Tuesdata: The books that influenced the marketing industry’s thinking class
Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.
This week’s edition tackles a simple question with some fascinating answers. We asked some of the industry’s smartest people to recommend the one book that most influenced how they think about the world of media and marketing.
Further down, a better day on the Unmade Index.
The content of the full post is available only to Unmade’s paying members. That could be you. Not only can you see today’s members-only edition of Tuesdata, but you get access to the full Unmade archive, which goes behind a paywall two months after publishing. Unmade’s paying members also get discounts on tickets for our events, including tomorrow’s REmade – Retail Media Unmade conference. The coupon code is at the bottom of this post.
Book report
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
There’s no shortage of instructive books promising the mastery of all things media, communications and marketing. Some deliver exactly that. Others… do not.
So we turned to some of the sharpest minds in the Australian marketing world to hear what shaped their thinking. Find out below what Telstra CMO Brent Smart takes from the life of adman Howard Gossage; how News Corp Australia executive chairman Michael Miller learned to gain from competitor’s mistakes; and how Lafley and Martin’s view on strategy shaped Dentsu chief investment officer Ben Shepherd’s perception. Hear too, why Mark Ritson nominates Ernest Hemingway.
Below, we speak to James Hier, Russel Howcroft, Sophie Price, Ted Horton, Brent Smart, Mark Ritson, Michael Miller, Caroline Hugall, Ben Shepherd, Gaven Morris, Barry O’Brien and Gavin Gibson.
Caroline Hugall, Chief Strategy Officer at Spark Foundry
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin is one of the most culturally prolific and influential figures of the modern era. His book The Creative Act: A Way of Being is part spiritual rumination, part practical handbook that’s composed of 78 meditations on the creative process, which democratises it for everyone. (“Regardless of whether or not we’re formally making art, we are all living as artists.”) It’s a dynamic, energy-giving book that I keep close by at all times. It is a constant reminder not to put ‘creativity’ in a box, but instead bring it to every task, no matter how big or small.
James Hier, Chief Growth and Product Officer at Wavemaker:
The Book of Gossage by Howard Gossage, Jeff Goodby, Bruce Bendinger
If you want to be the best in advertising and at the same time are really concerned by it, here’s a book for you. It’s about the not as famous as he should be US madman Howard Gossage and his provocative thinking about the craft, as relevant then and as now. The Book Of Gossage taught me not to plan too far, you never know how your campaign is going to be received – he called this the ‘participatory approach’ because he believed he was in a conversation and only a bore doesn’t listen. He’d ask the perennial ‘what keeps you up at night’ to the client…and then write an ad asking the consumer to solve it.
His whole ethos was making the faceless consumer real for the client, by getting them to respond to the work, so building an emotional connection between the client (and agency) and the audience. He believed it changed the work, moving the client from thinking their petrol station sold rocket fuel to a grudge purchase that we can make a little bit more convenient.
He did irony and fun in the era of ‘whiter than white’. His ad for Qantas had the headline “Be the first on your block to win a kangaroo”… taking his own medicine he waited to see where that went before the next campaign.
Brent Smart, Chief Marketing Officer at Telstra
Changing the World is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man by Steve Harrison
A book about the American ad genius Howard Luck Gossage, who should be more famous, but sadly died in the late 60s. I discovered Gossage when I moved to San Francisco – in a town more famous for tech founders, he was an ad pioneer who influenced the next generation of creative leaders from the West Coast, like Jeff Goodby. Gossage was decades ahead of his time, more interested in ideas that were “interactive” and “platforms” (his words) that would involve the audience and get brands talked about, like giving away free pink air for FINA gas stations and giving away a kangaroo for an unknown Australian airline called Qantas. Gossage also coined my favourite quote about advertising: “Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them and sometimes it’s an ad”. A great reminder then, as it is now, that people aren’t as interested in our brands or our advertising as much as we marketers are.
Mark Ritson, marketing professor and proprietor of the Marketing Week Mini MBA:
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
I know it has nothing to do with business directly, but The Old Man and the Sea had a giant impact on me as a young man.
At first glance there is little to learn about marketing from Hemingway’s final novel, but I’d argue that’s true of most of the boring-as-fuck books that most marketers nominate.
But
the tightness of its prose, the parsimony of its structure drove me towards a realisation of less being more. That’s a big idea for someone as young as me when I first read the book. And the simplicity of the story and the way it is told really hammered home to me just how important it was to use skill, expertise and experience not to make things more advanced or complex but instead to make it so basic and obvious even a child can get it.
In essence The Old Man and the Sea taught me about choice and focus. And Swordfish too of course.
