April 16, 2018
New Yorker media critic Auletta (Googled) masterfully maps the rapidly evolving topography of the advertising industry. Once a freewheeling, three-martini-lunch, money-flowing industry, advertising has undergone drastic changes in the decades since the Mad Men era, particularly since the advent of the Internet, and Auletta ably traces the dramatic shifts. He profiles executives at established powerhouses, such as MediaLink’s Michael Kassan and Wenda Millard, WPP’s Martin Sorrell, and GroupM’s Irwin Gotlieb, as well as newer power players, such as Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s v-p of global marketing. Perhaps most prescient is Auletta’s spot-on analysis of the interplay between traditional and social media, including traditional-media executives’ concerns over the tremendous amount of data available to Facebook and Twitter and the competitive edge it brings to those platforms over long-standing outlets like TV and magazines (not to mention the related privacy concerns.) Other fascinating topics include how efforts such as Citibank’s Citi Bike bike-sharing program in New York City and YouTube Red represent new forms of advertising; how Facebook fell prey to Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election; and how smartphones have revolutionized advertising. Intelligent and well researched, Auletta’s lively survey serves as an excellent primer to a brave new world.
Starred review from May 1, 2018
Auletta, veteran media reporter for the New Yorker, opens this astute, colorful, fully informed study with an anecdote: three years ago, addressing an annual meeting of the Association of National Advertisers, longtime ad-agency executive Jon Mandel called out his colleagues for extracting kickbacks from media companies (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and websites) in exchange for the dollars spent by their advertiser clients, and then keeping the money themselves. The impact was explosive, sending an industry already unnerved by the technological shifts moving beneath its feet into something of an existential crisis. However distant, even repugnant, the advertising and marketing business might seem to the average consumer, it is the fuel that drives a First World economy, Auletta argues, as he listens to a range of executives driven by, or driving, the force of change: from ad agencies to advertisers to neutral players who help customers (whether agencies or advertisers) move forward in a minefield of doubt to frenemies, like Facebook and Google, who pour money into agencies while luring away their customers. Adding to the shifts taking place in advertising and marketing, Auletta points out, is the lack of a rising new generation of leadership. An important if utterly disquieting book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
April 15, 2018
A plethora of recent books have focused on disruption in the ad world; Mara Einstein's Black Ops Advertising concentrates on the threats of content marketing, while Tim Wu's Attention Merchants situates newer forms of advertising in their historical context. New Yorker writer Auletta (Googled: The End of the World As We Know It) delves into how disruptions are impacting the most powerful agencies and personalities in the business and changing the way advertising is bought, sold, and created. With journalistic precision, the author profiles the executives and companies that have dominated the advertising, marketing, and media industries over the past decade before pivoting to describe how relatively new influencers such as Facebook and Google have overturned conventional thinking. Traditional agencies and media brokers are facing challenges from all quarters, including both the companies that have historically turned to them for marketing expertise and the platforms that have provided space for branded content. VERDICT This thorough volume will appeal to those with a keen interest in advertising and marketing as well as those interested in how media strategies are shifting in response to the availability of individualized consumer data.--Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 15, 2018
How technological change has "convulsed" the advertising industry.Mad Men's Don Draper would not recognize today's ad business, writes New Yorker media critic Auletta (Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, 2009, etc.). Once dominated by creatives and clients producing ads for print, radio, and TV, the modern industry relies on "machines, algorithms, pureed data, artificial intelligence--and on the skills of engineers." The $2 trillion global business is "struggling...to figure out how to sell products on mobile devices without harassing consumers, how to reach a younger generation accustomed to dodging ads, how to capture consumer attention in an age where choices proliferate and a mass audience is rare." In this well-researched, personality-packed account, the author examines the baffling choices facing advertisers (hundreds of media channels, billions of smartphones, etc.) and the technological threats to agencies, from ad blockers to targeted, computerized ad-buying. With trust eroding between clients and agencies, many clients find "neutral" guidance from MediaLink, a firm that orchestrates most relationships in the business. Auletta uses Michael Kassan--ad "power broker," MediaLink founder, and Brooklyn-born son of a Catskills comic--as the thread for his lively narrative, which delves into the major agencies and most corners of the business. There are deft portraits of agency heads, including the Cambridge- and Harvard-educated Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP, the world's largest agency (he popularized the term "frenemies" for firms that both compete and cooperate, notably Google and Facebook, which take ad money but refuse to share data with advertisers), and the stylish Irwin Gotlieb, chair of GroupM media company, part of WPP, who "looks as if he just slid out of a barber's chair" and "speaks slowly, as if inspecting each word." Auletta also covers privacy, kickbacks to agencies, the growing importance of data scientists and engineers, and how media clients are building in-house ad agencies.A bright, informative take on an industry in turmoil.
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