UK users

With a big nod to Al Ries and Jack Trout, whose "22 Laws..." series has become required reading for any self-respecting marketer, Michael Newman goes one step beyond by pooling the collected wisdom of the world's leading practitioners in advertising. Newman approached a broad selection of the industry's best-known gurus and asked each to suggest and explain his or her own personal mantra. As a result, as Saatchi's creative director Bob Isherwood says in the foreword, this is "22 books for the price of one". More importantly, as the tagline "and when to violate them" suggests, Newman and his contributors set out to demonstrate that advertising laws are not in fact irrefutable, immutable or any other sort of utable, and that there are often the best reasons for ignoring them. 

Better still, Newman offers a decidedly cosmopolitan view of what makes great ads. Unlike most such books, which tend to view the industry through American eyes, Newman's panel is multicultural in the widest possible sense. A former ECD of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia, there is a strong Asian Pacific slant to this book, with contributions from several fellow Australasians (including New Zealander Kevin Roberts, now Saatchi's worldwide CEO), as well as Jim Aitchison and Ian Batey from Batey Ads in Singapore, and Neil French, the former O&M Asia Pacific and WPP worldwide creative chief. Others include Jean-Marie Dru of TBWA, Marcello Serpa of Almap BBDO Brazil, Sebastian Turner of Scholz & Friends in Germany, and Graham Warsop of South Africa's The Jupiter Drawing Room, as well as the UK's MT Rainey (ex Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R) and Dave Trott (ex GGT, now Walsh Trott Chick Smith). And providing those American eyes - Allen Rosenshine (ex BBDO) and Dave Lubars (BBDO and Fallon) among others. Oh, and for good measure, Al Ries as well, who recaps and updates his original Law of Positioning, first conceived more than 20 years ago.

Not all the laws included here are quite as strategic as Ries's. After all, advertising is a gut-instinct discipline. Marcello Serpa, for example, offers the Law of Simplicity ("What is simple moves people. It is the revelation of the obvious: 'Gee, why didn't I think of that before?'"); Ian Batey argues on behalf of Consistency of message and campaign elements; M&C Saatchi founding partner James Lowther proposes that great staple of the best ads, Humour. Others talk about Emotion, Relevance, Experience, and so on. Perhaps the most interesting, if only because they offer an unfamiliar insight into less well-studied advertising markets are Sebastian Turner's Law of Jump ("Whenever great minds change the world, they jump") as applied to the German market; and especially Graham Warsop's cryptic Law of the Silver Elephant, which he defines thus: "great advertising relies on the imagination of one or more individuals who have the desire (1) to bring something into the world that has never existed before, (2) to do so in such a way that it surpasses what has been done before." 

Finally it is left to MT Rainey to sum up the contradictions inherent in a book about the "laws" of advertising. In a chapter entitled The Outlaw, she points out that advertising, after all, depends for its success on originality and creativity, two principles which rely fundamentally about breaking laws not following them. All in all, the book offers an excellent, entertaining and sometimes profound contemplation of that most elusive of goals: great advertising.

Added 11th May 2006