Customer Reviews

The End of Advertising as We Know It

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In his book "Crossing the Chasm," which explored how technology companies move from start-up to success, Geoffrey Moore used a great analogy to explain how market concepts move from the fringe to the center. Moore said the bulk of companies were like cows, always bunched together while contentedly looking down at their tiny patch of grass. Then one cow looks up and thinks, "new grass!" Another cow looks up too, and soon there's a stampede over to a different field.

In branding, the cows are starting to look up.

Sergio Zyman is a former chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola who bills himself as a "high-profile marketing guru." He runs an Atlanta-based consulting group with clients in banking, aluminum, skiing and golf. In 2001, Time magazine named him one of the three best pitchmen of the 20th century.

This book is a follow-up to his 2000 book, The End of Marketing As We Know It. His current book is a collection of observations on the changing role of branding, specific advice on sponsorships and PR agency selection, and musings on the impact of 9/11on advertising. He writes only for companies selling to consumers, ignoring the vital role of branding for businesses that sell to other businesses.

The premise that advertising has "ended" covers attacks on large, traditional agencies, who see advertising through the lens of 30-second TV commercials and define success by the number of creative awards. "The truth is that most agency art directors are frustrated movie directors and most agency copywriters are frustrated playwrights and both consider themselves artists," he says. Instead, he defines advertising as the sum total of corporate operations, ranging from packaging and PR to how secretaries answer phones.

Zyman also argues that "awareness" is irrelevant. "Too many companies make the mistake of thinking that creating an image is some kind of goal unto itself, that once they get their image into the public's mind they'll automatically see an increase in sales and customer loyalty. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way," he writes.

He makes a strong case for accountability. He dismisses traditional metrics like "reach," "frequency" and "continuity" because of a lack of targeting. Every marketing expense must be treated as an investment, with a quantifiable return. Even sponsorships must have a hard-dollar impact on revenue. Such accountability extends to ad and PR agencies. Don't hire anyone, he advises, who is not willing to be paid based on sales results.

Based on his extensive experience at Coke, he is especially strong on celebrity endorsements and sponsorships. When considering celebrities, key questions to ask include: "Is there a relevant connection between the brand and the celebrity?" Otherwise, it's a waste. Case in point: Hiring Terry Bradshaw to promote 1-800-COLLECT, or Michael Jordan for Ray-O-Vac batteries. What is the risk of controversy? Is the celebrity overexposed? ("Two words: Fran Tarkenton.") Can the celebrity be used in different media? And, does the celebrity actually use the product? There were a lot of frowns at Pepsi when Britney Spears was spotted drinking Coke.

Out of a worldwide marketing budget of $5 billion, Coke once spent about one-third on sponsorships. Zyman now suggests that the word "sponsorship" should be abandoned because it implies one-way philanthropy. His alternative: "Marketing Property Utilization." Key questions to answer before sponsoring events include: What specific business results are you trying to achieve? How much business will the event need to generate to achieve revenue and profit objectives? What are the opportunity costs? He emphasizes that the usual method of measuring return - minutes of exposure compared to equivalent media costs - "is a load of crap." He suggests that property sellers take a stake in the success from the event. For example, a bank sponsor of a NASCAR event paid NASCAR for every new account that was opened.

But Zyman misses the boat in several areas. He not only argues for "positioning," but "positioning du jour." "When it comes to brands, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' doesn't work....If your brand is going to succeed, and you're going to stay ahead of the competition, you're going to constantly fix things before they break and continuously realign your message and your image to your customers' wants and needs." It's hard to imagine a scarred veteran of the New Coke fiasco making such a statement.

He dismisses the experience that results from product and customer interaction. Zyman writes: "Pay attention because this is absolutely critical: The people who got you where you are right now - no matter how good they are- can't get you where you want to go. They just can't. If you're going to move ahead, expand your business, or get into new markets, you need to bring in some new people with new ideas. If you can't do that, you at least need to send your old people out to be retrained."

And some statements are worthy of American humorist Dave Barry, known for his catch-phrase, "I am not making this up." "The Microsoft brand, for example, projects an image that the company and Bill Gates himself are committed to making their products bigger, brighter, and more useful. They even try to involve customers in product development. By continually putting out a product that breaks they're giving the impression that Microsoft's technology is so advanced that their products are always in development. The company responds well to suggestions for fixes offered by heavy and light users alike and people end up almost feeling as though they own the company," he writes.

Some of his ideas are good, but are tainted by the blatant self-promotion on almost every page. If you're interested in a book that explores many of the same themes, but details how to put them into action and measure results, check out FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future by Nick Wreden. The difference between the two books is like exploring the same ground, one from 50,000 feet in the air, and the other with a map, guide and compass.

