Monday Book Review: Seducing Strangers

Just stop. Before you even get going on what have I been reading lately…read the rest of the title: Seducing Strangers, How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling, by Josh Weltman. Yeah, not sexy. Information. Hey, my book come out last Friday and I needed to figure how to market it right?

I should have known by the front cover tag about how John Weltman is co-producer of Mad Men that the book would talk about Mad Men. And it did. At first it talked about it soooo much that I wanted to pull my hair out. Weltman tells you right out he has eons of experience in advertising, but every example in the first few chapters he uses is from the show. Which bugged me. I want real life. Not what you made happen in Hollywood, even if the show was crazy hot.

As I read on however, it was like he forgot he was supposed to be talking about Mad Men, he forgot that was his hook and he started talking about the real world experience he garnered from years in advertising. That I liked. I like the truth, look at all the non fiction I read.

The meat of the book is his theory of the 4 step arc an advertising campaign should use. In short: introduce it, give a limited time offer to bring them in, differentiate the product to grow the market share, and then mutual love and respect ads. That’s it. That’s how you run a total campaign lasting years and years.

Weltman also talked a lot about figuring out what you want from your marketing. So in the old advertising world, you were trying to get someone to do something. With so much of advertising being on-line driven these days what you are doing is getting someone to stop doing one thing and do something else. Indeed. Stop reading this blog and buy my book. What the direct approach doesn’t work for you? Alright I’ll refine my style.

℘℘℘℘ – Solid four pages. I liked this book. I didn’t love it. I didn’t feel it was mind opening or so full of information I could barely handle it. It was good. Some nuggets of information, some bs. LOL. If you are looking for an easy advertising read, this could be it.