Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign

In 1991, Subaru of America, a carmaker struggling through a recession, began searching for a new advertising agency, and six firms competed for the account. The winner, Wieden & Kennedy, was an aggressively fashionable agency whose creative director had little interest in cars, and the match was rocky from the start. Randall Rothenberg followed the process closely, watching the rivalry, the brainstorming, the posturing and the vanity behind every decision. The result is a behind-the-scenes account of one campaign, and also a look at how advertising moved from earnest, conventional pitches toward a cooler, more knowing style, and how the industry's fixation on image came to shape wider culture.