HOW TO WRITE A SINGLE-MINDED PROPOSITION

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HOW TO WRITE A SINGLE-MINDED PROPOSITION

Name: HOW TO WRITE A SINGLE-MINDED PROPOSITION
Author: Howard Ibach
ISBN: 978-0-692-12000-2

FIVE INSIGHTS ON ADVERTISING'S MOST DIFFICULT SENTENCE. PLUS TWO NEW APPROACHES.

by Howard Ibach ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2018

A concise guide to effective advertising strategy.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)