When discussing the “general field of communication” in his “Personal Statement,” Alloway stated that “Art is one part of the field; another is advertising,” and each had its own messages, channels, and audiences. His writing about advertising belongs entirely to his continuum phase, and starts with a flurry of articles between the end of the second IG series and the beginning of This Is Tomorrow. Half a dozen other articles were published in the last two years of the 1950s. Six of the articles were published in Design, including five written in 1958 and 1959. There were two conventional cultural accounts of advertising in Britain at the time: the first discussed it in terms of applied fine art; the other as formal organization. The Art in Advertising exhibition arranged by the Creative Advertising Circle in January 1956 was an example of the former. “The message,” according to Alloway, was that “ads can be beautiful—if you cut out the client's name and the consumer's interest.” The latter was typified in the comments of the distinguished British designer F.H.K. Henrion who, at the opening of the Design in Advertising exhibition that took place in June 1956, argued that “what we want is more ‘good design’.” The problem with the first account was that it viewed advertising as a downgraded version of fine art; whereas the second “consigns an absolute value to design, just as in the worst idealist art theory: it is assumed to be of universal appeal and value.”

Alloway did not deny—or apologize for—the fact that “ads move goods,” but he preferred to argue their case as a cultural channel of visual communication: “Ads define the topical, and goods are only a part of this: styles of dress, grouping of furniture, choice of companions, and so on, contribute to the definition of the current folkloristic family of man… This cluster of popular art-forms gives us some of the symbols by which we organize the environment we live in.” Crucially, these forms, including advertising, were “expendable.”