An essential marketing manual for both the uninitiated and the experienced.
A guide to branded content that offers a newer, hipper version of “publish or perish.”
Digital media continues to expand and transform, and the field of content marketing—in which advertisers create branded, sponsored works, including magazine and newspaper articles, websites, and even TV shows—is no exception. Cramer organizes her debut in a way that will enable readers to focus on the sections that most apply to them: “The Marketer’s Mission,” “A New Road for Journalists,” or “Publishers and the Custom Content Boom.” However, she encourages everyone to read all three parts, because understanding the roles and concerns of one’s counterparts is the key to effective collaboration, she says. Along the way, she offers several concrete examples of successful branded content, such as a New York Times article on women’s prisons sponsored by Netflix and its hit series Orange Is the New Black. Likewise, she presents an in-depth case study involving Del Monte Foods, green beans, and Thanksgiving, following the project from conception and execution to its results. There’s a fair amount of jargon here—understandably so, though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at terms such as “client on-ramping.” The way Cramer introduces quotes from experts uses a long-winded format that often lists names, titles, positions, companies, and quote sources, and this becomes obtrusive to the point that some readers may want to skip right over them, much like much-maligned banner advertisements. Overall, the author suggests, the most entrenched resistance to branded content comes from journalists, who tend to view it as unethical or otherwise beneath them. However, Cramer, and others, points out that all media companies operate under editorial parameters. At the end of the second section, she alliteratively renders the bottom line: “Hemming and hawing (with a heaping side of hand-wringing) over the ethics of these tactics won’t do anyone any good if there is no newsroom left to worry about compromising.” Resistance may be futile as so-called “digital natives” set trends and increase their purchasing power, but this good-natured book makes the pill a tad more palatable. After all, Cramer cautions publishers, “If you’re still resisting custom content, you’re already years behind your customers.”
An essential marketing manual for both the uninitiated and the experienced.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-937290-06-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CyberAge Books
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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