Bang!
Bang! Getting Your Message Heard in A Noisy World, is a book by the CEO and vie president of the New York advertising firm KTG, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, plus a third author, Delia Marshal, who was not identified so I assume she was a “ghost writer” of sorts. The book is billed as a manual of sorts for advertising agencies to be affective at creating memorable ads that actually increase business.I listened to this book as audio via Audible.com, but by the language, and conversational tone, I feel like it would have been a very quick read on paper. The authors throw a lot of humorous analogies at the reader, although some of them are a bit trite and so fall a bit flat. It was a fun read, listening to all the war stories behind different famous ad campaigns (KTG did the AFLAK commercials and one of the authors worked on other very famous ones like Kodak moments, Toys are Us Kids, Herbal Essences Totally organic experience, etc.), how they got from initial ideas to the final product.
Although there was some good general advice in the book, I felt a lot of it was fairly common sense. Take risks, be nice, make ads that are different enough to be noticed but not so out there as to only be understood by a small group of elitist ad connoisseurs, etc. I suppose they are good things to hear about as reminders, but it would have been interesting to learn about somewhat less obvious and more “insider” details. For example, my mother used to be an award-winning advertising copywriter, working at some large New York ad agencies in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, including Bill Bernbach, Leber Kats, Footcone Belding, and more. However, by the mid 80’s when she was in her mid-50’s, she was pushed out of her job and could not land another one no matter where she went. The reason? She was too old. Ageism is one of those things that is rampant in advertising even more so than many other professions - at least for the creative people. It is assumed that if you are older than 35, you are not in touch with the youth culture, and we all know how companies and advertisers faun over the young. Yes, there are products geared towards older people, primarily drugs and other health remedies, and perhaps with the baby boom generation getting older this will mean more advertising firms keeping their creative staffs longer. My mother was actually lucky, looking 5 or 10 years younger than her 55 years.
Perhaps such things were beyond the scope of this book, meant as more of a general treatise on advertising for those who have little or no knowledge or experience with the field. Even with the somewhat general approach, as I mentioned, it was interesting to hear about the stories behind the ads and even stories behind ads that never came to be for one reason or another. So definitely some light, entertaining reading which might be useful to some extent for some, but not any significant resource for all but the most beginning uninitiated.