Common Sense Marketing
The Monthly
A book that makes sense.
At first, I was a trifle suspicious of Edmond A. Bruneau. The guy's been around. He's been a newspaper editor, a disc jockey, an advertising account executive, a creative services manager and an advertising director for a national corporation. And now he runs his own agency. And his picture looks like he's still under 50.
But the guy has credentials, and he's written a pretty good book, Rx for Advertising, A Common Sense Cure for Business Owners and Managers (Boston Books, Spokane, Washington).
No, this column isn't moving toward book reviews, but Bruneau's common sense approach to advertising seems to make sense for a common sense marketing column. Bruneau's book has plenty of good ideas for anyone new to the game.
Bruneau's credits include numerous creative awards for print, electronic media and sales films. Since he owns his own Spokane-based agency, the book is naturally self-serving. But why not? Recommending that you use real experts by hiring agencies for advertising work makes sense to most, save those in-house people who are either very good or very cheap. While no literary piece of magic, Rx for Advertising does maintain a clear, efficient style. If you're interested in the business, you'll stay awake for its 163 pages, including 30 chapters which open and close with mostly-interesting quotes, including some catchy proverbs and some cute advertising-oriented tidbits.
From an overall view of why you should advertise and why you should always use an agency to finding that agency, how to pay it, buying space and time, working with a photographer, and so forth. Rx for Advertising covers, although sometimes too quickly, just about everything you can think of in advertising.
Bruneau's best advice comes in his chapters on buying print and radio. Like many of us in the business, he questions the policy newspapers have of refusing to give commissions, claiming "25 to 30 percent of all radio buys could and should have been newspaper buys," a topic currently not without controversy. But Bruneau offers some strong opinions on many subjects. I don't agree with all of them, but at least he takes a stance.
Rx for Advertising makes no pretense that you'll become an expert just by reading the book, but attempts instead to prepare you for an onslaught of media salespeople and includes some "general advertising self-defense." "Advertising," Bruneau says, "is an investment toward a profitable return."
Television advertising, by far the most complicated media-buying chore, is handled nicely in this book. Bruneau doesn't try to prepare you to be a buyer yourself, which is probably just as well. As he does with nearly every subject, Bruneau prefers to give enough background to provide better judgment in dealing with media buyers. A little more in this section would have been preferred, although too much "rating point" information for the novice tends to cloud the issue. You could read an entire book on buying television and still not be totally prepared.
I did feel the section on outdoor advertising was too short, even for a business that may not have as many national common denominators as other media. Bruneau gives just three pages in his chapter on outdoor, but nearly triple that for a similar chapter on signs.
One of the more interesting pieces of information is a nifty chart Bruneau has compiled showing advertising budgets in relation to gross sales for nearly every conceivable category of business. Good ammunition, perhaps, for those fighting with clients for bigger budgets. You'll be happy to know that the biggest spenders include beverage manufactures, tobacco companies, watch and clock manufacturers and motion picture companies.
The big cheapies from this list, sorry to say, are accounting firms, aircraft manufacturers, mining companies, and pipe lines.
A rating system for ranking agencies after their proposals is included in the chapter on selecting an agency, and at least will offer those companies doing this for the first time some direction.
But Bruneau includes only a few illustrations in areas where he might have offered more, and he certainly could have given us more samples of press releases. But this book is heavily advertising-oriented, and should only be viewed as such.
If you have any advertising background at all, there are some things you'll disagree with, as I did. But, for the most part, that's nitpicking a book that appears to be an earnest attempt to educate the not-so-educated business person on dealing with advertising. Bruneau loves his business and wants no misunderstandings about an often-misunderstood field. He offers some good principles on sticky issues - like buying photographer and artist rights - that even those of us who have some ad knowledge can profit from.
This book was better than the big advertising text I spent all my coffee money on in college. That one didn't make sense. This one does.