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Mara Einstein
A detailed analysis of the categories and tactics of modern advertising and marketing. Even if you think you're savvy enough to already know all the tricks advertisers are pulling on us, Mara Einstein's book is sure to fill in some gaps. She splits her work between "native advertising" (non-advertisers such as the news media collaborating in marketing) and "content marketing" (advertisers producing stuff like "news" articles and interactive campaigns for themselves). The most disturbing topic in this book to me actually isn't all the social media advertising and the tracking and lookalike ads and all that-- it's the native advertising, where the news media monetize on their supposed trustworthiness to the benefit of advertisers.
An opening quote from David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather:
There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 percent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman also warns of how changes in media are changing our perception of the world, including through journalism, long before the internet really sunk its teeth into it. Postman's primary focus is TV and its everything-is-entertainment effect on communication, but the analysis is broad and insightful, and dovetails neatly with Einsten's more recent assessment here.