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.

  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders

    Eat Your Greens is a selection of articles curated by Wiemer Snijders on all things that come up for discussion amongst account planners. Branding, marketing, some home truths about innovation and the value of creative. Much of it recycles the stuff that account planners know from reading Sharp or Field and Binet. In addition there are a few that specifically address diversity, inclusion – but excludes ageism in terms of the ways it talks about these as an issue.

    Where’s the value in Eat Your Greens? The answer to that question depends on where you are in your career. As someone who is established in my career, I found it valuable in a few different ways.

    Some of the essays from the likes of Phil Graves, Mark Ritson and Ryan Wallman, Rose and Faris Yakob, Byron Sharp and Amy Wilson are strong enough to make Eat Your Greens worthwhile in its own right. For instance here’s some of what Ritson had to say:

    “The modern marketer has created an entirely stupid dichotomy between ‘digital communications’ and ‘traditional communications’… There are just tactical tools, and they can only be valued and selected once a target and a position and a strategy are in place. What’s more, it’s clear that most successful campaigns combine multiple channels for optimum success. Most studies suggest that the more channels a campaign includes, the better the ultimate ROI.”

    Mark Ritson in Eat Your Greens

    Going through the essays allowed me to come up with recommendations of new reading materials referenced in the essays – I have been using it to bulk up my Amazon list.

    Essays that I would particularly recommend:

    • What Ails Marketing by Mark Ritson
    • Post-Truth Telly by Tess Alps
    • To Target Or Not To Target, That’s Not The Question by Shann Biglione
    • Everybody Lies – The Importance of Psychological Validity In Consumer Insight by Phil Graves
    • The Devaluation of Creativity by Bob Hoffman
    • Biting The Hand That Feeds Us? Why Advertising’s Love Of Novelty Is Doing Brands A Disservice by Kate Waters
    • Why Innovation Isn’t As Sexy As Business Books Promise by Costas Papaikonomou

    For busy marketers or junior planners, Eat Your Greens is a nice introductory point for a number of issues in marketing, such as the corrosive digitisation of marketing.

    I think it fulfils an important role. Particularly for junior planners as many agencies now rely on an army of freelance talent. Eat Your Greens isn’t a substitute for having senior staff developing younger account planning minds on the job. But given the current state of agencies, its probably one of the best options that we have. More book reviews here and my slowly updated bookshelf here.

  • Frank Miller – Ronin

    Frank Miller – Ronin (often called Frank Miller’s Ronin) was a graphic novel written in the early 1990s. In the story Miller looks to combine is love of myth and legend a la 300, with cyberpunk.

    The story leaps across time from medieval Japan to the distant future of New York. The Ronin of the title is looking to revenge his master against a demon. The New York that they fall into owes a lot to the dystopian vision of Mega City One in Judge Dredd. All the money has flowed to capital and most people are living at the edges of society.

    Frank Miller’s Ronin

    Miller explores links between mysticism and technology as it relates to artificial intelligence.

    Frank Miller has a grand vision in Ronin; full of interesting ideas, but it feels half-baked. The potential in the story isn’t fulfilled. The worlds that Miller has built in the book feel very one dimensional in nature. That means that the foundation that the story builds on feels insubstantial. Miller tries to paper over the cracks by moving the reader quickly from one ‘cell’ to another.

    I think that Ronin isn’t something that fits neatly into a short comic run and a trade paperback, but needs its own franchise to breath and develop further. There is a richness in there waiting to be tapped.

    The artwork isn’t as rich as other Frank Miller works such as 300, The Dark Knight Returns or Sin City. Instead it feels like concept sketches rather than a complete work, even the colour panels feel that way. Ronin feels like something it would be worthwhile for the author to revisit and develop further. But at the present time I can only recommend Frank Miller – Ronin for completists, who are fans of Miller’s other works and will overlook this story’s limitations. More book related posts here.

  • How brands grow part 2

    I’ve been re-reading How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp. Part 1 is well known. It is the go-to bible for consumer marketers written by Sharp.

    part2
    How Brands Grow Part 2 by Romaniuk and Sharp

    In part 2 Sharp and Romaniuk looked at business-to-business marketing, luxury marketing and influencer marketing. The things that I found particularly interesting in part 2:

    • The heuristics around business-to-business marketing are remarkably similar to consumer marketing. This means that even in B2B marketing, the importance of brand building is paramount. This is very much at odds with the way in which business-to-business marketing is practiced
    • Part 2 provides a much needed dose of pragmatic realism on influencer marketing. Influencer marketing carries the most weight with people that would be interested in the brand anyway. It is less efficient than marketers seem to believe. If you look at Unilever at the end of the Keith Weed era; influencer marketing took an outsized proportion of marketing spend that could not be explained in a world of zero based budgeting (ZBB) that the company had brought in
    • Romaniuk and Sharp manage to explain why luxury brands need sustained advertising to sustain their standing despite the very nature of luxury being hard to find (and so discover) unless you’re part of the cognoscenti

    Regardless of your marketing area both part 1 and part 2 will help you to be a better marketer. What immediately becomes apparent is that empirical research done by Sharp and company outlined in part 1 and part 2 are best viewed selectively.

    Fads become orthodoxy in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary. A classic example would be the headlong dash into digital regardless of its role in the marketing mix.

    It would be great if these books were paid attention to as well as read by marketers.

