Another One Bites the Grass: Making Sense of International Advertising - Hardcover

Anholt, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471354880 ISBN 13: 9780471354888

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Another One Bites the Grass "An inspiring, thought-provoking perspective on creating effective and sustainable international advertising." ?Charles Lanphear, Global Media Director H.J. Heinz Company "At last, here?s a really intelligent new approach to the age-old problem of making great international ads. A must-read for everyone in the business of global brands, global marketing, and global communications." ?Robert Hancock, Director of Communications Pillsbury UK Ltd. "In an irreverent, finely argued, and entertaining assault on conventional wisdom, drawing on his considerable experience of working in the business, the author proposes thought-provoking new ways to survive and prosper in the international advertising jungle." ?Adrian Vickers. Founder/Partner Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO

About this title

About the Author

SIMON ANHOLT is the founder and Chairman of World Writers Ltd., an advertising consultancy that provides international creative and strategic services to other advertising agencies as well as directly to clients such as DuPont, Time-Warner. Sara Lee, Sony Corporation, and IBM.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

This book will make some people in big multinational advertising agencies feel rather uncomfortable. I sincerely hope so, because it s high time they did.

I ve written it because, during the fifteen years I ve spent working in international advertising, I ve seen that the international agencies are failing their clients in many, many ways. Most of them don t have the mindset, the techniques, the systems or the talents to make really creative and really effective international advertising campaigns.

In this book, I want to tell the tale which has never before been publicly told, even though it s an open secret within the advertising industry: how multinational agency networks are terrible at making international advertising. And I m going to tell this tale in some detail, because it s a big scandal, and it s time the truth was told.

Actually, you might say it hardly matters very much any more, because a tidal wave of new exporters is about to break, and it will swamp the advertising industry.

So we desperately need some quick solutions and some smart alternatives to the traditional networks because there simply aren t enough international resources to cope with the rocketing demand for global communications. I want to describe a concept which I call smart centralization: a very simple, very obvious, very neat and totally new way of creating real international communications for today s and tomorrow s traveler brands.

All this has a lot to do with language and culture, so I m going to show how doing international advertising needs entirely new approaches to planning, creativity, account management, production and delivery. It s all about the need to build a global brand with due sensitivity to the culture of its overseas consumers, and how this need should affect a company s thinking right at the start of its brand development process not at the end.

I also want to illustrate a revolutionary fact, which I hope will provide a major challenge to the dominance of the big networks: that small ad agencies, anywhere in the world, can manage complex and substantial international assignments through smart centralization. There is now, at last, such a thing as a small international advertising agency.

I hope this book will provide help and inspiration to the marketers who need smart international communications; and I hope it will give courage to the smaller ad agencies who were beginning to think that the only possible route to growth was by selling out to the multinationals.

To them, I say: don t do it until you ve read this book. You might end up buying them.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471354880
• ISBN 13: 9780471354888
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 325