A new bible for a new generation of pitchmen and -women. Young’s treatise makes a fine modern marketing 101 textbook—and at...
“The vast majority of content produced on the internet remains unread, unwatched, unseen, and unheard.” So writes adman Young in this richly illustrated, well-argued manual on how to get the word out.
The 1980s-era bible of the ad industry, Ogilvy on Advertising, writes current Ogilvy & Mather chairman Young, was “a most elegant rant against what [founder David Ogilvy] believed to be a legion of misconceptions about our business,” as well as a primer, if sometimes dogmatic, of how that business works. Young’s book picks up for the new age, with its attention to media that behave in the same way crack does: “instant hits are everything—and it is addictive.” The author sometimes turns to the gimmicky, as with a “content matrix” with aspirational terms such as “magnetic” and “immersive” to describe a subject—content, that is—that the original Ogilvy would have mistrusted. Of great interest to global trend-watchers, though, is the abundance of material Young pulls from the Asian and European markets, such as a brand-building campaign for Nescafé, which may now be the best-known coffee firm in the world. Yet, he adds, global markets are less important in some aspects than saturating local ones, since research indicates that consumers prefer local brands to international ones by a wide margin, though they may continue to buy both. Of interest to anyone seeking to understand how advertisers seek to capture hearts and minds are Young’s concluding predictions for the near-term future: politicians will always lie in political advertising; “the Indian ad market will be the most attractive in the world”; and virtual reality will introduce interesting multimedia possibilities but will not rule the planet. Creative-writing majors wondering how to retire their student loans may take heart, too, in the author’s assurances that “top-notch writing skills will carry a huge premium as they decrease in supply.”
A new bible for a new generation of pitchmen and -women. Young’s treatise makes a fine modern marketing 101 textbook—and at far below textbook prices, too.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-146-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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