The Sponsored Life

With keen perception and wit, three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Leslie Savan reveals how advertising really works-and how it's changing your life. How do Nike or Pepsi ads convince you that you're a rebellious individual-even while they sell you the same sneakers or sugar water bought by millions? How does a company associated with a disaster, Exxon or DuPont, for example, restore its reputation? What gender and racial stereotypes lurk in TV commercials for beer, cars, cologne, and diamond rings? And what is the deeper meaning of living in an ad, ad, ad world? For more than a decade, journalist Leslie Savan exposed the techniques advertisers use to push products and pump up corporate images. In the lively essays in this collection, Savan penetrates beneath the slick surfaces of specific ads and marketing campaigns to show how they both reflect and shape our lives.
Savan's pioneering use of advertising as a lens to examine society and politics made her a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. "With unerring perception," the 1992 Pulitzer jury in criticism wrote, Savan "has seen advertising, PR and political chicanery as a new field of socio-aesthetic criticism. Her merciless prose impales both the electronic and print media."
Though technology and tastes have changed since Savan's essays first appeared in The Village Voice, her analysis is timeless. The fundamentals of exploiting desire remain the same: sex and fear, flattery and patriotism, humor and cool still sell. Savan's interviews with ad agencies and corporate clients-along with her often hilarious take-downs of Adland's "Big Lies"-reveal how successful advertising works.
But ads do more than sell products. They are signposts to the evolving American psyche. Think of female athletes sweating hard while wearing Reeboks: think "empowerment." Hear solemn New Age music for Crystal Light drink mixes or KitchenAid appliances: think "spiritual." When virtually any product can be associated with a powerful self-image, we are subtly refashioned into the advertiser's concept of a good consumer. Like it or not, we lead "the sponsored life."
PRAISE: "Smart, stingingly funny collection...Ms. Savan brings to bear a pithy style, a peppery wit and an unerring moral compass that enables her to score hits on the corporate fictions that increasingly structure our world view."-New York Times Book Review"
Savan straps one ad campaign after another to her lab table and dissects each with humor, insight and a healthy dose of rage...This thoughtful collection will appeal to anyone concerned with how ads work, what they're hiding and why they have such a hold on us." -Publishers Weekly
"Her delectably sarcastic analyses offer disturbing insights into the images that millions of citizens seek to adopt."-Los Angeles Times Book Review"
Original. Provocative. Breathtakingly insightful." -Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean, The Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania
"By paying attention to social issues, particularly women and race, she makes us notice the politics at work in the spaces between news and entertainment." -Patricia Mellencamp, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for her Village Voice column about advertising, Savan is the author of Slam Dunks and No Brainers: Pop Language in Your Life, the Media, and, Like...Whatever and The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture. She blogs regularly for The Nation about media and politics and has been widely published, including in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York, Mother Jones, and Huffington Post. Savan appears in the documentaries Helvetica and Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (Netflix). The Sponsored Life was the solution to the Sept. 18, 2016, New York Times Acrostic Puzzle.