The Want Makers

By Eric Clark

Advertising is the industry of our time…

Whether it is called ‘the permissible lie’, ‘the only true new art form’ or ‘the lifeblood of capitalism’, it increasingly influences the whole of our lives – from the toys our children demand to the TV programmes we watch, from the drugs our doctors prescribe to the way we vote.

It is pervasive, global – and growing.

There are three times as many advertisements now as fifteen years ago – but in the new age of satellites and electronic wizardry, the real explosion is still to come.

At the same time, with vast computerised information banks and new psychological techniques, the industry comes closer and closer to its target of persuading us to act as it wants when it wants.

Intrigued by what he found, he embarked on three years of interviews in New York, the power centre, in Tokyo, and in London, widely regarded as ‘the Athens’ of world advertising today.

The Want Makers was conceived when the author was asked to help relaunch an advertising and marketing magazine.

He talked to the people who matter in the business, some of whom speak with extraordinary candour.

The result is a stimulating look at the whole world of advertising – from the research to the creation to the impact.

It is not an anti-advertising book – more frightening than even the worst excesses, believes Clark, would be a world with no advertising – but there are disquieting revelations, and the book does raise a number of worrying and important questions.

Eric Clark is an investigative journalist: according to then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, his Observer disclosures about gambling led to the decision to change Britain’s gaming laws. He has also written four successful thrillers, among them Black Gambit and Chinese Burn.