Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World

Faris makes another excellent addition to his canon. A voice of sanity in a wilderness of mad-ad-men.Early on in the book Faris makes the deeply disturbing observation “we must abandon the reductionism that attempts to hone brands to a single point and instead embrace complexity”.Just think about the ramifications of that well evidenced thought for a moment and you will realise that this isn’t a book that is going to make you feel comfortable in your ad-land bubble.Another truth bomb from the man who brought us; “advertising goes wrong in its search for originality…”.Paid Attention answers lots of questions about the modern media conundrum. But perhaps it’s greatest contribution is that it also raises a load of even more important questions along the way.Genius Steals is false modesty. In Paid Attention Faris yet again proves that the qualifying verb in his company name is not needed.Recommended.

Creative + accomplished + witty + futurist + fun + genius + unpretentious + marketing guru = Faris Yakob. And it’s all on offer in this new bible for marketing newbies, seasoned communications professionals or anyone with an interest in commercial creativity. Paid Attention is a guide and tutorial on contemporary marketing theory and creativity. Its ideas are meticulously sourced and supported by data and case studies from today through decades ago. Whether you work on the agency or client sides, this is a book you’ll likely dog ear, underline, and refer back to again and again. The toolkits and templates Faris generously supplies are both useful and inspiring (e.g., “how to have ideas”; “how to be a social brand”) and are, as he would say, for us to steal and create new combinations from. There is a ton of learning to be had here, made easy via Faris’s unique gift for storytelling and never, ever being boring.

This book offers a lot and has two great merits.The first merit is that it's one of the most comprehensive overviews of past and modern perspectives about advertising, providing countless references to neuroscientific theories, philosophical positions, historical contexts, statistics and even artistic framings. Faris Yakob shows an impressive display of interdisciplinary knowledge, culture, and global networking. You can tell that there's an enormous effort behind this work. And thanks to that effort, anybody hoping to start a deep journey into advertising would have myriads of options after reading this book. In some perspectives it must be consider a must-read by all the advertisers and agencies that have been corrupted by the dogma "content is king" that develop innumerable pieces without any transcendence either to the brand identity or the target audience.The second merit is that Faris Yakob excels at explaining complex concepts like creativity, brand identity and most importantly the attention economy, even bringing a framework to develop creative ideas by touching spaces far of the main idea taking in place an "outspiration" to get great ideas for advertising and a brief framework to get better planning work to the agency' strategists.The book is fully by perspectives and this, is at the same time their most valuable asset and their worst path, certainly at changing your perspective inherently you will get better results than the competition by far but if an author wants to let a footprint in the history needs to have a framework or a model to achieve to be worthy of those papers or megabytes that it will cost to the planet to share their ideas, and if not, only what we will talking about will be a thesis, not a book. These that get lost by the years that only some people remember and feels that was printed only by whim of the author so as not to be left behind or not lose his slice in taking out his book, like a lot other books.That said, the book is disappointing in some fundamental ways.The first problem is that the richness of references mentioned above makes the logic hard to follow. In a journey from A to B, the provided context is so overwhelming that the reader might forget why he has reached B in the first place. Sometimes the references are not even strictly related to the main problem or proposition, resulting in a lack of focus that is disorienting and even more importantly the reader won't get a straight answer about certain number of concepts and will have to comprehend them about touching and re-touching them chapters later. It happens over and over throughout the book, making the narrative unnecessarily convoluted.The second problem, and certainly the most important, is the lack of a model or a framework to follow, you will end up many gold nuggets but will have to read it again if you want to remember some of the concepts presented.Readers should consider reading Greg Creed's R.E.D Marketing to compare the approach. It offers the "what" and the "how" of a unifying theory of the brand identity.I'd also recommend reading Break Through The Noise from Tim Staples for a wholly different and more tested perspective on advertising.