“Power through freedom.” Michael Serazio‘s Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013) traces the mushrooming world of guerrilla marketing–defined to include word-of-mouth, viral, and advergaming, along with a host of other, often hidden kinds of persuasion. The book describes the ways that advertisers give up “control” to consumers through “authentic” discovery, dialogue, amateurism, the non-sell sell, and even anti-marketing messages themselves–all of which serve, paradoxically, to reinforce control and commercialism. The consumer subject, writes Serazio drawing on Foucault and Gramsci, is strategically engaged to act without the sense of being acted upon–a kind “corporate ventriloquism.” The book includes rich, detailed case studies and interviews with marketers, who recount their “cool sell” campaigns for America’s Army, PBR, and Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken.”
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