Advertising, once seen as 'the official art of capitalist society' is an increasingly commonplace component of a characteristically promotional culture. Iain MacRury's Advertising offers the means to explore and evaluate this transition with an introduction to advertising for the contemporary reader. Advertising provides a clear and easy guide to a changing cultural and commercial genre. It explores how advertising can be studied as a cultural industry, and as a sign system, and how adverts and the reception of adverts can be considered drawing on approaches from literary criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and ethnography. Written in an accessible and interesting style, Advertising is the ideal introductory book for students of media, communication and journalism.