Today millions are downloading ad-blocking software, and still more are paying subscription premiums to avoid ads. This $600 billion industry is now careening toward outright extinction, after having taken for granted a captive audience for too long, leading to lazy, overabundant, and frankly annoying ads. Make no mistake, Madison Avenue: Traditional advertising, as we know it, is over. In this short, controversial manifesto, Andrew Essex offers both a wake-up call and a road map to the future. In The End of Advertising, Essex gives a brief and pungent history of the rise and fall of Adland--a story populated by snake-oil salesmen, slicksters, and search-engine optimizers. But his book is no eulogy. Instead, he boldly challenges global marketers to innovate their way to a better ad-free future. With trenchant wit and razor-sharp insights, he presents an essential new vision of where the smart businesses could be headed--a broad playing field where ambitious marketing campaigns provide utility, services, gifts, patronage of the arts and even blockbuster entertainment. In this utopian landscape, ads could become so enticing that people would pay--yes, pay--to see them. Advance praise for The End of Advertising "In this dynamic little book, [Andrew] Essex challenges brands--even those of us who pride ourselves on thinking outside the box--to think bigger still. He's got me thinking."--Neil Blumenthal, co-founder of Warby Parker "Fresh and timely, The End of Advertising is an eye-opening take on the current media landscape. And along with it, Essex provides a roadmap for how brands can reinvent themselves and navigate this new world."--Arianna Huffington

    The United States alone is home to over 45,000 shopping malls. And there are more than 19 million customized beverage choices a barista can whip up at your local Starbucks. Whether it’s good or bad, the real question is why we behave this way in the first place. Why do we telegraph our affiliations or our beliefs with symbols, signs, and codes?Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits contains twenty interviews with the world’s leading designers and thinkers in branding. The interviews contain spirited views on how and why humans have branded the world around us, and the ideas, inventions, and insight inherent in the search.

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    No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content and sales messages they don't care about.Epic Content Marketing takes you step-by-step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act--without actually telling them to. Epic content, distributed to the right person at the right time, is the way to truly capture the hearts and minds of customers. It's how to position your business as a trusted expert in its industry. It's what customers share and talk about.Once we hook customers with epic content, they reward us by sending our sales through the roof.Epic Content Marketing provides everything you need to:Determine what your content niche should be to attract and retain customersDiscover and develop your content marketing mission statementSet up a process for creating and curating epic contentLearn how to leverage social and e-mail channels to create--and grow--your audienceMeasure the performance of your content--and increase your content marketing budgetWith in-depth case studies of how John Deere, LEGO, Coca-Cola, and other leading corporations are using content to drive epic sales, this groundbreaking guide gives you all the tools to start creating and disseminating content that leads directly to greater profits and growth.Whether you're the CMO of a Fortune 500, a digital marketer, or an entrepreneur, Epic Content Marketing gives you the tools you need to vanquish the competition. Start your epic journey now!PRAISE FOR EPIC CONTENT MARKETINGFrom the man who invented content marketing. Listen to this guy. He really understands the new world of marketing. The concepts in Epic Content Marketing are usable all over the world--instantly usable and useful for any business. -- Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing, Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and author of 13 booksJoe Pulizzi's ideas are so consistently . . . well, epic (!) that they really don't need any endorsement by anyone. But here's mine anyway: You don't need MORE content. You need the right kind of content, strategically applied. For those organizations struggling to create a content marketing program that drives results, Joe delivers. Again. -- Ann Handley, coauthor of Content Rules and Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfsAs Joe shows us in his wonderful Epic Content Marketing, you must unlearn interrupting people with your nonsense. Instead, publish the valuable content they want to consume and are eager to share. -- David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PRThis is a brilliant canter through the rapid and ever-changing world of content marketing. Joe has managed to capture the right blend of art and science as he plots the major trends impacting all marketers right now. -- Jonathan Mildenhall, VP, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence, Coca-Cola CompanyYou could say that Joe Pulizzi wrote the book on content marketing, but now it's more than just a saying. It's what you're holding in your hands. If you truly want to be successful at content marketing, Pulizzi is one of the few who can show you the way. -- Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image, and author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete"Joe Pulizzi may know more about content marketing than any person alive. He proves it in these pages. -- Jay Baer, New York Times bestselling author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype"The future of successful brand building, and especially the art of solidifying the emotional connection between people and brands, will require expertise in Content Marketing. Epic Content Marketing gives all the details practitioners need without overcomplicating." -- Professor JoAnn Sciarrino, Knight Chair, Digital Advertising and Marketing, UNC Chapel Hill Joe Pulizzi is the godfather of our burgeoning profession of Content Marketing. He lays out the objectives, principles, and core strategies of our field in a way that's easy-to-understand, inspiring, and entertaining. If your company doesn't yet realize that it's a media company, with all the challenges and advantages that implies, you're missing the most powerful way to connect with your customers. -- Julie Fleischer, Director, Media & Consumer Engagement, Kraft Foods

