A wide-ranging account of how to maximize a business’ success through marketing automation.
Once upon a time, marketing a product or service required laborious rounds of trial and error and outright guesswork, defying any scientific systematization. Radical progress in technology, however, especially regarding the collection of data, has revolutionized marketing, transforming its predictive powers. Authors Grdodian and Roberts, marketing professionals who founded the company Reach Marketing, argue that the next level of technological advancement is an artificial intelligence marketing program that aims at automation, or the self-regulation of the many aspects of marketing. In principle, such a system should be synoptic, covering the targeted search for new customers, the development of content, the oversight of the entire multichannel landscape, and the subsequent analysis of all pertinent data. Automation, as they understand it, does not mean an ungoverned marketing strategy but, rather, a faster, more responsive one that requires less time and speculative hypotheses. In fact, they argue that automation should enhance overall creativity by freeing up the opportunity for its expression: “It’s a powerful tool for amplifying your marketing team’s brightest ideas and for freeing it to focus on creative while your automation software handles the execution.” The ultimate aim is to satisfy time-honored metrics via modern means. Despite their focus on innovation, Grdodian and Roberts discuss the spectrum of marketing approaches, including traditional types like direct mail, email, and telemarketing, as well as the basic principles of search-engine optimization and search-engine marketing. In each of these cases, though, they urge the use of an AI marketing program to score better results. There are also incisive reconsiderations of the purpose and power of landing pages as well as a necessary treatment of data analysis. The authors are notably comprehensive in their coverage of the topic, and they write with welcome clarity given the esoteric technicality such subjects often invite. Also, their research is undeniably rigorous and based on extensive, rich experience in the field. Sometimes the prose reads like an infomercial for their business, but the guide remains persuasive and edifying nevertheless.
A useful introduction to a new understanding of marketing made possible by the modern information revolution.Pub Date: March 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-60228-7
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Reach Marketing LLC
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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