Sophie Price, Chief Strategy Officer at EssenceMediacom
Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense By Rory Sutherland
Rory Sutherland’s delightfully amusing book has become my trusted companion in the last four years, in combating what I call “the folly of over-reasoning.” We’ve all been there – those moments at work when you encounter excessively logical decision-making that’s sorely lacking in imagination and subsequently kills creativity.
Within its pages, Rory’s book explores the complexities of human decision-making, the power of psychology in marketing and business, and the importance of challenging established norms for marketers to breakthrough – delivered with Rory’s trademark wit and irreverence. My take outs:
1. Rory challenges conventional logic and wisdom, arguing that many successful ideas and solutions in business and life often defy rationality. It suggests that people’s decisions are often influenced more by emotions and perceptions than by pure rationality.
2. He suggests that innovation is difficult because people tend to focus on not making mistakes rather than pursuing breakthrough ideas. True innovation requires a willingness to take risks and embrace unconventional thinking.
3. The book acknowledges that people often cling to habits, even if they appear irrational, because they provide a sense of control and predictability.
4. The book criticises excessive reliance on reasoning (which I personally love), arguing that reason should be used to evaluate solutions rather than dictate them.
Russel Howcroft, 3AW host, Gruen panelist and partner at Sayers
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout, and A Big Life (In Advertising) by Mary Wells
Positioning had a really profound effect on how I’d always thought about advertising and marketing at a very, very simple level. It’s all about how you position brands and businesses in the eyes of consumers.
And the book that had a significant effect on an ambition level was by Mary Wells – ‘A Big Life in Advertising’. She was the first female CEO of an American listed company, Wells Rich Greene, and the very famous I Heart NY logo was developed by Wells Rich Greene. Mary Wells was a brilliant advertising executive, creative person and leader of the organisation, and my suspicion is, seducer of clients.
Michael Miller, Executive Chairman, News Corp Australasia
Two of the earlier books that I read many years ago…
The Cola Wars by Harvey Yazijian and J.C. Louis – You make your biggest gains on the back of your competitors’ mistakes.
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson – Don’t procrastinate, learn to embrace consequences (they can be both positive or negative, however you don’t learn from procrastination).
Writing On the Wall: Social Media – The first 2000 years by Tom Standage – Social behaviours don’t change as dramatically as we think. It’s the tone and delivery you need to keep ahead of.
Ben Shepherd, Chief Investment Officer at Dentsu
Playing to Win by AG Lafley and Roger Martin
Lafley was the CEO at P&G and Martin was both an advisor to him as well as a noted management academic and consultant. The system they built around the creation of value at P&G absolutely reframed my view of strategy and also business more generally, and is a book I return to frequently when looking for guidance on approaching business challenges on behalf of clients. Martin and Lafley’s view that strategy is ultimately the act of considered decision making, and that decisions happen across all elements of an organisation (hence all parts of a business are strategic) has provided me with immense clarity on what strategy is (choices) and isn’t (pontification or theory) that I hope has translated to great, valuable work for clients.
Gaven Morris, Managing Director at Bastion Transform
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith
Eighteen months ago, I left the newsroom after 30 years navigating the chicanery of change as journalism and broadcasting adapted to the rising tide of online content consumption. When I started out, old hands in the newsroom talked wistfully of typewriters, film and reel to reel radio and mobile phones, Google and social media hadn’t yet arrived. So begins the story of Traffic, and the rise of Buzzfeed, Gawker and the frontier rivalries of the digital age – often driven by bluster and petulance and usually based on spectacular solar flares of imagination and energy by people like Jonah Peretti and Nick Denton.
The story is told by Ben Smith, who’s had a front row view and through his generous and often brutally honest observations, I can relate to many of the key moments from my more distant view of it all. So many of those dotcom creations have burned and exploded but the attention-seeking techniques and tactics generated during this time are still with us, for better or worse. While this book wasn’t formative in setting my career path forward, it is a wonderful reflection of the change that was so reflective of my journey.
Ben Latimer, Head of Audio Content at the ABC
Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
Good Strategy Bad Strategy is one of those books I seriously wish I’d stumbled upon earlier in my professional career. It’s basically a myth-buster for all those common pitfalls of bad strategy, and it provides you with a treasure map to help you craft better strategy. Which ironically will make your work harder!
This book taught me that setting ambitious goals is not a strategy. And that even when you do all the work to create and execute a good strategy, you can still not succeed. You can make terrible choices, even with a good process. Luck still plays a role. Unexpected events play a role. Your competitors play a role.
Ted Horton, founder of Big Red Communications
The Art of Advertising by George Loys
It is a knock-you-in-the-face, powerful demonstration of unapologetic advertising.
