3000. That’s the number of marketing messages the average American confronts on a daily basis from TV commercials to podcast ads to YouTube pre-roll ads. Over the last decade, advertising has become more devious, more digital, and more deceptive, with an increasing number of ads designed to appear to the untrained eye to be editorial content. It’s easy to see why. As we have become smarter at avoiding ads, advertisers have become smarter about disguising them.

Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know exposes how our shopping, political, and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. It helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing industries work in the digital age. Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising’s subtle and not-so-subtle impact on our lives–both as individuals and as a global society.