This is a quick read about happenin's at at happenin' ad agency, no more. If you are looking for books to help you better position your business, read:

(1) The Green Banana Papers by Chris Coleman (ISBN 1887617027) -- a book written by an agency person also, but with real focus on positioning and messaging and good practical advice

(2) The classical Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore (ISBN 0060517123) -- it has as excellent chapter on the prosess of positioning. A must-read for anyone in high-tech marketing!

Both are excellent choices.

If you still want to read Bang!, check it out at the library; don't waste you money and shelf space.

This book is a fresh and fabulous approach to thinking "outside the box." Not only for people in the advertising and marketing professions, but even for lawyers (I am one) and other professionals. It is hysterically funny, it is creative, and it SHOULD make you think differently about solving problems in your profession. Its authors have considerable experience and success in the advertising world -- they have packaged that knowledge into an insightful and entertaining tome.

As a former owner of a small business, I found this book to be so enlightening and practical. It departs from the routine suggestions on how to start or operate a company - small or large.

I would rate this more than 6 stars if it was an option.
A very satisfied reader.

I have read several books which were meant to show how to start an ad agency which I found to be routine classical so-called information. The Bang book is entirely different! It is written by experts, in plain language, describing how their agency became so profitable and creative in such a short time.

I can only believe that negative reviews come from envious or standard conventional competitors. The success of the KTG departs from the "normal" and that is why so many large and small companies have selected them over so many other agencies.

I truly believe the contents of this book can apply to ANY startup or existing business other than advertising.

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"Bang!" is an important book that addresses an important issue in the field of modern advertising: How to make your message stand out in a country where people are exposed to thousands of ads per day.

"Bang!" dovetails nicely with other books that have become my marketing bibles: The works of Jack Trout and Al Ries ("Positioning," "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing," etc.), C.G. Rapailles book on archetypes ("The 7 Secrets of Marketing"), Robert Cialdini ("Influence"), and Mary Wells Lawrence ("My Big Life in Advertising"). Perhaps the strongest companion to this book, however, is Twyla Tharp's latest, "The Creative Habit."

Kaplan-Thayer, Koval and Marshall provide lots of excellent examples in "Bang!". More importantly, they provide details about how their campaigns (and others) fared, both in their test phase and the actual rollout. That increases their credibility, and I salute (and envy) their success.

But you have to take some things in the book with a grain of salt. For example, it's not always a good idea to break the Rules (chapter 2) if you don't know what the rules are that you're breaking. There are several principles of marketing that will always be applicable; as Trout and Ries say, "ignore them at your peril." For all of their creative campaigns, and the success that has followed them, the authors, in fact, do adhere to successful principles of marketing. They just hold them up to a fun house mirror, with outrageous results.

My rating for this book: "Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!"

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