What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds

I actually rolled out the COP process, with a few localized tweaks, in my last Fortune 500 role. It absolutely works. As some of the other reviewers have mentioned, you will get pushback from those who feel more comfortable marketing by feel and intuition. Applying rigorous process and discipline to marketing processes does work. If the book seems repetitive at times (and it does) it's because of the need to give examples in different businesses to give credence the concept that process-oriented marketing works across industries and is not just a one-off that only works in a few industries. Highly recommended and a quick read.

Whether you are a seasoned marketing veteran or a young person aspiring to a marketing career, you must buy this book. My credentials: I am a 15 year veteran of the advertising agency of the business (starting at Ogilvy & Mather), then the lead marketing analyst at Forrester Research for 8 years. I've known Rex and Greg for years, and have admired the innovation and leadership they have brought to the industry. I'm now CMO of a social media analysis firm. They have accomplished something extremely rare with this book: created something that a beginner should read to learn the immutable basics of advertising, but that a veteran like me also needs to read in order to learn new techniques and insights enabled by new technologies. The result is a book that avoids the hysteria currently gripping the marketing world that the old mass marketing model is dead. the consumer is totally in control, while providing a clear roadmap, strategies, and tools to evolve marketing based on intelligent experimentation, hard facts about what works, and, perhaps most importantly, how to guide this evolution within a framework that doesn't completely disrupt the typical company's marketing culture. Key to these are the concepts of ROMO (Return on marketing objective), COP (Communications Optimization Planning) and 70-20-10 (the formula to allocate the marketing budget to deliver on key business objectives while also testing and learning). [...].

You'll notice that people either love this book or they hate it. That's not surprising since it is controversial. Marketing is undergoing a transition from an art to a science (of course art still matters, but science now dominates in effective marketing execution). Not everyone is happy with this transition. Art is fun - science means hard work and accountability. It's not surprising that the average tenure of a CMO is now under two years. With movements like Six Sigma across companies, CEOs understand the importance of metrics and process, but it's taking some marketers a while to get there. Personally I believe this may be the best marketing book ever written. It can be an important tool for helping dedicated marketers approach an optimal marketing process based on continuous improvement and metrics. It is a broad reaching scientific study of the effectiveness of marketing across multiple companies. Based on a 5 year project, the authors work with many leading companies to evaluate the efficacy of their marketing activities and determine the proportion budget and effort that is wasted. They then look at the companies with the least waste and describe what these companies are doing differently. The findings may strike similarities to Marketing 101 (a criticism I have seen in some review), but deeper look reveals a clear process that is based on metrics and a continuous improvement process. As a leader of a marketing team that has been built from the ground up on metrics and process improvement, I can say that I have tested many of the findings and they absolutely work for delivering exceptional results. Fortunately the book wasn't just about validating what I already have discovered on my own. It puts all key marketing functions in perspective to the metrics (including functions that I've often ignored as unimportant for driving results). For example, it gives a metrics based process for determining optimal messaging based on key customer motivations. Overall, I can't recommend this book enough. I plan to buy it for all new key marketing hires at my company. Sean Ellis VP Marketing, LogMeIn Inc. Blog: [...]

This book delivers on it's promise of defining "what sticks". Written for bigger businesses with marketing departments/ad agencies/multi-media marketing I found it useful to "translate" down for use with smaller businesses on limited budgets. I think they will find it most useful since many don't accurately plan or "track" marketing/advertising. As a "marketing" speaker I already knew the facts (about what doesn't work) but the book does have useful insights to implement procedures to catch those mistakes quickly and remedy them before they exhaust the budget of firms with limited advertising budgets. It is somewhat repetitive, using the COP acronym repetitively gets old, and I agree there are no "magic bullets" or "revolutionary ideas" but it's definitely worthwhile reading. As a side note I have been using the ideas in this book to "research" some current "major" commercials I felt probably missed delivering their message, especially after reading this. So far I have been 100% right (asking people simply "have you seen these commercials?" then "Who is the company?" and in every case so far nobody has identified the company or "message" even though they are very familiar with the ads!) Those companies need to read this book, their ad is "sticking" but their message isn't.

Many people who read this book will hate it . . . because it will challenge everything that they believe to be true and yet, once they get past the fear it will be their roadmap for the rest of their career or business. This book is a powerful look at what truly works in consumer influence today. If you want to know what to do to get profitable results from your advertising efforts read this book. And, it doesn't matter if you advertise online or offline or what kind of business that you have. Too many treat advertising as a necessary evil, something that is non-quantifiable and questionable in impact. What Sticks will help you turn your advertising from necessary evil to one of the most important business functions. Get this book and profit. Dave Lakhani Author Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want & The Power of an Hour: Business and Life Mastery in One Hour A Week