Gavin Gibson, Mindshare Chief Product Officer
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
A layman’s approach to the importance and techniques of creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that can be tested and validated before investing significant time and resources into scaling.
This book challenges some traditional notions of success such as revenue/new user growth by assigning an equal value to learning. Relevant to how we think about shaping our agency model to focus on a minimum viable product versus the perfect, which often never happens or is superseded by a new technology and where learning (good and bad) has a hard value assigned.
Barry O’Brien, Chairman at Atomic 212
Negotiating by Mark Hume McCormack
McCormack was an American lawyer, sports agent and writer. He was the founder and chairman of International Management Group, now IMG, an international management organisation serving sports figures and celebrities.
He was the original Jerry Maguire, but unlike Jerry, McCormack had every major sporting and celebrity worldwide. He negotiated with media networks globally on behalf of major sporting bodies for sporting rights and also for his own sporting clientele!
His life was living on planes, meetings and hotels and he went around the world several times a year representing his vast array of clients. What I learnt from the book that still sticks with me and I believe I practice to this day:
Be respectful and listen to the other side when negotiating to ensure both parties have a decent outcome
If you say you will deliver something, eg a figure, then stick to your word and deliver what you said you would
Know what your walk away position is on the deal, don’t be going backward and forward for days on end, that’s a bad outcome for all
Long haul flights are for resting and relaxing to ensure you land in good shape at the other end
Be courteous, respectful and friendly to the front desk at airports and hotels, pretty much any service industry. They have a job to do too. And you never know, you may just get an upgrade, nowadays they have signs up asking people to be respectful. How times have changed!
And one from Unmade reader Peter Middleton, a retired adman who worked for Y&R Sydney and Monahan Dayman Adams before establishing his own agency with clientele including Tourism Ireland and the European Travel Commission. Peter now works pro bono with community groups to help them campaign for policies in the public interest.
Commonsense Direct Marketing by Drayton Bird and The Power of One to One by Ian Kennedy and Bryce Courtney
Commonsense Direct Marketing is not only a must-have direct marketing text, it is also a really enjoyable read. Apart from Bird’s droll British sense of humour – and that he looks a bit like a hybrid of Basil Faulty and Terry Thomas – it is self-deprecating; it includes at least as many of his failures as his successes.
I met him the week that I moved from Monahan Dayman Adams mainstream agency to become the inaugural GM of the fledgling Sydney office of MDA Direct. It was on a Sydney harbour cruise launching the week of the Pan Pacific Direct Marketing Conference, at which Bird was the keynote presenter. I bought the book at the conference and it became a lynchpin in my studies for the Direct Marketing Certificate course on which I’d just embarked. That was 1984 (prophetically) and it’s some years since I last read the book but I’m almost certain that it was one of Drayton’s failures included, where I learnt, that as a hotel marketer, never send a letter to the home address of a pair of recent guests, especially if you’re addressing it to Mr & Mrs!
It is no surprise to learn that Bird honed his craft, initially as a writer and later at board level, with the legendary David Ogilvy at Ogilvy & Mather.
The late Ian Kennedy, for whom I have the utmost respect as a direct marketer and communicator in general, penned an Australian DM/CRM milestone with his The Power of One to One, cowritten with Bryce Courtney. Ian and Bryce were ad industry buddies well before Courtney launched his second career as an internationally successful writer of fiction, with “The Power of One”. Pun though it may be, I am sure the title of the DM book gave a real rocket-booster to both its launch and its ongoing sales success. Coincidentally, my first meeting with Ian Kennedy was on that same 1984 harbour cruise.
We’d love to hear your recommendations. Please let us know in the comments.
Unmade Index creeps back above the 600 floor
The Unmade Index, our measurement of Aussie media and marketing stocks, earned some respite from its downwards trend yesterday, opening the week with a 0.64% lift to 605.5 points.
ARN Media saw the largest rise in share price of 5.49%. Seven West Media and Nine followed, with respective 1.69% and 1.55% increases.
Enero Group had the hardest fall. It dropped 4.32%, while IVE Group fell 2.58%, Ooh Media lost 1.11% and Domain lost 1.03%.
That’s all for today. Thanks, as ever, supporting us through your membership.
Don’t forget that Unmade’s paying members – including you – get an extra 30% discount on our event tickets – that includes REmade, which takes place tomorrow. Your coupon code is below.
We’ll be back with more tomorrow.
Your coupon code for RE:Made:
Unmade members get a 30% off tickets for REmade – Retail Media Unmade.
Your coupon code is:
Unmade_Member
Go to remade.net.au and enter the coupon code to access your discounted tickets.
