Joseph Jaffe came onto my radar in December when he corrected me for terming his new venture crayon as a development firm in my now infamous screed asking why marketers should give a fig about SecondLife. crayon is not a dev firm, but a “new marketing company.”
Jaffe went back on my screen this morning as I was reading Lorne Hanley’s fascinating piece in this morning’s Sunday Times Magazine about Bud.tv. Jaffe was quoted there in the context of his authority earned by penning Life After the 30-Second Spot.
Jaffe, who co-founded crayon (emphasis on the lower-case “c”, ask me sometime about what happened when I tried to start a sentence in a Forbes story with the word “cisco”), is a former Madison Ave. exec (Ogilvy, TBWA/Chiat (what is the deal with the four-letter ad agency acronym fest?)) is the kind of change agent I’d love to drag into a interactive marketing meeting to knock some heads together.
The book came to me via a colleague, Gary Milner, who bought multiple copies to press into the hands of the marketing team. Last week I read it during the flights to and from RTP.
The first thing I did was look at the frontispiece to see what the publication date was. 2005. The problem with books about new media, or any trend pushed by technology is that books are inherently slow media and new media is inherently fast. Jaffe actually writes what I imagine in 2004 or early 2005 was a very strong and prescient polemic against business-as-usual marketing, mass media tactics, and a call to arms and revolution to Internet/Interactive marketing. A lot of what he predicts has come true, but I suspect for a more current state of the art perspective, you need to spend time on his blog, lifeafter30.com
CMOs should read it, people like me who own the function should read it, but it’s not an operations manual by a long shot. It’s stuffed with great stats and quantitative data that should help some interactive marketing change-agent inside of a “Brown-Suit” company to make their point via some strong Powerpoint slides (I saw one of Jaffe’s points or frameworks appear in a presentation I saw just last week).
So, good book, not a cookbook like an O’Reilly Press manual with a lemur on the cover, but a good cribsheet for making the big plea to the CMO to get with the program and ditch all the old tactics that used to work, but don’t any more.
Hey David,
Thought you might find it interesting with all yr jet travel that Senor Jaffe told me he wrote much of the book jet setting all sort of places. A “hit the tarmac, open the laptop, scrivi, scrivi scrivi thang.” It’s a very enjoyable, unique read by the gentleman who coined the phrase “new marketing.”
Isobar handed out copies thereof at a stellar conf in Boca in 5/06.
Judah
So newspaper does actually work in terms of driving sales? Who knew?
Thanks for the review and your feedback. It is much appreciated.
You still owe me an interview on Across the Sound…
– Joseph