Admen, Mad Men, and the Real World of Advertising

Essential Lessons for Business and Life

Dave Marinaccio

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628726213
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

A bestselling author and advertising veteran shares a life’s lessons from the ad trade.

Dave Marinaccio, cofounder and the creative director of LMO Advertising, is a veteran of the industry who, as a young man starting out, studied stand-up at Second City in Chicago. He later wrote an international bestseller, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek. His equally entertaining new book takes us inside the world of advertising, offering stories and observations from his three decades at some of America's best-known agencies, working with clients from Pizza Hut to the Holocaust Museum. In short, punchy chapters, Dave pulls back the curtain and shares his insights on how marketing decisions are made and other lessons. His topics range from logos, the big idea, and selling perfume to how we undervalue our gifts, to do-overs, celebrities, and "meetingsmanship." And more than a few lessons turn out to be apt not just for business but for our stressed-out lives.

Admen, Mad Men, and the Real World of Advertising is written to be easily digestible by interns, CEOS, or anyone who has ever watched a television commercial or clicked on a banner ad. Irreverent, packed with useful information, and unflinchingly honest, it is a serious business book by a seriously funny man and a must for anyone who lives, works, or plays in today's commercial culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• That’s going to leave a mark
• What’s on the bottle is more important than what’s in the bottle
• Can you TIVO doomsday for me?
• Advertising in an economic downturn
• J. Walter after dark
• How did I get here anyhow?
• What is an advertising agency?
• What is a brand?
• Do you know Dick?
• Ethical advertising
• Make the logo bigger
• Killing days and buying days
• Influencers of purchase decision
• Zero tolerance
• Clients get the advertising they deserve
• What’s in a nameplate?
• Bewitched
• Intelligence at play
• Hard softballs
• Life is a contact sport
• What do you do for a living?
• Triage
• The award for the best award show goes to …
• Hanging in there
• Resetting to zero
• Do you need a Hispanic advertising agency?
• Mr. Humble
• Segmenting your audience
• Bullets
• External forces
• Stupid human tricks
• Leaping to conclusions
• Meetingsmanship
• Mulligans
• Unfocused groups
• Immediacy
• The United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Stress
• Render walkabout
• The mission is based on good nutrition
• McDonbel, McDouglas, McDonald’s
• The Y2K bug
• Your audience is not naked
• The English accent
• Left brain/right brain
• Everybody gets fired
• Everybody loses accounts
• Celebrity
• Is perception reality?
• No battle plan survives contact with the enemy
• Subliminal advertising
• No one hums the announcer
• The Big Idea
• Big Data
• Small agencies
• The lowest form of advertising
• Werner Heisenberg
• Every job is a job
• All business is personal
• Your true agenda
• One last thing
• Acknowledgments
• Index