Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger

Another book about Satan: not as good as ‘the confidence man’ but still fun. In this book, Satan is an Angel. Yet he has no respect for Man:

“No brute ever does a cruel thing – that is the monopoly with the Moral Sense. (…) A sense whose function it is to distinguish between right or wrong, with liberty to choose which one of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? (…) There shouldn’t be any wrong; and without the moral sense there wouldn’t be any.” (Twain, 1922, pp.50-51).

Being an Angel, Satan tries to help Man. Yet, since to Satan Man’s life is a complete disaster, he helps by killing people or making them insane:

Yet towards the end, the book takes a surprising turn: it is not all black. The misery is just proof that the world doesn’t exist: ““Nothing exists save empty space – and you!” “I!” “And you are not you – you have no body, no bones, you are but thought (…) Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that you universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange because they are so frankly and hysterically insane – like all dreams: God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones” (Twain, 1922, p.139).

Hemut Krone. The book.

Not much to say about this book. Rather than quotes I should put scans of his best ads here. And from the amount of post it you can see I will take plenty of scans. Hence, just a couple of quotes from the guy who did VW, Avis and Polaroid:

“Our mission is to sell products. We should not attempt to make advertising.” (Challis, 2004, p.252).

Something interesting on logos “I’ve spent my whole life fighting logos. Logos say I’m an ad. Turn the page.” (Challis, 2004, p.63).

On the Avis strategy: “Hertz had 75% of the rental car market and Avis, just ahead of contenders three on down, held second place with ten to eleven percent.Avis was going to take on Hertz, and polarize the market by differentiating itself from all the other little players” (Challis, 2004, p.112).

And how VW and Avis worked: “In another way, and in a harder style, another American nerve. He’d done it with Koenig in ‘Think small’ and ‘Lemon.’ – challenging two of the fundamental wisdoms of US boosterism. Now he had done it again, on being second.” (Challis, 2004, p.115).

Philip Roth - Zuckerman Bound

4 books about writing and the relationship of the writer to his subjects: from exploitation, love, stealing up to himself.

“You are a bastard. (…) To you everything is disposable. Everything is exposable. (…) To you it’s all fun and games. But that isn’t the way it is for the rest of us.” (Roth, 1979, p.257).

The books are about how people react to Zuckerman writing about them and finding their lives made public, how they remove themselves from him in order to avoid being written about.

This way he loses his subject and is thrown onto himself – which makes him ill.

Yet, it turns out, the trouble is less the lack of any subject, but the constant search for the right one, and the constant doubt whether it is good enough:

“The burden isn’t thateverything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book”.

How to make it as an advertising creative - Simon Veksner

No, I don't want to amke it as a creative, but they are my main target audience for briefings. So it helps understanding what gets them going.

David Droga in the foreword: “We’re still storytellers, but it’s not about a story that starts and finishes within 30 seconds of a TV ad anymore. Our job now is more about instigating a story, and letting it go. We can create momentum. Our work doesn’t have to be as disposable as before.”

I think this one is interesting, because it goes beyond simply telling us advertising people to let go and let consumers do our job with shitty UGC. Yet, if we are in the business of storytelling, the question simply is, how to tell a story, with the participation of your target audience?

Another interesting one, for everyone planning to get hired by an agency: "Ask yourself “What protion of that agency’s creative output would get you hired at that agency?”"

And a classic Ogilvy: “Get rid of the dogs who spread gloom!"

Rabbit, Run - John Updike

“I once did soething right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first rate atsomething, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.”

“”I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this” – he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half-brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world-“ there’s something that wants me to find it.”

”That’s what you have, Harry: life.”

“Funny, how what makes you move is so simple and the field you must move in is so crowded. His legs take strength from the distinction, scissor along evenly. Goddness lies inside, there is nothing outside, those things he was trying to balance have no weight. (…) I don’T know he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness.”

Advertisin Works 17 - Neil Dawson (ed.)

There is not much to say about these books: if you are an account planner in advertising you will love them, if not, don’t bother. It proves the way advertising and ideas work in the most rigorous ways I ever came across. After reading them you can never read an Effie again, without having to laugh out loud and feeling ashamed.

This one is interesting because it got the detailed case of the ‘try something new today’-campaign by Sainsbury and the long term analysis of Audi advertising in the UK. Moreover the authors raise the question, that despite having elaborate measures for how TV advertising works, not many people try to show the distinctive contribution of media decision and the contribution of digital media.

Most importantly: on the CD accompanying this book, I finally got the great old Audi ad ‘If you want to be at the pool before the Germans’

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe

Looks like a very good book about one group of hippies in California in the late 1960:
“The incredible postwar American electro-pastel surge intho the suburbs.” (Wolfe, 1971, p.38). “

This group uses LSD to help them expanding perception: “He compared the brain to a reducing valve.” “We’re shut off from our own world”

But they recognize that LSD gives them the experience, opens the door, but they also have to come back. So they try to overcome acid: “Beyond acid. They have made the trip now, clodes the circle, all of them, and they either emerge as Superheroes, closing the door behind them and soaring through the hole in the sapling sky, or just lollygag in the loop-the-loop of the lag” (Wolfe, 1971, p.289).