Beckham Lecture

I had the privilege to attend the Beckham Lecture at BYU today that focused on the becoming of literature and advertising. Some sections of his lecture that I enjoyed were the birth of advertising and his example of Amazon, and the rise of puffery. He spoke about the rise of the internet and how it allowed for the world’s largest book store. Amazon was created in 1995 after the internet really took hold. And it was Amazon that then began a new type of marketing; selling their books as if they were other kinds of everyday merchandise. The makers of Amazon knew that we use the same cognitive process to choose books as we do to choose which brands to buy, which cereal to eat, etc. So they used the same ideas from ads for everyday things to sell their books online.

Puffery (click here for an example) essentially means that the publisher attempts to sell their book in an unusual or new way, but the word puffery is generally used with a negative connotation. People presume it to be an advertisement in disguise and publishers are just trying to talk up something that is not as good as they same it is. This idea of puffery then leads to literary criticism which was a way for people to find out about book without having to read everything. However, much like a disease puffery encrypted this too and authors would then become their own literary critics and just rave about their book, once again hoping to get more sales.

I enjoyed the Beckham Lecture, he was very professional and had interesting points that through all my studies of communication I hadn’t heard about before.