An interactive marketing manual that effectively encourages new methods while demonstrating them.
Consultant Schaefer delivers a bold manifesto on why human audacity has the ultimate advantage over AI.
In an era in which people and companies are using artificial intelligence to flood the digital landscape with automated content, Schaefer argues that the true competitive advantage lies not in outsmarting AI, but in “out-humaning it.” His latest work is a rallying cry for marketers, entrepreneurs, and brand experts to embrace “audacity” as their greatest asset in an oversaturated market. Schaefer begins by asking “What does it take for your product to be discovered today?” His answer unfolds through an exploration of brands, agencies, and individuals who’ve defied convention and, according to the author, have turned marketing into an art form. The book features case studies from innovative advertising companies and brands such as Giant Spoon, the Taboo Group, e.l.f. Beauty and HBO, among others, and it showcases how fearless creativity—not algorithms—captures attention and builds lasting loyalty. Through a mix of case studies and strategic insights, the author explores how what he calls “audacious” marketing can capture consumer interest and keep it. The book notes three critical pillars of brand storytelling: the narrative, the platform, and the storyteller. Using real-world examples, Schaefer illustrates how to “disrupt stories” and “[twist] them into new spaces,” rather than relying on predictable, “safe” marketing. One of the book’s key concepts is “everyday awe,” which involves creating small but profound moments of wonder that can potentially turn passive customers into brand advocates. To that end, Schafer uses an intriguing strategy that effectively follows his book’s own advice: He includes QR codes that lead readers to videos and additional case studies, among other things, which turn reading the book into a more interactive journey. By the same token, the text also includes 19 bolded words that form a “magical phrase,” rewarding readers who engage with the game. In these ways, this playful guide delivers dozens of tips for eager market executives in offbeat ways.
An interactive marketing manual that effectively encourages new methods while demonstrating them.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798987245774
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Schaefer Marketing Solutions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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