Ca$hvertising - A Review

This book is a gold mine! I made notes on almost every single page.

The best part I liked was on page 184 when he says,

"Advertising is not supposed to be entertainment! You may be entertained by it, but that's not its purpose. It's not a creativity contest. It's not meant to grace the walls of the Louvre in Paris. It's also not poetry, comedy, or a riddle to be figured out. Advertising is not about winning awards for being tricky, off-the-wall, or ingenious. Advertising - plain and simple - is about selling products and services. It's business communication with the goal to increase sales by interesting people enough in a product or service that they ultimately trade their money for it."


Yowzer! If only the stalwarts of the advertising industry would read this. They'll be up in arms!

But the thing is, this guy's absolutely right. Advertising is about selling.

However...and there is a however, some of the methods he prescribes are quite crass and questionable. I'm all for simplicity in the message but a certain degree of elegance wouldn't hurt, I think.

Ad-Agency Secret #4 - I don't agree with this. While cranking up the scarcity does rake up the sales, what happens when the deadline expires? An honest advertiser would pull the product out of the market. Or at least deploy a "Back by popular demand" kind of message. But still, it's such a deception.

Ad-Agency Secret #13 - Adding questions does help to keep the prospect's interest, but for how long? To me, it'll only work well if the prospect is not required to read through massive amount of copy before finally arriving at the answer.

Ad-Agency Secret #26 - This tip says that long copy covers the requirements for both types of readers, i.e. those that do need long copy to persuade them (Ms. Long) and those who do not need long copy to persuade them (Ms. Short). The thing is what if in all that long copy, there's not enough to convince Ms. Short to buy? She's been made to read through a whole load of nothing and all it did is make her turn off from ever reading future communications from the same advertiser.

Ad-Agency Secret #29 - In Ad-Land, editorials are called advertorials. I don't think they work anymore despite Whitman's assertions.

I think for some of Whitman's tips, what works before does not necessarily work now.

But still a worthy read.