After reviewing a wide range of topics, we conclude that good science requires greater efforts to manage biases and to promote the ethical conduct of research. An important problem is the belief that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are exempt from systematic bias. Throughout the book, we acknowledge the importance of RCTs, but also emphasize that they are not immune from systematic bias. A second lesson concerns conflict of interest, which must always be taken seriously. Most large RCTs are sponsored by for-profit pharmaceutical companies. We identify leverage points to address these problems. These include cultivating equipoise – the position that research investigators enter a study with the understanding that either a positive, negative, or null result is of value. We return to several other themes prominent throughout this book, including the reporting of research findings and serious problems with our system of peer review. The book concludes with recommendations for reducing conflicts of interest, improving transparency, and reimagining the peer review system.

This case study of gender in advertising through the lens of two campaigns – one by Virgin Atlantic and one by Bud Light – examines these brands’ alignment with modern gender perceptions and the subsequent consumer responses. It considers how advertising mirrors or moulds society’s gender norms and how companies navigate this spectrum. Beginning with Virgin Atlantic’s ‘See the World Differently’ campaign and updated gender-identity policy in 2022, this example indicates the campaign’s success in its positive reception. Conversely, Bud Light’s collaboration with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney for the ‘Easy Carry Contest’ faced a polarised reception. While aiming to resonate with a younger, more inclusive demographic, the backlash from conservative corners illustrated the risks involved when a brand ventures into socially charged territories without thorough consideration of its diverse customer base.

The comparison between Virgin Atlantic’s holistic approach to embedding inclusivity into their brand ethos contrasts with Bud Light’s reactive stance, highlighting the importance of proactive engagement with social issues in brand strategy.

This chapter treats the marketing of transatlantic passenger shipping companies from the post-Famine period to the emergence of amphibious aviation at the end of the Free State era. It explores the use of evolving advertising, marketing and public relations techniques, collectively commercial propaganda, in the USA on the transatlantic passenger shipping trade. It compares and contrasts the commercial propaganda of American shipping lines with that of their British and Irish counterparts to determine the degree to which American marketing techniques influenced domestic marketing, shaped consumer tastes and stimulated desire for an American life experience that was grounded in participatory civic consumerism. The chapter suggests that the reverse flow of knowledge and practices, stimulated by temporary and permanent reverse migration, and correspondence with Irish-America, led to the post-Famine modernisation of commercial promotional activity, with attractive communications from America copied by shipping lines and agents in the Irish market to create a domestic, Americanised form of marketing, more sophisticated and polished than previously seen.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing a semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. This chapter argues that The Waste Land is mimetic of affect insofar as the effect of reading The Waste Land is a constantly shifting landscape of affective intensities that refuse narrative containment and prevent the emotional complacency that was the source of social stability in the world of industrial capital and the value form of character. The poem thereby functions as a kind of training ground for an emerging corporate capitalism that orients consumers around the affective intensities of constant novelty through branding and rebranding campaigns as well as the volatile ups and downs of a financialized economy whose health is measured by corporate stock indexes rather than the productivity of labor.

This chapter argues that Imagist poetry participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing the semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. Pound’s and H. D.’s Imagist poetry renders the raw moment of impact between bodies, which provides the foundation for affective experience, as an object of poetic study, literary representation, and semiotic problem to be solved. Therefore, Imagism, along with philosophical and commercial endeavors during this time period, lays the groundwork for affect to emerge as a value form in literature and as a site of social, economic, and cultural struggle under twentieth-century capitalist structures of power.

Chapter 6 turns to the consumption of patent medicines and toiletries and their impact on the Colombian market. By following their distribution, it explores the mechanisms and strategies employed by foreign manufacturers to infiltrate the market and gain widespread attention. It also shows how producers of patent medicines were the first to introduce modern advertising techniques to Colombians. As a result of such advertising, popular sectors were gradually incorporated into the world of foreign nostrums and toiletries, embracing the ideas that these commodities promoted and enforced. In spite of this, as the chapter demonstrates, Colombian men and women still transformed and domesticated their uses and their meanings in interesting and often unpredictable ways.

Tracing the trajectory of journalism fields in Africa from the 1700s to the early to mid-2000s, this chapter highlights the tensions between the political and journalism fields in postcolonial Africa. It focuses on the numerous ways political fields sought to assert control over journalism through colonial-era laws and using their financial muscle to cajole the fields. It shows that ideas about the role of journalism fields were contested both within and outside the field, with some in the field agreeing with the political field with regard to a limited approach to journalistic freedoms. It shows how political elites were keen on controlling journalism fields upon independence primarily because they were aware of the fields’ enormous potential to challenge their legitimacy after using them to push for independence.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

It is usually a mistake to suppose that a company is the best judge of how its business works.1 Or that an industry is the best judge of how the industry works. AT&T is a good example. When the Justice Department sat down with management in 1981 to negotiate a breakup of what was then a monopoly provider of telephone service, government lawyers asked which part of the company management wanted to keep after the breakup – the long-distance operations or the regional networks.2 The long-distance operations had long been the company’s most profitable, so management asked for those.3

This chapter focuses on the distribution of wine. It begins with a detailed account of the liquor wars that pitted Distillers against South African Breweries (SAB), which owned SFW, from the late 1950s. This culminated in a peace agreement in 1974 which left SAB with a beer monopoly and divided the wine and spirits market between SFW, Distillers and the KWV who owned shares in a new company, Cape Wine and Distillers (CWD). It is shown that the competition between SFW and Distillers remained intense. A detailed account follows of how the wine companies, and especially SFW, attempted to market wine to a black consumer market, initially through jazz promotions. It is argued that while the SFW invested in market research and advertising, it was trapped in a racialised way of reading consumer preferences. This is demonstrated with reference to high-, medium- and standard-priced wines. The SFW dominated the market for SP wines but because the real profits were in spirits, rather little of the advertising budget was directed towards black and Coloured consumers. This fed a self-fulfilling prophesy about the limits of the market for wine amongst ’non-whites’.

The chapter is dedicated to the active career of the eighteenth-century printseller Jane Hogarth, widow of the painter and engraver William Hogarth. It looks at the means Jane employed to face competitors, namely by turning to copyright law in an effort to protect her property. In doing so, she set an important precedent in copyright law, whereby she obtained a special provision that would grant her the exclusive right to sell her husband’s prints. Letters, newspaper advertisements, legal reports, and even satirical prints by contemporaries offer insight into Jane’s commercial dealings, her powers of persuasion and the impact of her achievements.

Mary Darly has been called the mother of British caricature, a pioneer who – with her husband Matthias – paved the way for the ‘golden age’ of satirical prints. This chapter reveals new details of her life and her twenty-four-year career gleaned largely from study of the Darly prints and newspaper advertisements. Mary saw the importance of prints in influencing political affairs: she produced satires before her marriage in 1759 as well as after her husband’s death in 1780, and she published some of the most virulent prints in the campaign against prime minister Lord Bute in 1762–1763. Appealing to the new fashion for images that exaggerated facial features, in 1762 she published the first how-to book in English, The Principles of Caricatura Drawing. The Darlys produced a wide range of prints but their greatest success came in the 1770s with a series of caricatures of well-known people described as ‘Macaronies’. Designs were provided by enthusiastic amateurs and people flocked to the Darly shop near Charing Cross for their annual exhibitions – the first commercial print shows in London.