Review
THE FALL OF ADVERTISING AND THE RISE OF P.R.
Al Ries and Laura Ries
HarperBusiness, 295 pp.
"Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."
Al and Laura Ries are an Atlanta-based father-daughter team specializing in telling corporate America what it doesn’t want to hear: that advertising no longer works. Their mission is to get big business to eschew advertising and buy into Public Relations (PR).
This is tougher than it sounds. Nine of the top 10 PR firms in the U.S. are owned by advertising agencies, and a staggering $243 billion is spent annually on ads, compared to a modest $4.2 billion spent on PR.
For the authors, the purpose of PR is to build your brand. They write, "You have a job to do, perhaps the most important job in any organization. Building the brand." Advertising, on the other hand, is bad. Advertising costs heaps of money and nobody believes it any more. In contrast, the authors continue, "A brand is a name that stands for something positive in the prospect’s mind."
Sure, we get the idea. Mention Starbucks and "the prospect" begins salivating for an iced Americano. Of course, there is no discussion in this book of the other hallmarks of successful brands; sweatshop labour, monopolies, union busting and the dubious ethics of the pharmaceutical industry are off the agenda.
The book is also ripe with unintended howlers. "Art has no function," the authors pronounce, a statement that would be laughable even if the Pope had made it. "Prozac, the first drug for depression," they write. Come on, Ries & Ries, the medical establishment has been throwing drugs at depression for decades. Perhaps what they mean to say is: Prozac, the first successfully branded drug for depression.
The Fall of Advertising is written in what seems to be the style of all business books: short staccato chapterettes, suggesting the audience cannot read continuously for more than two minutes. And why is it these books always seem as if they should be read on a flight from Toronto to Calgary? Perhaps because the ideas feel so weightless.
The book is peppered with tiresome military metaphors, which may go over with the fatigued U.S. business traveller, over-saturated with double shots of CNN fear and war mongering. The authors are also very hard on creativity, or even having a sense of humour, which they associate with the plague of ad agency creative departments. Creativity is bad for your brand, they seem to say, which www.ries.com, their seriously dull Web site, proves.
By the end of The Fall of Advertising, if the authors have anything revolutionary to say, it’s lost amidst all the bad writing.
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