Inquiring Minds

Collaborating on a book with an Australian academic proved a bit more taxing than Alice Sylvester initially imagined.
“I signed on blithely,” said the industry veteran, currently vice president and account planning director at FCB in Chicago. After three years of e-mails between Sylvester and co-author Max Sutherland, Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why, is ready for an October release in the U.S.
The book uses global campaigns to support theses including one that advertising is not designed to make consumers run out and buy a product, but to “make the brand more salient, part of our mental agenda,” Sylvester said.
“We think about how advertising is constructed, and how it affects the brain,” Sylvester said, acknowledging that people in the business “don’t think a lot about the reasons we do what we do.”
The book is an update of a well-received 1993 volume by Sutherland,...