Two days later, everyone’s still talking about the Super Bowl ads. This classic book is great resource for putting these pitches in perspective: Schudson argues that advertising is both a much more complicated and a much less successful enterprise than is often realized. In fact, he writes, the “success” of a marketing campaign is often driven by contingent, contextual factors as much as the ads themselves. For further reading, the second edition of Schudson’s The Sociology of News is also out now.