Advertising Age - Book Reviews

Re-imagining the 'Design of Business'

"The Design of Business" is a perceptive, wide-ranging, entertaining and, at less than 200 pages, tightly written guide for marketers that truly want to make innovation part of their DNA.

In Praise of Seth Godin's 'Linchpin'

Seth Godin's premise is that today's organizational structure is a throwback to the days of factories, with interchangeable parts and interchangeable workers. Basically, this means that if you do your job as you're told, then you're easy to replace. Seth wants you to "become indispensable" instead.

Motivation 3.0: Finding Satisfaction in a Digital Age

Daniel Pink's newest book, "Drive," disputes the long-held corporate ideology that handing out external rewards on the job -- money, for example -- is the best way to manage employees. This approach is counter-productive and crippling to company morale. What we really need, he said, is an upgrade in management technique, one where people are free to explore what really motivates them -- the desire to learn, create and improve their surroundings.

A Loyalty Even Man's Best Friend Can't Beat

The way marketers interact with customers -- in the store, over the phone and on the web -- is as critical to their success as the product or experience they offer. And marketers that can get their customers to love them have an enduring, and lucrative, advantage. In "I Love You More Than My Dog," Jeanne Bliss lays out the big steps companies must take to earn customer affection.

Adland, Now With More Heart

Miles Nadal Gifts His 2009 Reading List in an Engraved Crate
I don't know about your office, but Ad Age didn't make out so well with the holiday swag this year. In olden days we'd be reinforcing our cubicles with tins of King Leo peppermint bark well into March. Now, reporters are fighting over broken slivers of white chocolate. With raisins. But if the four wooden crates hauled through the doors of Crain Communications today are any indication, profligacy is back in 2010.

Needs, Wants and Everything in Between

In Lee Eisenberg's 'Shoptimism,' I was somewhat troubled that a former head of advertising and marketing for Land's End had so little understanding of what many in the sales promotion side of our business would consider profoundly basic aspects of how stuff gets bought.

'Futurist' Author Returns to Share His Adman Past

"Adland" is a meditation on our industry through the lens of a personal story, told by a veteran of the Old World Order who is rapidly acclimatizing to the new. It resonates with everything we love about this industry, everything we hate, everything that keeps us working in it, everything that makes us want to leave and everything that makes us believe in what could still be possible.

Agency Founder, Art Collector, Recluse

Fans disappointed to learn that famed art collector Charles Saatchi does not actually appear in "School of Saatchi," a new reality TV series where contestants vie for a spot in Saatchi's namesake London gallery, should steer clear of his latest tell-all.

Google, This Side of $100 Billion

A considerable collection of internet history books have been written over the last decade. Ken Auletta's "Googled: The End of the World As We Know It," is one of the better entries I've read from the genre. Like many dot-com profiles, this one is full of "anecdotes" -- we industry folks might call it gossip -- from the early days of Google down through the search giant's challenges in recent years.

Bargain Hunters Beware: 'Cheap' Thrills Come at a Price

When Ellen Ruppel Shell talks "cheap," she does not mean "that which is a good value for the money." She means that which we buy because it is priced insanely low, whether we need it or not. It is this cheap, she argues, that is now the driving force in the world economy. And that's bad.

A Subtle Manifesto for Creative Freedom

This book is tougher than it looks. At first glance it resembles yet another theorizing tome written by an experienced adman -- in this case John Hunt, a giant of South African advertising and worldwide creative director of TBWA. But it soon transpires that the book has little to do with advertising: the word is never mentioned. It's an inspirational tool, a guide to the creative process for when your back's against the wall.

When Gas Hits '$20 Per Gallon'

Oil prices are only going to rise, argues author Christopher Steiner, who was trained as a civil engineer and is now a reporter for Forbes, in his book "$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better." The emergence of a global middle class is driving demand for oil even as remaining supply becomes more expensive to extract. And because oil byproducts can be found in household goods ranging from shampoos to toys -- only 40% of the oil we import goes into our fuel tanks -- virtually no aspect of our lives will be untouched by the end of cheap oil.

Marketing With Meaning! Is There Any Other Way?

Bob Gilbreath's new book, "The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect With Your Customer by Marketing With Meaning," revolves around a three-tiered Hierarchy of Meaningful Marketing: solution, connection and achievement. The book is a critical, timely and enriching read for anyone looking to succeed in a world of consumer control, media fragmentation and content co-creation. It's an honest diagnosis of advertising and marketing pains, but also a practical road map to digging ourselves out of our own hole.

Getting 'Baked' With Alex Bogusky

"Baked In," a manifest of sorts written by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor, argues that companies that pair consumer feedback and research with product design are rewarded with a product that can sell itself, meaning stronger market penetration at a fraction of the paid media. More important, the product retains the same message and target user from creation to distribution.

Exit the 'Spurbs': Life Beyond the Real Estate Bubble

Business leaders and social observers agree that the Great Recession has been a reset event for the American economy. The next question: What does the post-reset world look like? According to journalist John F. Wasik, it'll be marked by the emptying of the exurbs (or "spurbs"); people returning to cities; and the rise of environmentally friendly, affordable and energy-efficient housing.

