Advertising Age Handbook Of Advertising

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource
Review: AdAge does it again. The nations best source for the ad trade puts out another great resource. This book is full of survival techniques for the aspiring and seasoned ad pro.

Rating:
Summary: Questionable value
Review: I approached this book as someone looking to enter the advertising field on the business side. Having read fifty pages or so, I'm not very happy with it. The writing style uses confusing wording for what should be simple statements. Consider this classic: "In the post-future-shock era, contingencies are more common than uninterrupted progress" (pg. 58). Or "In a database-driven organization, salesmanship can slowly give way to the recitation of fact" (pg. 18). Eh? Sadly, one of the authors is supposed to be an authority on direct marketing--one would assume that he could at least write clearly. Also scattered throughout the book are assertions, such as "A theory of marketing (that has great validity) is that marketers can't make a mistake by overflattering their targets" (pg. 33) that are mentioned once and never supported, examined, or referred to later. The authors seem to assume that the audience will believe that assertion and others based upon the audience's own prior knowledge of the field. Also, some ad campaigns are mentioned as being faulty, without saying why.

Overall, I don't reccomend this book.