Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

  • Realm of the Damned by Alec Worley

    I was given a copy of Realm of the Damned – Tenebris Deos by one of the staff at Forbidden Planet. Werewolf Press did a really nice job of printing up Alec Worley’s graphic novel. The subtitle is a nice touch as Worley must have been thinking that he had a franchise on his hands.

    Realm of the Damned

    The next installment is out later this year.

    So whats Realm of the Damned like? It reminded me a lot of Blade 2. You have the titular character who is a natural enemy of vampires brought in by them to kill a super vampire that would kill all of them.

    The closeness of a vampire slayer to the Catholic church is very reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Vampires series of films. The main protagonist Alberic Van Helsing is already tired and worn out, rather like Wolverine in Old man Logan; but with severe addiction issues.

    Where Realm of the Damned differs from these films is in aesthetic. It’s like something out of a black metal album lyrics. Darkness, killing, death, decay, hopelessness, savagery, dark magic, endless supplies of blood.

    A badass character like Kate Beckensdale’s Selene from the Underworld series would only work if she was emerging from a sea of blood. Think Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in Doctor No, but everything’s red.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ6mOC4uSX4

    And there in lies the weakness of Realm of the Damned. It’s something that the writers of Arachnophobia knew very well. If you want something to shock and horrify, use it sparingly. Unlike horrific spider films of the 1950s and 60s Arachnophobia had one spider who popped up at any time rather than a legion of spiders.

    Even Garth Ennis’ The Punisher punctuates violence with detail and plot movements. Realm of the Damned splashes the claret too much and loses much of its effect.

    Of course, I am probably not the main target audience for this book.

  • Über by Kieron Gillen

    Back in the day reading graphic novels like the Über series would have been a niche interest at best.  Now with the rise of Marvel and DC universe films they are part of mainstream culture.

    Über invasion

    But not all comics are about accessible hero stories with easy cinematic adaption. My preferred writers like Gillen use the superheroes to ground the stories more in a gritty reality.

    Garth Ennis from Preacher to The Boys has looked to subvert and examine comic franchise conventions. Gillen tried to get us to examine our own conventions and pre-conceptions about war.

    I see clear parallels between their work and the ‘political’ spaghetti westerns of Franco Solinas in particular.

    Gillen’s Über uses superheroes to explain the kind of damage cased by massed Russian artillery in the march to Berlin and atom bomb blasts a la Hiroshima.  Superheroes make the horrors of war more relatable.

    It is also interesting how what would seem to be a ‘diesel punk’ series hinges on transformations that are outside the the power of medicine even now. Finally, there is a clear parallel and differentiation between Captain America and Über.

    In summary, if you want a good thoughtful read and aren’t squeamish; start reading Über.

  • Seventeen by Hideo Yokohama

    Seventeen by Hideo Yokohama

    Seventeen follows Yokohama’s first break out book translated into English; Sixty Four, but it isn’t a sequel or a prequel.

    Hideo Yokohama is a former journalist. he used to write for the Jomo Shimbun, a regional paper in Japan. It was obviously easy for him to write about life as a journalist. Yokohama-san captures the atmosphere in a news room. The egos and tensions. Perhaps the biggest tension being the solitary nature of being a writer, whilst participating in the team effort of a daily miracle of creating a newspaper.

    It describes a pre-internet world, where pagers were hot items, cellular phones were starting to make an appearance but outrageously expensive. Two-way radio sets were commonly used by taxi-companies, field services organisations (utility vans) and possibly media who couldn’t afford cellphones.

    Seventeen isn’t a straightforward book to read, it has parallel narratives that wind together. One narrative is that of a senior journalist in a local paper in 1985 in the aftermath of Japan Airlines Flight 123; the world’s largest loss of life in a single aircraft accident. The second strand is the journalist some 15 years older; preparing to climb a rock face with the now adult son of a friend who died at the same time as the air crash.

    The book mixes the existential crises of the journalist in both home and professional life; with the emotion involved in reporting such a horrific event. Yokohama  captures the politics and internal pettiness of his office colleagues and the perverse nature of the company chairman.

    Seventeen is a great read, which I can highly recommend as a summer holiday read. More book reviews can be found here.

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  • The limits of the IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It

    The IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It (TLATSOI) has been a north star for agency strategists since it was published in 2013. It’s now been out there long enough to understand the limits of its approach.  This post started with a blog post that talked about the IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It (TLATSOI) role in the planning and strategy process of the ad industry.

    Thermometer

    The Long And The Short Of It Needs The Wrong And The Shit Of It. Feel free to go and have a read and come back.

