"I believe today’s marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities."
- Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble
Yes, the model may indeed be broken—but there’s still time to fix it! Advertising can be fun. A great ad can bring tears to your eyes. Another piece can be obnoxious. Ads influence our desires and beliefs about the world in profound ways (for better or worse). Advertising is definitely a lot harder to do than you’d think. But most of all, advertising is REAL. It happens in real time by real people who want to reach other real people. Really! Too bad you’d never know that when you read a lot of traditional advertising textbooks. They give you the nuts and bolts (that you get to memorize) but they don’t build anything exciting with them. Get real: Welcome to the first advertising textbook written in partnership with a real-life advertising agency. It’s fine to talk about ad campaigns from the past, but we’d rather hear about one from the horse’s mouth—while it’s still happening. We’re going to teach you about the ad biz the way you’ll learn it if you choose to make it your career (and we hope you do). None of that shiny, happy “talking heads” stuff; we’re going to take the gloves off and show you how a campaign works (and sometimes doesn’t) from the vantage point of the people who have to do it every day. Sure, we agree that you need to understand about the nuts and bolts of advertising in order to build a strong ad campaign—and to know when it’s time to bring in the wrecking ball and start over. In Launch! you’ll get all that. And you’ll get a lot of it directly from those who work with these tools every day as if their jobs depended on it (because they do). Our friends at SS+K, a hot advertising agency based in New York and Los Angeles, share our belief that the type of people they want to hire out of school should have a solid grounding in the nuts and bolts—but they also need to appreciate that there are times the pristine blueprint for the building has to be modified to meet the demands of an ever-changing media environment. If you watch the hit TV show 24, you know that what you see happens in real time (Jack Bauer and his buddies have some busy days!). Launch! is like that (without the explosions). It’s built around an actual advertising campaign for SS+K’s client msnbc.com—a campaign that continues to evolve even as you read this. You’ll read, see, and hear about the campaign from many of the people who actually did the work (including one member of our humble author team). That means that the Table of Contents is organized a bit differently than “old world” texts. The chapters follow the campaign’s timeline—you’ll see this timeline at the beginning of each chapter. It’s a convenient way to keep track of where you are and where you’re going as you accompany the SS+K folks on their perilous mission.