Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else)

An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective of its most powerful players, by the bestselling author of Googled

Advertising and marketing touches on every corner of our lives, and is the invisible fuel powering almost all media. Complain about it though we might, without it the world would be a darker place. And of all the industries wracked by change in the digital age, few have been turned on its head as dramatically as this one has. We are a long way from the days of Don Draper; as Mad Men is turned into Math Men (and women--though too few), as an instinctual art is transformed into a science, the old lions and their kingdoms are feeling real fear, however bravely they might roar.  

Frenemies is Ken Auletta's reckoning with an industry under existential assault. He enters the rooms of the ad world's most important players, some of them business partners, some adversaries, many "frenemies," a term whose ubiquitous use in this industry reveals the level of anxiety, as former allies become competitors, and accusations of kickbacks and corruption swirl. We meet the old guard, including Sir Martin Sorrell, the legendary head of WPP, the world's largest ad agency holding company; while others play nice with Facebook and Google, he rants, some say Lear-like, out on the heath. There is Irwin Gotlieb, maestro of the media agency GroupM, the most powerful media agency, but like all media agencies it is staring into the headlights as ad buying is more and more done by machine in the age of Oracle and IBM. We see the world from the vantage of its new powers, like Carolyn Everson, Facebook's head of Sales, and other brash and scrappy creatives who are driving change, as millennials and others who disdain ads as an interruption employ technology to zap them. We also peer into the future, looking at what is replacing traditional advertising. And throughout we follow the industry's peerless matchmaker, Michael Kassan, whose company, MediaLink, connects all these players together, serving as the industry's foremost power broker, a position which feasts on times of fear and change.  

Frenemies is essential reading, not simply because of what it says about this world, but because of the potential consequences: the survival of media as we know it depends on the money generated by advertising and marketing--revenue that is in peril in the face of technological changes and the fraying trust between the industry's key players.

The Idea Writers: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Era

This book is a must read for any copywriter and anyone looking to understand the new realities of the brand creativity business. 

A memorable slogan has been the cornerstone of every great ad campaign. In the past, writing one great headline could launch a career. But today's advertising campaigns are interactive, multi-platform and ongoing, and the copywriter's canvas is vast. At any given time, a copywriter may be conceiving a video game, writing a TV show, maintaining a Twitter feed, creating a mobile app or an interactive installation or, yes, writing a headline or a TV script. 

While the best copywriters have always been brand storytellers, now that story can play out anywhere. The digital revolution put control in the hands of the people - the audience - now no longer just consumers, but active participants in a brand's story. 

The art and science of advertising has gone from creating one-way messages to engaging audiences in ongoing conversations. 

A new ad landscape means new opportunities for writers who now have the incredible opportunity to push brand narrative to places it's never been before and to actually create something so useful or entertaining that it generates its own audience. It also means that many of the rules of the past - while exceedingly worthy of study - are insufficient to guide the modern copywriter. Co-published with AdvertisingAge, The Idea Writers outlines the changing landscape of the advertising industry while providing useful how-to advice. 

Filled with interviews from top creatives including: Greg Hahn, Nick Law, Jeff Benjamin, Tim Delaney, Rei Inamoto, Lee Clow, Steve Simpson, Rick Condos, David Droga, Gerry Graf, Ty Montague, Calle and Pelle Sjonell, PJ Pereira, David Abbott and many more.

Included in Advertising. 

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!

A crackling look at the philosopher whose founding ideas were at once obscure and eerily prophetic.

Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is remembered now primarily for the aphoristic slogan he coined to explain the emerging new world of global communication: “The medium is the message.” Half a century later, McLuhan’s predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of “electronic inter-dependence” have become a reality—in a sense, the reality—of our time. 

Douglas Coupland, whose iconic novel Generation X was a “McLuhanesque” account of our culture in fictional form, has written a compact biography of the cultural critic that interprets the life and work of his subject from inside. A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global village—now known as the Internet—has come to pass in the 21st century.

Included in True Stories. 

The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications

America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's dominant economy and most powerful state. But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole repertoire of mass communications.In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio, Paul Starr shows that the creation of modern communications was as much the result of political choices as of technological invention. With his original historical analysis, Starr examines how the decisions that led to a state-run post office and private monopolies on the telegraph and telephone systems affected a developing society. He illuminates contemporary controversies over freedom of information by exploring such crucial formative issues as freedom of the press, intellectual property, privacy, public access to information, and the shaping of specific technologies and institutions. America's critical choices in these areas, Starr argues, affect the long-run path of development in a society and have had wide social, economic, and even military ramifications. The Creation of the Media not only tells the history of the media in a new way; it puts America and its global influence into a new perspective.