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
A well-researched but dull account of the hungry, unkempt days of early television. Written by film director Ritchie (The Candidate, etc.), the book shows the chaotic beginnings that justified the once widely held belief that this gimmicky new technology had no future. A fuzzy picture was first telecast on a bulky monitor with a tiny screen in the 1920s by Philo T. Farsworth, a high school student in rural Utah. But it would be another 20 years before television was taken seriously in America. Ritchie chronicles many of TV's historic firsts. In 1927, for example, future president Herbert Hoover was the first public official to speak in front of a ``televisor'' in Washington D.C., while his wife appeared from New York. They were followed by a comedian in black-face who called his routine ``a new line of jokes in negro dialect.'' Television's first commercial was illegal, but this did not stop broadcasters from soliciting commercials. NBC earned seven dollars in 1937 for simply showing the face of a Bulova watch. Many of the early (live) commercials were more than artistic disasters: A newly invented ``automatic'' Gillette safety razor would not open on camera, and the hostess of a Tenderleaf tea commercial mistakenly lauded the quality of Lipton tea. The first television newscasts were also tentative affairs. News was considered the exclusive domain of radio, of which television was then a poor cousin; CBS's first newscast featured Lowell Thomas talking in front of a stack of sponsor Sonoco's oil cans. The BBC was technologically ahead of US companies, but it abruptly stopped transmission (in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon) when WW II broke out. A historical video would be better than written narrative for this material. The 77 black-and-white photos provided here hold the nonspecialist's attention, while the text rarely does.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-87951-546-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
A thoughtful, well-presented argument about an issue many people face.
A doctor’s manifesto about terminally ill patients’ right to die.
While many Americans believe that the terminally ill should be able to choose to end their lives, the medical profession, the courts and the government mostly remain beholden to traditional and religious beliefs about the sanctity of life. Preston, a medical professor for more than 20 years, argues that it is time to re-evaluate those ethics in light of today’s technology and its ability to prolong life beyond its natural course. The author writes that confusion and misconception pervade most discussions about aid in dying. He distinguishes "patient-directed dying" or "aid in dying" from terms like "physician-assisted suicide” or "euthanasia." In his analysis, the word "suicide" should not apply to someone who is dying with no hope of recovery. Euthanasia, on the other hand, refers to someone other than the patient administering a lethal drug. Patient-directed dying is when a terminally ill individual is able to request and obtain a prescription for medication to end his or her life, under guidelines set to guard against abuse. Through four composite stories based on situations Preston has witnessed from counseling terminally ill patients and their families, he reveals the suffering caused by prohibitions against patient-directed dying. He adds that doctors must be more willing to care for patients when curing them is no longer possible, and recognize that exhausting every medical treatment, no matter how slim the chances of success, often just prolongs suffering. Preston states his case persuasively, illustrates the need for patient-directed dying as an option, counters arguments often made against it and suggests compromises to address concerns on both sides of the debate.
A thoughtful, well-presented argument about an issue many people face.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 978-1-58348-461-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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