As Essex succinctly demonstrates, since consumers will continue to buy and companies still have large budgets to promote,...
The death of advertising requires a creative resurrection.
Media have long heard the mantra “change or die,” and veteran ad executive Essex, the CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, argues that advertising as we know it is already in its death throes, a victim of the digital technology that it has yet to master. With no apparent irony but maybe some hyperbole, the author hails the advent of “ad blocking, which I have come to regard, heretically, as the greatest thing that has ever happened to the advertising industry.” Why? Because it has forced some companies and those charged with the promotion of their products to acknowledge and even embrace the paradigm shift, to recognize that consumers can now bypass anything that doesn’t offer value. Some of the results that he praises seem visionary. “The incandescent genius of Lego’s adventure in antiadvertising” is how Essex praises The Lego Movie, a critically hailed, crowd-pleasing release that found people paying to see what was essentially an extended ad for the toy company’s brand. Not only did Lego increase sales; the movie itself made money, a reversal of the sort of expenditure that promotion represents. Essex also praises the branding of American Girl, a doll series that has become so much more; the stores themselves are moneymaking promotions for the brand, where they have created their own context for the content: “I realized that the American Girl brand had achieved this stranglehold on my daughter’s imagination without her ever seeing so much as a single traditional ad for the company. And yet every inch of the store and its attendant content was advertising.” Then there’s New York’s popular Citi Bike kiosk program, “a massive, historic success and a game changer in terms of reinventing advertising,” launched at least in part because of “the serendipity in the name Citi Bike. After all, it was just two letters away from Citibank.”
As Essex succinctly demonstrates, since consumers will continue to buy and companies still have large budgets to promote, ingenuity can find a way to promote value.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58851-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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