Advertising lives: memoir and career

Since the 1950s, a small but growing number of Australian advertising practitioners have produced memoirs documenting their time in advertising. Generally descriptive in their content, they cover the authors' career trajectory, their successes and shortcomings, and various personal and professional lessons that they have learnt along the way. By comparing and contrasting these memoirs, this article not only charts the experiences and insights of a career in an advertising agency, it also reveals the ways that these memoirs collectively reflect advertising's inherently ephemeral nature.