chicago Sun-Times Book Week

How does advertising really work? This thoroughly revised edition of Ivan Preston's popular classic, The Great American Blow-Up , provides new examples of puffery and deceit in advertising. Preston examines in detail the role of laws and the Federal Trade Commission in ensuring fair representation of goods and services to consumers. In a new concluding chapter, Preston describes and assesses developments in the field of advertising from the mid–1970s to the present.

Critical acclaim for the first edition

"Anyone interested in or concerned about advertising, especially the regulation of false, misleading or deceptive advertising, will find this treatise valuable. Preston does all that one can do to make an extremely complicated subject as understandable as it can be."—Ivan Ross, Journal of Consumer Affairs

"This is an important book and should be a must for all serious students and practitioners of advertising.... While the book is scholarly, it is also popularist and should find great favor with consumerists."—S. Bernard Rosenblatt, Journal of Advertising

"[Preston] is a thinker and writer who has something of interest and value to tell us.... The Great American Blow-Up   offers much to admire, not the least of which is Professor Preston's courage and discipline to bridge disciplinary barriers in a difficult subject area."—David A. Rice, Boston University Law Review

Ivan L. Preston is Journal Communications/Heyse Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been honored three times by the American Academy of Advertising, most recently by being elected its president. An expert witness and author of numerous articles on advertising law, he is the author of The Tangled Web They Weave: Truth, Falsity, & Advertisers, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

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September 1996
256 pp.      none     6 x 9

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Paper $17.95 x
ISBN 978-0-299-15254-3
 
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