A fascinating—and surprisingly fun—wide-angle look at advertising.
A comprehensive look at the nature and practice of branding.
Once upon a time, companies developed their brands solely for recognition purposes and distributed them through limited and well-worn channels, as Probst makes clear in the groundwork for his impressive new book. A farmer or a small-town shop owner might respond to a particular brand by buying a product, but the relationship usually went no further than that. But now, as Probst asserts, “We consume all these goods because marketing convinces us they make us happy, loved, and esteemed, but too many products make us feel happy one moment and miserable the next.” The author begins by noting what most consumers already understand: Brands “can foster meaningful relationships with their customers by being more empathetic and delivering a personalized experience.” But he quickly expands his discussion to include far more cultural and psychological elements. He contends that the advent of the internet has split most of us into three people—the real, digital, and virtual selves—which sometimes makes it difficult to remember who we really are. This conflux of identity and advertising is a note struck throughout the book, which repeatedly cites the ubiquity of a new mode of advertising. “People who want to express their ‘real me’ are more engaged with brands online and are motivated to co-create brand value,” he explains. “They become brand advocates.” All of this is in service to what Probst calls “contextual commerce,” the modern phenomenon of instant gratification that consumers expect—being able to “buy anything at any time without interrupting their lives.”
Readers of Probst’s Brand Hacks (2019) will remember his snappy prose style and quick pacing, but nothing in that earlier book will prepare them for the manic, thrilling sweep of this new book, which begins as a discussion of the ways branding must adapt to the demands of the present moment and steadily expands into nothing less than a penetrating portrait of an entire culture. Indeed, one of the most interesting and challenging main takeaways of the book is the extent to which branding has become the entire culture, for good or ill. “Consumers no longer expect brands to merely market their products,” he writes, “but to provide reliable and accurate information, take a stance on social issues, and make a positive contribution to society and the community.” In these pages, Probst takes the inner workings of consumer marketing and transforms them into an utterly fascinating snapshot of the way we live now. As Probst notes, the playing field has never been broader. “Small brands used to be hindered by few retailers carrying a limited number of brands along with their private labels. E-commerce has solved this by giving anyone access to an audience,” he writes. “Amazon shelf space is unlimited.” The author touches on everything from recycling and “green” initiatives to amateur-dominated social media platforms like YouTube or Instagram to the “woke” movement, and he illustrates his points by referencing TikTok trends and celebrity endorsements. Probst’s combination of agile writing and insightful observations makes most other books on modern branding look both overly circumspect and woefully incomplete.
A fascinating—and surprisingly fun—wide-angle look at advertising.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1646871254
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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