Top Ad Creatives Talk About Their First Commercial (Ad or Site) And What They Learned From It. And All You’ve Heard About The Crazy World of Advertising Doesn’t Even Come Close. From the top ad people all over the world, the ones who create the best TV commercials and ads, the ones you love, the ones you remember, the ones you wish you had thought of yourself, come their own stories, in their own words, about the first work they ever did. And lived to talk about it. Barely. They talk about the zaniness and craziness. They talk about the good guys and the bad girls and vice versa. They talk about things you only think can happen on TV or in the movies, but actually happened to these people. You may not believe what you will read, but in the ad world, you may not believe what you see, either. Here's a partial list (in alphabetical order) of the top global creative leaders whose stories you'll read: David Angelo (Chairman, CCO, David&Goliath) Rosie Arnold (Deputy ECD, BBH/London) Nick Bailey (ECD, AKQA/Amsterdam) David Baldwin (Lead Guitar, Baldwin &) Jamie Barrett (Partner, ECD, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) Jeremy Craigen (CCO, DDB/London) Susan Credle (CCO, Leo Burnett) Jonathan Cude, (ECD, McKinney & Silver) Greg Di Noto (Partner, CCO, Deutsch, Inc./NY) Mark Fitzloff (Partner, Co-ECD, Wieden & Kenney/Portland) Ian Grais (CCO, CO-Founder, Rethink/Canada) Vann Graves (ECD, McCann Worldwide/NY) Susan Hoffman (Co-ECD, Wieden & Kennedy/Portland) Kevin McKeon (ECD, StrawberryFrog/NY) Robert Rasmussen (N.A. CCO,Tribal DDB) Kevin Roddy (CCO, Chairman, Publicis & Hal Riney/SF) Ted Royer (Partner, ECD, Droga5/NY) Mariano Serkin (CO-ECD, Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi/Buenas Aires) Rob Strasberg (CCO, Vice Chairman, DONER) Carlos Vaca (President, CEO BBDO México)
I listened to the audio book. I really cannot recommend it unless you are in the Ad world. The book starts with a lesson about the acronyms used in the book and the number of acronyms rivals the military or any large global or multi-national company and they are confusing.
The author's makes many attempts at humor throughout the book that really fall flat and are contrived. Some of the Ad women and men profiled in the book do have some humorous stories and I chuckled a few times and mostly thought they were egotistical, self-absorbed people that are trying way to hard to be funny or attract the attention of an audience, hence they are ad people.
I cannot recommend this book and I hope the author does not write any more books or do any follow up books to this which are mentioned at the end, even if only sarcastically.
Really uneven. This is one of those "compilation" books, where the author named reaches out to his network and asks people if they'd be willing to write about a "first" experience in the industry. Some of the contributors really put thought and effort into it, and share great stories and/or interesting lessons. However, the bulk of contributors didn't manage to turn in anything good. The author should've pushed for better contributions and for people to dig deeper. It's ultimately a lazy effort for a good concept, which, ironically, several of the contributors warned against in their stories.