A concise guide to effective advertising strategy.
Advice on how to focus on what matters in an ad campaign.
Essayist, educator, and public speaker Ibach (How to Write an Inspired Creative Brief, 2nd Ed., 2015, etc.) has decades of experience as an advertising copywriter/creative director, and in this book, he can’t help but admire the strong simplicity of a well-wrought, single-minded proposition, or “SMP.” From an advertising agency’s perspective, the SMP is the “one, most important thing we need to say about [a] product.” It’s also the linchpin of a stellar creative brief—the document that drives an agency’s advertising campaign. With laserlike focus, this book effectively analyzes the SMP by first discussing its current usage and then revealing “new perspectives” on its application. Advertising newcomers and readers outside the industry will find that this first section does a fine job of defining the central concept, and it’s written with aplomb. It highlights several excellent examples of SMPs, such as those for the European Tango carbonated drink and the drug Viagra; shows the SMP’s relationship and importance to the creative brief; and distinguishes between an SMP’s features and benefits, among other things. One key point that Ibach makes is that an SMP must be aimed at a specific target audience. He closes the section by reviewing a weak brief and walking readers through how to fix it, which ties in with a workshop that he promotes at the book’s end. Ibach also includes creative exercises that help to hone the reader’s SMP-writing abilities, such as naming two features of a mundane object. The second, very brief section of this well-designed guide relies on input from two other advertising professionals (consultant Paul Feldwick and DDB Canada president Lance Saunders), proposing a way of approaching the SMP, which, Ibach admits, has already been adopted by some executives. It basically revolves around an understanding that the decision to buy is “based solely on emotion, not rationality,” to quote Saunders. What’s missing in this part of the book, though, are the meaty examples of the first section. Still, it makes for a good send-off, and it encourages deeper creative consideration of the SMP.
A concise guide to effective advertising strategy.Pub Date: May 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-12000-2
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Ibach Media Group LLC
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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