Book Review : Hegarty on Advertising – Turning Intelligence into Magic by Sir John Hegarty. Advertising has spent much of the last twenty years enthusiastically announcing its own death. Television was dead. Print was dead. Agencies were dead. Then social media arrived, and apparently everything changed. Then AI arrived, and apparently everything changed again. And…
Book Review : Marketing 7.0: A Guide for Thinking Marketers in the Age of AI by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawa. Marketing has a slight obsession with declaring that everything has changed. A new platform shows up. A new technology launches. Someone coins a new acronym. Within about two days, we hear that…
Book Review : The Customer Experience Book by Alan Pennington. Businesses spend an extraordinary amount of money persuading people to become customers. Advertising campaigns. Social media. Websites. SEO. CRM systems. Brand strategies. Carefully crafted emails containing the recipient’s first name to prove that everything is now “personalised.” And then, having finally convinced someone to buy…
Book Review : Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Some ideas disappear almost immediately. Others hang around for years. You can forget an entire presentation before you’ve reached the car park, yet somehow remember an advertising slogan from 1997, the plot of a film you…
Book Review : Hacking the Human Mind by Richard Shotton and MichaelAaron Flicker. There are two kinds of books on marketing. The first promise to make known “the secret” for influencing customers. The second point is to explain that neither your customers nor you were ever making completely rational decisions from the start. The book…
Book Review : Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Roy Schwartz, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Modern business has an odd problem. People say they lack time, yet they send emails so long you need a packed lunch to finish them. Smart Brevity aims to fix this issue. The main idea…
Book Review : This is Marketing by Seth Godin. Many people still think marketing is just about convincing others to buy things they might not really need. Seth Godin has spent much of his career making the case for a different approach. This Is Marketing isn’t focused on tricks, hacks, or chasing the newest algorithm.…
Book Review : Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide by John Cleese. Many people in business still believe that creativity is only for designers, writers, musicians, and those with especially colourful socks. John Cleese challenges that idea in less than 150 pages. Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide is not about turning you into an…
Book Review : Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In marketing, it’s easy to think that any book written before social media, smartphones, or AI is outdated and belongs on a shelf somewhere. Confessions of an Advertising Man politely suggests otherwise. Published in 1963, David Ogilvy’s classic is still one of the most…
Book Review : TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson. There’s a particular type of presentation that begins with thirty-seven bullet points, continues with an unreadable chart, and ends with everyone checking their phones while quietly questioning their life choices. TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking is…