  • What Happened by Hilary Clinton

    I just had a chance to read What Happened am glad that I didn’t pay good money for this book. I found it both insightful and disappointing in equal measures. Clinton conveys her emotion really well. She also deeply loves power and policy. I don’t mean that in a megalomaniac way; but in a deep love of the job. The emotional release in the writing lacked the kind of intellectual rigour and analysis that she could, but didn’t apply in this book. Clinton is still mystified why she didn’t resonate with Americans.

    The sub-text is that it wasn’t her fault she lost to Trump but ‘them’ for disliking her and winning. It felt as if Clinton was writing for insiders.

    What Happened

    I am sure What Happened would resonate well with:

    • The writing team of The West Wing. If the show got a reboot, this book might be a good choice for tone of voice. I’ve worked with a lot of centre right and progessive public affairs people. They all loved The West Wing. It seems that Clinton does too
    • Political wonks with a centerist stance
    • True Clinton believers

    My guess this is partly why my initial reaction is that What Happened was the equivalent of a commemorative programme. She vigorously name checks everyone involved. (I am sure that they’ll buy a couple of copies, in a similar way to selling a high school year book.) Much of her ‘mistakes’ are turned into sins that her opponents or the media clickbait business model. Clinton tries to justify things in the book a bit like the late Paul Allen’s biography Idea Man. Her justification is sometimes dressed up as introspection.

    The first part of the book is about coping with grief. One gets the sense of how losing the presidential election was like a death in the family for Clinton and her supporters.

    Clinton tries to lead by example to give hope to the middle and right of the Democratic Party that she represented.

    Clinton is right about the fallacy of storytelling which provides easy closure for the media and voters. It doesn’t however provide the colour required for serious stories. This was the reason why Italian spaghetti westerns felt more authentic than Hollywood.

    She is right that fear identity politics and manufactured legislation gridlock favours small government parties over ‘big government’ parties.

    Clinton seems to think that more of the same of her brand of progressive politics is the answer. This seems a world away from the current Democratic Party direction.

    Clinton differentiates her stance of listening, rather than Trump’s grandstanding. What also becomes apparent is that Clinton needed to ‘reconnect’ with the public, whereas Trump had the pulse of the zeitgeist. Clinton seemed to have a lack of awareness on this.

    Her description of her marketing machine being constructed was interesting. Yet there was other curiously analogue examples of insight. Clinton wants to see how a progessive Democratic candidate will do in the Ozarks. They contact a trusted advisor in the area. He recommends reaching out of a country store owner in the middle of the constituency. The man fed back on how identity politics and government inaction will see the seat go Republican.

    Clinton doesn’t seem to take on board how emotion was so important. Secondly, Clinton thought that the togetherness platitudes would not come across as more of the same.

    She wants to make sure that you realise data was an early focus on her campaign, but . Clinton praises her team and throws her 2008 team under the bus.

    To quote an old advertising maxim:

    To sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising

    Raymond Loewy

    Clinton got this in terms of her visual branding (her appearance) she made her gender as a candidate familiar through her consistent trouser suit uniform, but failed to grasp it in terms of the wider policy approach. She was selling the familiar but failed to make it surprising.

    Her description of her daily life tries to imply, ‘I am just like middle-class people you’. But the problem is; middle class people have the time to read four daily papers, or have a residence manager to curate reading materials. Clinton admits that neither her or Bill had nipped to the store for an emergency bottle of milk, since there has always been people helping out since Bill was first appointed Arkansas state governor.

    The team’s diet of hot sauce with everything, protein bars and canned salmon is given a good deal of coverage. Artisanal food fetishised in the copy is again middle class virtue signalling. There was no Red Bull, no pizza.

    Clinton goes deep into each activity explaining what it feels like to go through things like media training and debate preparation.

    It was interesting that the selfie had risen to prominence in Clinton’s election campaigning, compared to her last serious run in 2008. She nails it when she talks about how it limits connection between the politician and the people, eating into brief talk time.

    Clinton also does some interesting thinking about what future policy making should look like and how it should be merchandised – as what creative marketers would call ‘the big idea’. Citizens don’t read policy papers, but they remember big, audacious simple things they can grok.

  • A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris

    I was given a galley copy of A Shadow Intelligence to read.

    TLDR: version of my review is that its a thoroughly modern spy thriller.

    The protagonist Elliot Kane is a British intelligence officer who has returned from Saudi Arabia to London. He is sent a video of himself in a room that he’s never been talking to a man that he doesn’t know. Harris takes the reader on a spy story that takes place in the Central Asian republics between China and Russia.

    It is a thoroughly modern book:

    • Addressing the confluence of interests between government and businesses going abroad that had long driven policy and actions in Africa and the Middle East. But is now driving along the Silk Road with the expansion of China’s Belt & Road Initiative and the quest for oil and mining
    • Privatisation of military, cyber and intelligence capabilities. We know have a private intelligence and military industrial complex. Edward Snowden worked for Booz Allen & Hamilton. Palantir do data analysis for intelligence, as does Detica for the UK. SCL Group ran outsourced psychological warfare programmes for western militaries and supported political interference in the developing world
    • Technology including modern information warfare over social media channels, fake news and deep fake videos. Even pretty crude efforts at the moment drive effective disinformation campaigns, deep fake video and audio completely undermines what the nature of truth is.

    Kane comes across as a jaded, human bookish character more George Smiley than James Bond. Harris did his research really well. He brings alive the locations and the main characters.

    If I had one criticism it would be that the end felt a bit rushed, rather like the author was trying to exceed a word count. Despite this I am happy recommending A Shadow Intelligence as a good leisure read. More book reviews here.