This would have been an interesting book idea if it had been written seven or eight years ago. As it is, there is little substance here, just a lot of noise about the obvious problems with most advertising today - misguided and pre-tested to the point of gum with the flavor chewed out of it.

Zyman's own career is a product of big advertising budgets. His lack of experience building brands any other ways shows. As such, this book lacks specific advice about non-traditional marketing that comes from personal experience.

If you're looking for a books that can help you find a new approach to marketing, this isn't it. Save your money.

This book would be better off as an entry in the 'Idiot's Guide' series. Not because Zyman is an idiot. He's quite smart. but because it's just a basic primer about how advertising works. Anyone beyond an Assistant Brand Manager role at any decent company knows this stuff cold. And, in my experience dealing with agencies, so do most mid-level and above ad people. Basically, he's selling himself. Every chapter contains tales of his great ideas and the 'visionaires' who agree with him (some of them dead.)
Still, Sergio managed a 6-figure advance for a thin book with college-level information. Now, that's smart. Oh, and by the way: that's marketing.

Zyman drives home the point that the bottom line measurement for advertising is sales; not awards, not recognition, but sales. He repeats this, and shows it in many different ways. If sales goes up, the advertising was good. If sales goes down, the advertising was bad.

I like the message, but my question is: how do you measure that the advertising was the cause for the sales? As much as he repeated that message, he never got to how the measurements were made. I was truly interested in this because of the studies by Don Kirkpatrick (Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels), which made excellent points for evaluation as a whole; specifically that behavior and results cannot be measured because it is nearly impossible to isolate the dynamics. For instance, let's say that XYZ Inc. puts out a new commercial for a new T-shirt, and sales jump through the roof. According to Zyman, this advertising is good. But the reality could be that it was not the advertising, but that a heat wave along with a new teenie-bopper singer cause hundreds of kids with not that much cash to seek out this style because it matches their idol and wallets. Lets also say that maybe all the competition had coincidental disasters that either stopped production or distribution. So in the end, correlation does not equal causation.

Zyman does point to these scenarios, but does not explain "how" to measure - just the need "to" measure. If he could show more, this book would be worth it's weight in gold and every Six Sigma guru out there would hail the work as the missing link from production measurement to sales measurements. But alas, the work is left to what the measurement gurus call IBU. Interesting, but useless.

Getting past the flagrant arrogance is perhaps the most challenging aspect to reading this otherwise spectacular compendium of advertising knowledge. However, one look at author Sergio Zyman's credentials and his seemingly arrogant tone is understandable. In a world where advertising is synonymous with award-winning television commercials, Zyman preaches a different message to the masses. The purpose of advertising is not to create visually stunning television "mini-movies" but instead to convince people to buy more stuff. His message - advertising should help sell more stuff to more people more often for more money.

Zyman teaches that advertising should be relevant for its audience. Budweiser's famous "Wassup" commercials were funny and swept up nearly every advertising award in 2000, but sales dropped over 8%! Everyone imitated the clever commercial, but no one was convinced to buy more Budweiser beer. On the other hand, Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's, shot hundreds of very plain, down-to-earth commercials, and sales have increased substantially. People identified with Thomas and his "folksy" message, and they rewarded the commercials by eating more Wendy's hamburgers.

Advertising is far more than commercials - advertising is about anything that communicates to your customers, and just about everything communicates. How attractive is your packaging - does it communicate your brand? How is your company portrayed in the media? Do your employees create an environment friendly for customers? Zyman considers each in turn, providing both analytical advice to improve in these areas, and examples of companies doing it right or wrong.

As the former Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola, Zyman has proven his marketing prowess by achieving both record sales figures and a consistent brand identity in the soft-drink industry. He stresses the importance of separating brand identity and core competency. McDonalds' strengths may be picking out great locations and ensuring consistent quality across restaurants, but this is not how customers identify the brand. Advertising should focus on repeatedly indoctrinating customers with the McDonalds brand, and tailoring every communicable factor to that message.

Zyman also lectures on the importance of tracking and ensuring a return on every advertising dollar spent. Initiatives that typically do not focus on a quantifiable return should be dropped in lieu of better alternatives. Sponsorships are better classified as "marketing property utilization", or the involvement of your firm with another that carries a proprietary value ensuring you a positive return. Sponsorships or endorsements that do not carry relevance to the customer are frivolous wastes of money.

Although a brand manager or marketing executive may know these lessons cold, Zyman provides plenty of examples and a framework that ensures no one will walk away without learning something new. This book is a great addition to any business arsenal.

