New Tricks, Same Dog
One out of three of the books Amazon sells you won’t find on the shelves of even the biggest real-world book retailers is just one of the gorgeous nuggets gleaned from the book I have just read – “Watch this, listen up, click here” by the CEO of Carat Americas, David Verklin.
By virtue of the industry we’re in, by the time it was published in early 2007 it was already out of date (when it was being written DoubleClick hadn’t been bought by Google, online gambling hadn’t been driven offshore). Nevertheless, he has a knack of percolating complex issues down to natty, but pertinent, sound-bites that I only wish I could recall and parrot at whim.
What is so refreshing and worthy of mention about this book is the way this old school ad-man not only accepts the way the digital world has changed the media landscape but also how he embraces it without a whiff of regret or resentment. But of course, he’s not an ad-man, he’s a media guy. As he points out in his summing up – “Media people don’t fear testing, measurement, and numbers the way creative folks do”. Whether that’s fair or not he provides another worthy counterpoint to the comments earlier this year of John O’Keefe (BBH) about digital being all about the idea, not the technology. Verklin talks of “reforestation” not the “creeping in of a desert landscape into advertising”. He advocates “open participation” and “banding together” on the “next generation of new media technologies” so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of 2001. Failure to so, he says, will leaver marketers as “toast”. Aye! Aye!
You can even buy it from my, ahem, Book Club.
October 8th, 2007 at 9:48 am
[…] Even more out of date than my last read - David Verklin’s “Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here” the prospect of the next instalment of SEARCH had me looking forward to bedtime like a newlywed. […]