“I know half of my advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half”. Said by the father of modern advertising - and John Wanamaker’s old adage is as true as 50 years ago. To point out the “wasted half”, you have to know how advertising works. Well….exactly how does advertising work? The opinions to clarify this matter are many. There are many players in the complex field of advertising with sturdy opinions - people with different interests. Frankly, it’s a jungle out there. As it turns out - much advertising is wasted because of that. But shouldn’t people in advertising know how advertising works? How hard can it be? To many peoples surprise it’s not that simple. The thesis at hand is my way of comprehending the field of marketing – and in particular: Advertising. I will theoretically deconstruct four different perspectives for a broadened understanding to give a more efficient advertising, which can be defended morally. Three of the perspectives have a school of marketing; to discover the line of thinking in each, I have chosen one representative: - Strong theory (Preben Sepstrup) - Weak theory (Robert Heath) - New humanistic theory (Claus Buhl) At the moment a lot of movement is happening in the marketing-field, so to give a fair representation of the schools I have supplemented with other marketing scientists/gurus where needed. Overall the line of thinking in the schools very much resembles these statements: - Differentiate, so the our target audience chooses us (strong theory). - Low involvement processing influences the consumer’s mind (weak theory). - Show people ideas they can use in their lives (new humanistic theory). Most advertising-critique comes from social constructivists, who have a very language-based view of the world. They deduce directly from the “text” to “society”. The social constructivist point of view is important in the discussion of the future of advertising. Is advertising to blame for making people’s lives more or less miserable? (as social constructivists say) Or is it just annoying, when being exposed for something irrelevant? As it turns out, a lot of opinions on advertising come down to the view of human nature. This project advocates that much wasted advertising comes from people in advertising with just one tool in their toolbox. The world is more complex than that. Having different strategies and understandings of adverting gives you different tools to choose from – so you can grab the right tool depending on the situation.