The first two things about the cover that caught my eye were the come-hither look of the author and the word ADVERTISING. Agency presidents and CEO's may not be drawn to either one, but they are clearly the target of this book. And they may get something out of it, but it didn't enhance my role as a freelance copywriter. ...I enjoyed the insights into what Pepsi does right and some behind-the-scenes stories of a few other accounts. I agree with Zyman's condemnation of artsy big-budget TV spots that lack a sales message, but that's partly because I never get big budgets and I'm just plain jealous. But although I would somewhat recommend this book to decision makers at larger agencies, I must caution that it is not well-written, nor does it deliver what the title promises. It's witty in a terrifying sort of way that makes me worry I may one day meet this guy at a seminar, in which I'm ducking into a ladies' room. But the book meanders in its focus and gives a lot of seemingly revolutionary advice that isn't revolutionary to me. This book is NOT for the polite, sensitive or the politically correct....

I wish this was a better book because it's at least part of a good book on a very important subject for business. Basically, the advertising business is imploding-- caught up in its own creative shorts by an obsession with TV commercials, awards and the trendy technique of the moment, oblivious if not downright hostile to client demands for accountability and non-TV services like direct response, and as a result no longer trusted by clients as marketing partners. Zyman's trench-level observations on this are timely and powerful, not to mention occasionally hilarious (and no, ad biz, we're not laughing with you).

But in the end, although he convinces me that The End is nigh, he's not very clear on what will come next. One minute he seems to be urging a back to basics, retail-gutter-level approach focused solely on sales, the next he's devoting a whole chapter to how to use celebrities in your advertising (the epitome of empty glitz, 99% of the time). Basically he deeply mistrusts the haphazard, unaccountable way brand advertising has been done for years, and is right to do so, but knows he can't honestly dismiss it entirely (as PR man Al Ries blithely does in his The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR). As a result, he doesn't offer a roadmap beyond what might be described as "You know all those solid principles of salesmanship you read about in Ogilvy on Advertising 20 years ago? Well, start using them again!"

The book also suffers some of the more general flaws of business books-- chapters seem to wander all over a variety of topics with no very clear agenda, sentences are bolded randomly (and about ten times too frequently), and every person Zyman's ever worked with was either a clueless dinosaur or one of the true visionaries and a good friend. (It would make me a little afraid to work with him; disagree once and bam, you're in his next book.) Finally, this is a book that poses serious questions few have wanted to raise, and is worthwhile on that basis, even if the answers never quite arrive.

Zyman's first "The End of _______As We Know It" book, which dealt with marketing, is quite good. This one reads more like a jeremiad against the entire advertising industry (not necessarily a bad thing) followed by a thinly veiled, extremely long, copy advertisement for the author's consulting practice.
The book starts off promisingly enough with chapter and verse on the largely lamentable state of most established ad agencies, which in his mind have lost focus on their primary reasons for existence: to help their clients sell more stuff and to grow and nurture their clients' brands. But after that, he meanders through various areas-the importance of differentiation, that everything about a brand communicates, the proper use of sponsorships-none of which is particularly new news. Until finally, in Chapter 8, he arrives at a very key observation: How a company communicates with its employees is every bit as important to the success of its brands as anything else the company does.

For this chapter alone, the book is worth reading, but it may be one you're better off borrowing than buying.

As a new marketing manager given the responsibility of spending money on advertising, I felt like the first three chapters helped me understand 1) What advertising really is and 2) The value a manager should expect to derive from spending money on advertising.

From there the book launches into a description of different forms of advertising. Zyman packs the book full of examples of advertising that (at least in his opinion) work and don't work. He continues on about the necessity of managers to ensure that advertising is positively impacting revenue and profit while lambasting those company's that seem to engage in advertising for advertising's sake.

I really expected Zyman to go beyond the complaints and accolades and help me learn how to develop metrics and programmatic evaluations of marketing initiatives so that I can make the right decisions before spending the company's money. No such luck, I suppose that knowledge like that is the "secret sauce" reserved for those who plunk down money at his agency.

If you know nothing about advertising, this is a good history book of do's and don'ts. If you need to make decisions about spending money on advertising you'll be better served finding a more technical book on marketing campaigns and programs...... or giving Zyman's firm a call I suppose..... which may be the real reason the book was written.... it is after all good advertising.

For anyone involved in advertising this book provides very interesting read. . Overall not impressed with the content and lack of substance. More marketing than substance! I preferred High Intensity Marketing by Idris Mootee. This book is LOADED with solid, meaty real world marketing insights and techniques that can are being kept as trade secrets. You will probably find this book a real eye opener. If you're looking for a more balanced marketing book, suggest going for David Aaker's books, some Kotler's books.