marketing and sales

Another Outsource Marketing firm favorite!

A great book about communication planning written by Jon Steel, the Brit who heads account planning for Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Steel and his agency are best known for developing the "got milk?" campaign.

Truth, Lies & Advertising describes the process of gathering consumer insights and turning them into potent communications.

It offers great advice about developing advertising objectives, using consumer research, and working with creative people.

Steel writes with enthusiasm and sympathy for the creative process, but he's also savvy about business realities and committed to results.

If you've ever struggled to reconcile the art of creative with the science of business, this book should interest you.

Goodby-Berlin may well be the best advertising agency in world at this time. Jon Steele's introduction of account planning there may well be the main reason. The proven formula: original consumer insights help create more powerful ads for greater results. Steele's work has consistently produced successes like the "Got Milk?" campaign.

Steele's approach is rare in the advertising world for several reasons: it shows humility and common sense, honors listening to the consumer with imagination, acknowledges the importance of creative quality, is mercifully free of self-promotion, and states the limits of account planning (sometimes there are simply no insights to be found).

While this is not a "how-to" book, I particularly enjoyed some of the tools and tactics: asking focus group participants to go weeks without milk and report back on what they had missed; asking drivers to fill in a thought balloon when they see the driver of a particular brand of car.

When I was done reading the book I felt as if I had just had a witty and interesting conversation with an intelligent and insightful person. I have been sharing the book with my advertising partners ever since.

Successful ad campaigns are not linear developments where a business need meshes straightforwardly with an effective creative approach and actually produces successful tangible results. Instead, building memorable, provocative advertising campaigns is such a complex, political task, both rational and emotional, that a successful campaign is a wonder. Veteran advertising expert Jon Steel contends that building a good campaign is the common sense responsibility of the account planner - the new nexus of the consumer, agency creative staff, client and researchers. Steel shows the pitfalls of misguided research and creative arrogance as he explains that a good business-oriented account planner can help produce wonderfully effective, often simple, ad campaigns. His witty, erudite book concludes with its best case study: a look inside the successful "Got Milk" campaign for the California milk industry. We recommend this book to those who buy and sell advertising and to anyone working at an ad agency.