    The Limits

    The IPA’s original research had flaws that dictated the limits in the methodology:

    • Focusing purely on successes brings in biases due to the research being taken out of context. Context provided by the ‘complete’ population of good, mediocre and awful campaigns rather than award winners
    • There aren’t any lessons on how not to truly mess up

    TLATSOI isn’t a LinkedIn article

    Its easy to throw shots over the table when someone has done a lot of work. TLATSOI isn’t an article on the ‘five morning habits of Warren Buffet’ to make you successful.

    Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 996 campaigns entered in the IPA Effectiveness awards (1980 – 2010). That would have taken them a considerable amount of time to do. They then managed to write it all up and distill it down into a very slim volume on my bookshelf.

    The work is an achievement and Binet & Field deserve our gratitude and respect. Secondly, other marketing disciplines don’t have their version of TLATSOI. We couldn’t critique TLATSOI if it didn’t exist.

    Let’s say we want to stand on their shoulders and build something more comprehensive than TLATSOI. Just what would it take?

    The limits of working with what you have

    Binet and Field worked with what they have. If you’ve ever written an award entry you’ll know pulling it together is a pain in the arse. 996 award entries represents thousands of weeks of non-billable agency time. This was also strained through their empirical experience in the business, which adds a ‘welcome’ bias.

    Now imagine if that kind of rigor in terms of documentation and analysis was put into mediocre campaigns. The kind of campaign where the client logo barely makes into the agency credentials deck.

    Without a major agency (nudge, nudge, wink, wink BBH) providing all their warts-and-all data, the initative won’t start.

    It will be hard to get what is needed. Agency functions aren’t geared up to deliver the information. A technological solution would take a good while to put in place; and like all IT projects would have a 70% failure rate.

    In an industry where careers are made and talent attracted on ‘hits’; theres a big chunk of realpolitik to address.

    How would you keep a lid on the dirty laundry?

    We live in a connected world. To the point that there are now likely to be four certainties. Birth, death, taxes and data breaches. Imagine a data dump, some Excel skills and what was a bit of snark would do to an agency’s reputation? The stain of an ad agency equivalent of the movie industry Gold Raspberries would likely bury careers.

    What do we measure?

    My friend Rob Blackie started some of the thinking on effectiveness data SLA tiers

    A = Tests the objective directly using a Randomised Control Test (RCT) in a real world environment (e.g. measured at point of sale).
    B = RCT tests of proximate objective (e.g. brand), direct measurement of impacts without correction for population bias or confounding factors (e.g. a sunny week drives a lot of ice cream consumption). Or case studies (independent), quality survey data on changes in behaviour, testing in an artificial environment. For instance a Nielsen Brand Lift study
    C = Case studies (non-independent), data sources that may contain significant bias compared to the underlying population. For instance: Award entries.
    D = Indicative data such as PR coverage, social media Likes and similar.
    E = Anecdotes. Extra points for quality, and reproducibility across different suppliers / evaluators.

    There are challenges capturing long-term branding factors such as advertising ‘ad stock’ or ‘carryover‘. That then takes you into fundemental questions:

    How long is the minimum viable time of campaign duration to be considered for assessment?

    How long should we be measuring long term branding effects? How do you measure ‘clientside’ quality issues:

    • Resourcing / budgets
    • Product
    • Ambience in the case of client-owned channels
    • Adequate quality briefs. Are the objectives written well? Are they relevant to the business
    • Mission creep or changing company agendas

    All of this means that getting to the greater volume of poor campaigns as well as the best is easier said than done. The best way to kick it off would be having large agencies to work together on putting together data sets.

  • Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert M Cialdini

    Cialdini’s Influence is now over ten years old and still stands up. It is a good guide on the psychology of why people say “yes”. The accessible style of Influence reminded of Douglas Rushcoff, or Malcolm Gladwell. Ok Malcolm Gladwell is a poor analogy, Cialdini’s work isn’t candy floss for the mind. This is deceptive as there is usually an inverse relationship between value and accessibility. Exceptions to this heuristic would be the likes of Sun Tzu – The Art of War.

    Influence by Cialdini

    Cialdini hasn’t been researched within an inch of its life in the same way Byron Sharp’s books have been.

    Cialdini provides planners and strategists with starting points for customer experiences. The book isn’t a how to guide for digital journeys but provides first principles. Psychology is not channel-specific.

    The Journal of Marketing Research described it as

    …among the most important books written in the last 10 years.

    The book’s style allowed me to pick it up and put it down, to fit in with my holiday schedule of train travel and family time.

    Why should you have Cialdini’s Influence?

    • If your work includes marketing planning or strategy, your bookshelf should have this book. If you are thinking about customer interactions, this book outlines the first principles that you need
    • If you’re a consumer and want to know how you’re being sold to; read this book
    • If you want to get on better with people ( your kids or co-workers); buy this book

    My copy is well-thumbed and stuffed with post-it notes around the edges as I go back and forth into it on a regular basis. More marketing related content here.

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