An entertaining, no-nonsense guide for connecting with consumers.
Coleman urges advertisers to up their game with ads that tell compelling stories in this primer.
The author, a radio creative production director and advertising professional, surveys the contemporary advertising landscape, in which consumers are constantly bombarded with information; commercials have about five seconds, he estimates, to make an impression before they’re skipped over and forgotten. Coleman advises advertisers to eschew the polished, empty verbiage of traditional adspeak and to avoid frenetic overselling. “[B]ad ads,” he observes, “use a glut of laser beam sound effects, explosions… processed phrases from filtered and equalized voices, flashing lights, and pretty faces to distract us, ramming as much information down our throats as possible.” Instead, the author suggests that companies connect with audiences through emotionally resonant, open-ended dialogues, like the classic ice-breaker pitch, “What would you do for a Klondike Bar?” Drawing on his radio background, Coleman emphasizes “audio optometry,” meaning sound design that evokes visual images—a sizzle that conjures steaks on a grill, for example. He continues with a soup-to-nuts discussion of advertising principles, including fundamentals (an ad’s most important task is hammering home the company’s name, so consumers remember it); proper ad targeting (no lip gloss commercials on football broadcasts); the nuances of copywriting (he explains why “unique” sounds better than “different” and “guarantee” sounds better than “promise”); and the loftiest of marketing philosophies (he enjoins corporate branding strategists to ask the question, “Why does your company exist?”) Coleman contextualizes all of this material with interesting dives into neurology and language processing and proffers practical advice on even the most abstruse topics—he asserts that funny ads should have “a comedic rise in tension building to a compelling surprise”—all conveyed in tart, punchy prose (running an incompetent ad is like “writing your brand name on a tennis ball, then hurling it at people’s heads as they walk by”). Marketing managers and advertising agencies will find wonderfully readable insights into their trade here.
An entertaining, no-nonsense guide for connecting with consumers.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8987054901
Page Count: 252
Publisher: multi-SENSE
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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