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Advertising leaves no one indifferent. Starting with a diatribe by the art historian Louis Réau against advertising (1959), then the much later critical reflections of Naomi Klein in No Logo(2000), the introduction to this dossier considers advertising cultures from the angle of a history of the reflections, reactions, and emotions that they never fail to arouse. From the opponents of advertising, through those who sought to distinguish the nobility of art from the vulgarity and baseness of advertising, to those who believed, especially in the interwar period, that advertising would be the art of the twentieth century, it is this whole range of ideas that forms our starting point. Often criticized and despised, advertising remains a field to be explored for cultural and social history, as much in its own objects as in a wider relationship with diverse societies, times, and places. Thus, advertising cultures appear as a crossroads subject, at the intersection of several domains and disciplinary fields—a promising field of investigation to which this issue offers an introduction.