Power Pal

In my continued efforts to learn about the advertising industry, I read a great textbook called Advertising and Promotion, An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective . There are far too many topics to summarize here, so I'll cover my main take-aways. The book covered the integrated marketing planning process and aspects of the promotional mix, including: advertising, direct marketing, interactive and internet marketing, sales promotion, publicity and public relations, and personal selling. The book was well-written, interesting, and included up-to-date anecdotes and stories. It definitely reinforced much of what I learned in brand management and other marketing classes, particularly the marketing planning process. It was a great overview text. A couple of the things I found most interesting (major take-aways): Companies spend an unbelievable amount on advertising and promotion . If you add it all up, companies spend in excess of $1 trillion. U.S. media expenditures al...

I've been wanting to get up-to-speed on online advertising and how it works. But I figure before I do that I should learn a thing or two about advertising. Based on the suggestion of my friend and classmate Nate Jaffee (a marketing genius), I'm starting with one of the basics - David Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather. He wrote a book, published in 1985, called Ogilvy on Advertising . The following are my notes from reading the book - apologies if they seem terse ... it's how the book is written and saves me time in writing up this post. "Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world." How to Produce Advertising that Sells Do your homework - learn about the product, what kind of advertising your competitors are doing and how successful they are with it, learn about your consumers (how they think about your product, what language they use, what att...

I listened to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell on CD on a flight close to a year ago and took some notes on it. I wrapped up my classes and have a little time, so thought I'd finally summarize some of those notes here. In the interest of saving myself time, I'm going to leverage the Wikipedia article liberally (via quoting) and then add my notes on top of that. What is a Tipping Point? From Wikipedia: Tipping points are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable." [ 1 ] Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." [ 2 ] The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." [ 3 ] The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mi...