Under the Influence from CBC Radio

After The Age of Pursuasion, his award winning series about advertising, I’m certain Terry O’Reilly’s new program will be radio that I will not miss. We’re better consumers of both goods and ideas when we understand how advertising works and Terry O’Reilly has the expertise of an industry insider and the skills of a fine broadcaster.

Since I was a teenager and first read Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders, advertising has been a fascinating topic for me. I was like Mark Greif who wrote this in the New York Times in 2007:

“The books a child sneaks off his parents’ bookshelves and surreptitiously reads ought to be sex books. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Memoirs of Hecate County” scandalized and educated earlier generations. The volume I made off with was a 75-cent paperback of “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard.

“It did scandalize me, completely. But it did so by exposing the secret world of advertising and brands. Published in 1957, it is now enjoying its 50th anniversary and a new edition from Ig Publishing, with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. I remember my own edition as small enough to hide — not that I really needed to — but packed with dynamite. It had a lurid cover illustration showing a barbed fishhook buried in a gleaming apple. Packard’s book reached into the darkest corners, not of sensuality, which I was sure I knew all about from television, but of the cynical selling in the commercials that ran between the shows.”