Bang!

Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World

By: Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval, Delia Marshall

Narrated by: Deborah Marlowe

The founders of one of today's hottest, most innovative advertising agencies explain how to ignite the kind of marketing explosions that will capture customers' attention.

Linda Kaplan Thaler, the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of the Kaplan Thaler Group, is the brains behind a host of memorable and highly successful ads, from the irresistibly sentimental "Kodak moment" campaign to Herbal Essences' "totally organic experience" to, most recently, the irrepressible AFLAC duck. In Bang!, Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval of the Kaplan Thaler Group, currently ranked as the fastest-growing ad agency in the country, offer the kind of out-of-the-box thinking and proven strategies that marketers anywhere can use to create loud, clear, attention-grabbing messages about their products and services.

Presenting an arsenal of "big bang" ideas, the authors discuss how to create a memorable publicity hook and how to design attention-grabbing packaging that taps into consumers' innermost desires. They interweave entertaining accounts of their successes and failures, as well as those of other companies to suggest specific ways to establish an atmosphere conducive to innovative breakthroughs--why having "enough" time to work on a project can be a disadvantage, and why having a small staff in a cramped space is often the best way to come up with big ideas.

Full of colorful anecdotes and inspiring accounts of campaigns that have catapulted revenues and increased market shares, Bang! shows how to create a marketing campaign that rises above the banal barrage of commercials to create a genuine marketing explosion.©2003 Linda Kaplan Thayer and Robin Koval; (P)2003 Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

Advance Praise for Bang!

“Linda Kaplan Thaler is the best and the brightest mind to come into advertising in the last dozen years. A consulting firm would charge millions for the secrets revealed in Bang! If you want to move your business—and fast—buy Kaplan Thaler and Koval’s amazing book. Take notes.” —James Patterson, bestselling author, former CEO of J. Walter Thompson North America

“In the techno-age of no personality, Bang! explodes with advice, anecdotes, and insight. Like the original Big Bang, it keeps on going.” —Faith Popcorn, bestselling author, futurist

“Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval ‘get it’ from every angle. This book is full of extraordinary insight on effective message delivery.” —Gordon Bethune, Chairman and CEO, Continental Airlines

Great Listening

It's truly unfortunate that there is such disparity in the other reviews of this book. This is an interesting book that gives solid insight about where advertising is headed for the forseeable future. There are probably many other books out there that do exactly the same thing this book does that offer similar critical analysis of the advertising principles that helped these ideas succeed. Regardless, the facts stand for themselves: the authors are succeeding both in getting the message of their clients across and in making money for themselves. Both are admirable achievements.

Awesome

This is a fantastic book. Full of usefull ideas on how to...well...get ideas. Fascinating. A MUST READ !!

Unlike other marketing books...

"Bang!" delivers true to its title. Fast paced clear concepts with examples, ideas and how they were inspired and achieved. This is a good one to feed into the hopper!

Excellent

I used some of Linda Kaplan`s techniques in my business and they are phenomenal. A Great Book!

A Brilliant Work of Marketing Inspiration

Wow! This is an incredible piece of writing and an interesting insight into the the creative process of this particular agency. Mrs. Thayer is brutally honest in her warts-and-all presentation of even her own past mistakes when illustrating her points. This honesty only adds to the credibility of her advices and the tales of her and her agency's many successes.

Only two things struck me, hence the four stars rather than five.

At one point she attributes the creation of the VCR to the wrong company. This sounds minor, but when so much of the book is anecdotal, it made the facts of the stories from outside her direct participation slightly suspect to me for a little while. But listening on, I heard no other error of this type.

The second is her assumption of resources and NYC tunnel vision. She asserts in her book that for less than a million it's impossible to do much more than print posters and refers to her company's humble beginning as being "a little ten million dollar shop." Ten million maybe little for the New York market, but for advertising agencies outside that specific region it's anything but. A great deal of great work gets done outside NYC, Chicago, Boston and LA, and for far less than a million.

But all that said, this book is still outstanding, inspirational and a fun listen.