Making Friends in 'Twitterville'

Shel Israel's "Twitterville" is a compendium of case studies crowd-sourced from hundreds of Mr. Israel's followers from around the globe. It's a book less about social-networking theory than real-world mistakes and successes; real influencers and engagements; real marketing threats and opportunities. This is about buying and reading one of the best insights into what is really going on in the Twittersphere -- not just a how-to handbook.

From Fledgling Zine to Industry 'Survivor's Guide'

"Ad Nauseam," a collection of essays and other bits culled from the zine and blog Stay Free over the years, calls itself "A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture." And in a way, it is. Editors Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky have clearly survived without resorting to a remote and heavily-armed compound in Idaho, and they are here to tell the tale. Or more precisely, they are here to explain to the masses just how consumer culture works and why everyone should be concerned.

Time to Press the 'Reset' Button

In an expanded version of his March 2009 article in Time magazine, Kurt Andersen argues our current woes are a result of the go-go '80s ethos never ending (not an unsurprising argument from a Spy alum) and now we, as a country, have an historic opportunity to build a more grounded and sustainable world.

Father of Flash Mobs on the Future of Viral

As the provocateur behind the Great Flash Mob Craze of 2003, Bill Wasik knows first-hand how quickly stories (trivial or otherwise) can flare up in the wired world, get fanned by the media and then quickly fizzle. That experience (and other experiments) informs "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture," a survey of the rise of the "nanostory" in America and its impact on culture, art, politics and, of course, marketing.

Hotel de Sharp: Lessons From Four Seasons' Founder

Isadore Sharp would be the first to admit (as he does in a new book) that Four Seasons is what it is because of a culture of fanatical devotion to understanding what his guests want and a rigorous dedication to the idea that actions speak louder than words. To then write a book that neither delivers what a reader would want, nor does it in a way that is believable, is, at best, a lost opportunity and, at worst, disappointing in the extreme.

'Microtrends' Redux

The first edition of "Microtrends" was a runaway hit, turning marketers on to the needs of "Pet Parents" and "Caffeine Crazies" alike. In an expanded edition of the book out this summer, Penn offers up seven new microtrends for commercial targeting, albeit these are rehashed versions of his earlier columns in the Wall Street Journal.

Revisiting Emanuel Rosen's 'Anatomy of Buzz'

Ranking high on our recent survey of readers' favorite media and marketing books is Emanuel Rosen's "Anatomy of Buzz," a much-praised guide to word-of-mouth marketing that rode the best-seller lists in 2001 alongside "The Tipping Point" but predates the connectivity age of Facebook and Twitter -- a critical component of buzz-building today. Where most biz books would face becoming irrelevant, Rosen's chosen to rework his text to reflect today's social-media graph. Ad Age sat down with the author and his "Revisited" tome.

Top 10 Media and Marketing Books of All Time

Ad Age wanted to create a definitive reading list for the marketing and media business, but we didn't know whether the editorial team could pull it off on our own, so we turned it over to the wisdom of crowds. We tallied hundreds of reader responses, but in the end it was the ad-focused classics that won the day, with Al Ries and Jack Trout's "Positioning" narrowly defeating "Ogilvy on Advertising" for the top spot.

Of Salad Dicers and Spray-on Hair: 'But Wait ...There's More!'

In his addictive take on the gimmickry that is direct-response TV, Remy Stern explains why we buy into products with false promises and celeb spokesmen with even falser tans. We hate to say it, but you probably won't believe your eyes.

What Is the Best Book Ever Written on Marketing or Media?
We want to know the best book you've ever read on media and marketing. No rules. We'd rather you didn't vote twice, or vote for yourself, but we're not going to fight over it. Nor are we going to tell you what constitutes a book on media or marketing -- that would kind of defeat the point of asking you in the first place. We will, however, tally up and publish the results next week in an effort to create a list of the best marketing and media books of all time.

Holding Court With the 'King of Madison Avenue'

"King of Madison Avenue," like most bios of 20th-century business pioneers, paints a broader picture of an industry's evolution, in this case advertising in America. What's missing, though, is a more critical analysis of Mr. Ogilvy's work, how it touched the masses and its lasting importance. One could argue this might make the book less accessible to the public, but let's be honest: The public cares a lot less about the inner workings of adland than we wish they did, "Mad Men" notwithstanding.

Dismissed, Denigrated and Demonized: 'The Decline of Men'

Men are giving up. They sense that they've lost the high ground (and the future) to women, and they aren't even trying anymore. They've opted out to become jackasses, stoners and slackers. Responsibility is shirked, and adolescence is extended indefinitely.

The One About the Adman and the She-Wolf

OK, we admit it: We're sorry we missed the chance to pour praise on Toby Barlow's book a year ago with the rest of the literary elite. It's just that an ultraviolent epic poem about sex, drugs and werewolves set in modern Los Angeles -- think Homer's "Odyssey" as scripted by Anne Rice, with a whiff of Elmore Leonard -- didn't strike us as standard CMO fare at the time. And it's not.

Swarm Is the New Herd

The core of DDB CEO chuck Brymer's argument lies in the book's subtitle: "Marketing to the Swarm as Well as the Herd." Consumers, he writes, now behave more like bees, birds and fish than beasts of the field. "In a community a small number of people -- sometimes even one person -- can quickly become the voice of a hundred, a thousand, or 200 million, in much the same way that a darting fish can move the entire school away from a single predator."