Customer Reviews

Creative Advertising, New Edition

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I expected this book would contain some cool ads and lots of boring text about advertising. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is actually full of awesome examples of ads, pretty much from cover to cover.

It also contains a good How To guide to help eliminate 'art directors block', based on methods used by the creators of the ads featured throughout this book.

A very good buy with lots of pages of 'wow'.

This book is just like riding a bike or using a mobile phone: you enjoy the sensation while not considering the process. Providing fresh knowledge about what professionals do in practice, it leads you into what is called creative advertising. Step by step questions and suggestions with real live examples. I have never seen anything like it. If advertising interests you, make time for it!

This book covers the past on advertising, why ideas are good, how they're created, and has a vast amount of questions you can work through to create your own adverts. I have this on my lounge table, it's good to flick through and guests like it too. What it doesn't really cover is the new age of advertising as in social networking and complex new technology campaigns. No book can cover the future though, so that's not a criticism. A great book, well worth the cash!

One of the best books I've seen on the topic of working in a creative environment and brainstorming. I have read a lot on the subject and although other methods are alright, none of them seem to be as well field tested as this one is. It lays down principles can be easily implemented in daily firm work or any creative project you set out to do. The examples are great, the chapters are kind of long, but it is well worth the read.

This is the single most practically useful concepting book that I've ever seen in 15 years as an advertising copywriter.

It offers a really clear set of questions/conceptual directions you can use to get the juices flowing or "unstick" yourself on a project-- along with real-world examples of how each approach has been used in previous ads. I love it and use it constantly when starting a new project or to help me be sure I've really explored the full range of conceptual possibilities for a project that I'm working on.

Great book, worth every penny and 10X that of most of the advertising books I have.

This is a great book, full of great exercises and examples of creative marketing at its best. Whenever I am working on a creative project and having a mental block, I pull out this book for inspiration, and look at the great campaigns and use the exercises included.

Note that this focuses pretty exclusively on the visual communications in advertising, rather than long sales copy (although it does have a small section on this).

This is a must-have reference book for any small business owner, agency, or marketing/advertising professional.

I'm an aspiring copywriter who can string a snappy sentence together, but I have a lot less experience coming up with creative concepts for ads. I don't really know what's cliche/played out as opposed to what's original, or what reeks "amateur" as opposed to worthy of top agencies. And I don't always have time to scour blogs to find out (I bought this book the day before an unexpected interview). When I see a brilliant ad, I wonder "how the hell did they think of that?" - and I consider it a problem that I don't feel confident in my ability to come up with something comparably brilliant myself. This book has been great in that respect; now I feel like I have the tools I need for brilliant ideas, I just have to practice using them.

So: this book showcases creative, high-quality, awards-friendly (i.e., the consumer might not understand half of them, but they're very clever and all that) print ads (with a minority of TV, design, etc) paired with brainstorming questions that are intended to help you come up with creative ideas. Some of the questions seem so specific that I have a feeling the author thought, "Ok, I wanna include this ad, so I'd better come up with some BS brainstorming question that corresponds to it" - i.e., that he pulled the question out of his rear end. However, a lot of the questions/challenges are genuinely helpful - for example, thinking of an imaginative, funny, alternative use for the product (selling pillows? obviously people usually rest their heads on them, but what if they put their feet on them? or ate the pillow? or used the pillow to prop up a house that's tipping over?).

I agree with the other reviewer who said you could find all these ads (and styles of ads) on the web. This just aggregates it and prints it out. Nothing special. In fact, I wish it had Internet comments - it would be useful to read other people's opinions of the ads; what was done right and what was done wrong. But overall, it's the brainstorming questions I found useful - for me, the ads just served as examples to help clarify the brainstorming questions and illuminate some directions your train of thought might go, not to mention giving me a better idea of what separates the decent ads I see everyday from the "great" ones.

It's going to take a lot of experimentation and practice for me to put these questions to work - I think I'm going to copy them into my email so I can give them a quick glance when I have to come up with a concept on the fly - but so far it's the best resource I've found when it comes to improving your idea skills.

Anyway, even though it's print advertising heavy, these ideas can be used for all kinds of campaigns, not just print. I do wish there'd be a companion book showing you how to grow an idea from a print campaign into a multi-channel campaign covering radio, ambient, social, web, TV, etc. That seems to be my next challenge; figuring out how to cleverly apply the same idea to different mediums.

Overall, I would definitely buy this book again - they could have condensed it into a 15-page workbook, but whatever, it does the job and doubles as an interesting coffee table book, I guess. It does exactly what I wanted it to do: helps me come up with genuinely cool ideas for ads.

The spanish edition I read was a Great advertising inspiration. Definetly 5 stars.

But...has this new edition have the same contents.? wHATS NEW??

It was a gift i made. Good quality, nice size and excelent pictures. I didnt read it so i cannot write about the content, but he was very very happy.

This book was a gift for my niece who is in the advertising field. She requested this book and loved it.