Each month Racom Communications, or other publishers or authors, will give away two copies of a recently published marketing or sales book to two SLMA members. Winners will be drawn at random. You must be an SLMA member to win.
This month's selection is "How to Write Great Advertising" by Randall Hines and Robert Lauterborn.
Print matters still. In fact, it matters more than ever, even – maybe especially – in a world of continuous rapid-fire media innovations because it provides the standard – the acid test – for relevance and communication power.
Why print? Because it’s the purest form of advertising – an idea given power visually and crafted to move people with words. If you don’t have an idea, it shows. If you can’t write, people know. You can’t hide emptiness behind a mesmerizing glare of glitzy TV production or trade on the familiar voice of a spokesperson to make a connection for you. It’s just you and the reader. So print is the acid test for advertising as well as advertising people.
Unlike electronic media, print requires our attention. If you lose your concentration when you’re reading and your mind wanders, what do you do? Why, you read the sentence or paragraph or page over again – too often more than once. A woman named Evelyn Wood built a speed-reading franchise on this simple truth. Her instructors don’t teach you to read faster; they teach you to concentrate better so you don’t have to reread. That’s why Evelyn Wood graduates not only seem to read faster, they also remember better.
People process print differently, too. An Israeli researcher demonstrated this with an often-cited experiment. He exposed a group of young people to a simple story, half of them in a video mode, the other half in print. Tested at similar intervals – two days, two weeks, two months or whatever – the subjects revealed fascinating differences not so much in their ability to recall the basic story, but in the connections they had made with the material. Their relative ability to repeat the plot line differed only slightly, but when asked questions such as, “What do you suppose Rachel’s life was like before this story began?” and “What do you think is going to happen next?” the TV kids went “Huh?” The print kids, however, had developed entire scenarios that combined material already in their heads with the story they had read. “I think Rachel grew up in the city, in a house near the harbor,” said one. “Rachel and Ben are going to get married and have three children, two boys and a girl,” said another. IN short, Print—as a discipline and as a medium—matters to advertisers more than ever. This book shows how to harness its principles for greater profit.
Order "How to Write Great Advertising" Now.
About the Authors
RANDY HINES is a professor in the Communications Department at Susquehanna University. He has received three professor of the year awards during his 25-year teaching career. His doctorate is from Texas A&M in public relations, a profession in which he has obtained universal accreditation (APR). He has a B.A. and an M.A. in journalism from Kent State University. He also earned an M.Div. at Bethel Theological Seminary.
Prior to joining Susquehanna in 2002, he taught in the University of North Carolina system, where he served as chair of the Mass Communications Department at UNC-Pembroke. He has also taught at East Tennessee State University and Kent State University. He has been active in the American Advertising Federation, starting a chapter at ETSU where he also served in the local AAF professional chapter, holding several positions, including first vice-president.
His consulting work has included such clients as: American Water Heater Company, Creative Energy, Doe River Gorge Conference Center, Duke University, Eastman Chemical, Georgia Press Association, Hotel Günther, Johnson City Medical Center, Mid-Atlantic Newspaper Advertising Marketing Executives, New England Newspaper Association, Nuclear Fuel Services, Siemens, Sire Advertising, Tennessee Press Association and Wyoming Press Association.
He publishes articles in various consumer, professional and academic publications. Since 1993 he has written monthly columns for 20 state press associations. He is also a regular columnist for the Southern Newspaper Press Association. He is lead co-author of The Writer’s Toolbox: A Comprehensive Guide for PR and Business Communication (Kendall/Hunt, 2005). He also co-authored Feeling at Home in God’s Family in 2006 with Dr. Stewart Brown.
Locally, he provides pro bono services for regional nonprofits and serves as copy editor of Susquehanna Life Magazine.
ROBERT LAUTERBORN is the James L. Knight Professor of Advertising in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, a distinguished chair made possible by a million-dollar grant from the Knight Foundation “to improve the teaching of advertising.” Bob is a co-author of the best-selling book Integrated Marketing Communication: Pulling It Together and Making It Work (NTC, 1993), now translated into 13 languages.
Prior to joining academia, Lauterborn was Director of Marketing Communication & Corporate Advertising for International Paper worldwide. He also spent 16 years with General Electric, principally in creative functions. As creative director of GE’s 400-person house agency, he developed the FOCUS approach to improve creative performance and consistency across the group’s 15 U.S. and overseas offices.
In 2004, he was named “Advertising Educator of the Year” by Advertising Club of the Triangle, which set up two scholarships in his name, and in 2005 he received the Silver Medal Award, the American Advertising Federation’s highest honor. Always active in the industry, he has been vice chairman of the Association of National Advertisers, chairman of the Business Marketing Association International and the Business Advertising Research Council, and a board member of several organizations, including the Advertising Research Foundation.
In 1999, he was presented with the G.D. Crain, Jr. Award (named after the founder of Advertising Age) for “lifetime contributions to the development and improvement of business marketing,” and inducted into the Business Marketing Hall of Fame.
Over the past dozen years, he has consulted or conducted seminars and workshops for more than 50 organizations in 21 countries on five continents, including IBM, General Motors, ExxonMobil, Hewlett Packard, Monsanto, AT&T, Bank of America, BASF, Kellogg’s, Eli Lilly and Philips.
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