Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle Reading App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Apple
Android
Windows Phone
Android
To get the free app, enter your email address or mobile phone number.
$5.75
FREE Shipping on orders over $35.
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Gift-wrap available.
Frequently Bought Together
{"currencyCode":"USD","itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":5.75,"ASIN":"1434102750","moqNum":1,"isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":6.74,"ASIN":"0761169253","moqNum":1,"isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"1434102750::GSe7xKhdByhcF%2BPwx7hVqPJMYRzn9YsNG0AsooYcmGJv6iw5%2BkbaDQRAhpX%2F89UZX3juZnjWr98npfmXku2G6KeY2OHKdflHbZpcvztLByQjCaAgmxemkw%3D%3D,0761169253::32qWHfbLldkoDdsjHgQodBLCmXZnDoINXLf7zfob5R7M%2FyT54TJgd2dr9bDw7MSUiL9QvYYMWJMPM3OY%2FSVHn5GS63P%2BxEKJzeTk9cz8Y5vEf0BRDPZvZA%3D%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"shippingDetails":{"xy":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z","w"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["Add to Wish List","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List","Add all four to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart","Add all four to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:","Price For All Four:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items","Pre-order all four items"]}}
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
This booklet (28 pages) was originally published in 1940 and some new material was added twenty years later. The Foreword to the edition I have (published by Waking Lion Press in 2009) was provided by William Bernbach (1911-1982), one-time chairman and CEO of what was Doyle Dane Bernbach, then renowned for many of the greatest ads in the 20th century. The booklet's author, James Webb Young (1886-1973), added a "Prefatory Note" in 1960. His first publication, How To Become An Advertising Man (1963), focuses on core concepts that every ad practitioner and copywriter should know:
o Knowledge of Propositions o Knowledge of Markets o Knowledge of Messages o Knowledge of Message Carriers o Knowledge of Trade Channels o Knowledge of How Advertising Works o Knowledge of The Specific Situation
Today, these core concepts continue to provide the "basics" on which all effective marketing depends when attempting to create or increase demand for the given product and/or service and multi-media advertising is without doubt advertising's most powerful resource. However, for at least the past 75 years, everything begins with a compelling idea.
In A Technique for Producing Ideas, Webb offers what he characterizes as a "simple, five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life! " Although the process itself is indeed simple, completing it to achieve the given results is a wholly different matter. Webb's focus is on the process by which to generate ideas. "They appear just as suddenly above the surface of the mind [like a lovely atoll above the surface of a deep blue sea]; and with that same air of magic and unaccountability.Read more ›
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
In his last year as an advertising agency executive, James Webb Young was taking an apparently urgent meeting with a client at a well-known magazine. It turned out that the magazine had decided that their future strategy should be to “sell ideas”. However, after that they got stuck and now they turned to Webb with the question: “You have produced a lot of advertising ideas. Just how do you get them? The boys are waiting for me to come back to tell them.” Totally unprepared for the topic at hand and with no formula to share Webb had to disappoint the client, but even though he at the time thought the question funny and naïve it stuck and over time Webb realized that there actually is a technique for producing ideas. The resulting formula was later on presented for graduate students in advertising at the University of Chicago and for advertising practitioners. The presentations subsequently became this book published in 1965.
According to Webb there are two principles that are the source of ideas and then a method by which ideas are produced. The first principle is that an idea is a new combination of old elements. The second is that a person’s capacity to create these new combinations of old elements depends on his ability to see relationships – making the habit of mind to search for relationships between facts an important and trainable aspect in the production of new ideas.
Further, the technique to generate ideas follows five distinct steps in a definite order. 1) The first step is to gather the information that makes up the raw material for the idea. The material is of two kinds, the specific and the general. The specific material concerns the particular facts on the topic at hand. In advertising it could be facts on the product, the target customers etc.Read more ›
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Not bad but pretty expected. Simple to read and understand but nothing earth shattering. Many of us have always know about this whole process, we do it subconsciously, we just didn't write a book about it.
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
This has got to be one of the top five books I've read over the past ten years (that we'll over 10,000 books). I figured out how I should have written my masters thesis (but did not) causing major stress on my life and the others around me. How ever I did use a version of this process when I did my.under grad work.... dare I say, I did everything in pen and or pencil then used an IBM ball type typewriter to pull all my. Lets together this king through the whole process again. What can I say to put it the best perspective...One day soon I hope to be in a PhD program in "Innovation". This book will be at my side - heavily outlined and commented as it is now...
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
This concise booklet was first published in the 1940s by James Webb Young, who became vice president of the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson and the first chairman of The Advertising Council. He wrote it in response to the question, “How do you get ideas?”
Before explaining the process, Young explains two principles.
The first principle is that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements… In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events… The specific materials are those relating to the product and the people to whom you propose to sell it.” With regard to the general materials, the author observes “every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known… was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.”
The second principle is “a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.” He also mentions the link between “advertising and psychiatry… why the change of one word in a headline can make as much as 50 percent difference in advertising response… What is the one word-symbol which will best arouse the emotion with which I wish this particular advertisement to be charged.”
The author presents a process to generate ideas using “five steps in definite order.” 1. “The gathering of raw materials—both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.” 2. “The mental digestive process” in which you are actively seeking “a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.” 3. The incubating stage.Read more ›
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more
This item: A Technique for Producing Ideas: The simple, five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!
![]({"http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Y0ihc836L._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[324,499],"http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Y0ihc836L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[225,346]})