    Most entrepreneurs, even seasoned brand managers, launch first and then work on slowly transforming the new offering into a brand. A logical progression, I would agree. After all, how can you possibly launch as a brand if you don't have any customers or marketing outreach and--obviously, since you just launched a new offering--you have no legacy or advocates?The simple answer is by design. Design relates to the systematic process you have to adhere to, which is likely the primary reason you are holding this book in your hands. In addition though, design truly holds the key to the success of your new brand. It will set your offering apart to look, feel, and sound like a brand at the time of launch, as opposed to something that might or might not have the power to eventually turn into a brand. This book will teach you how to launch your brand by design.In this book I share expert insights based on two decades of professional experience transforming new product and service ventures from ideation phases to tangible brand realities. Each of the key phases of preparing for a brand launch are broken down into practical guidelines designed to help you make the right branding decisions along the way.

      Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck.  Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.    There are many others like Chris – those who’ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful.  Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn’t depend on shelving what you currently do.  You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful.   In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he’s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies.  In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment.   Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment.  It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise” – even if you don’t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for.  You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees.  All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.   Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick.  Among Chris’s key principles: if you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish – sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins.   In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold.  Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives.  And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs.  This remarkable book will start you on your way.

    It is also a crucial discipline to help you get the most out of in-person events such as conferences and networking opportunities where the key to a successful outcome often lies in your personal brand standing out.Given the explosion in use of digital and social media over the past few years, the internet has presented professionals with a magnificent opportunity to help their expertise become more discoverable, sharable and memorable through their personal brands.Personal Branding Benefits Your Business by:Establishing Credibility & Thought LeadershipGrowing Your NetworkAttracting New OpportunitiesIncreasing SalesHelping You Reach Your Business GoalsWho is this book for?CEOs, Executives, and Business Owners who want to position themselves as industry thought leaders and stand out from the competition.Individual Contributors & Academics who want to get ahead in their careers and want to understand how to have their expertise and experience be more discoverable.HR & Training Managers who want to understand personal branding to help train employees on social media branding and social selling.PR Agencies & Exec Comms Managers who need inspiration and training on personal branding strategies for their clients, CEOs, or themselves.About Mel CarsonMel Carson is Founder of Delightful Communications and former Digital Marketing Evangelist at Microsoft. He speaks and writes about personal branding at conferences and for publications all over the world. He previously co-wrote Pioneers of Digital: Success Stories from Leaders in Advertising, Marketing, Search and Social and has had his wisdom featured in Forbes, Fast Company, GQ, QZ.com, USA Today and he regularly writes as a business columnist for Entrepreneur.com.For more on Mel Carson visit http://www.MelCarson.com and http://www.DelightfulCommunications.com

    Even companies committed to jabbing-patiently engaging with customers to build the relationships so crucial to successful social media campaigns-still yearn to land the powerful, bruising swing that will knock out their opponent or their customer's resistance in one tooth-spritzing, killer blow. Right hooks, after all, convert traffic to sales. They easily show results and ROI. Except when they don't.In the same passionate, street-wise style readers have come to expect, Gary Vaynerchuk is on a mission to improve marketers' right hooks by changing the way they fight to make their customers happy, and ultimately to compete. Thanks to the massive change and proliferation in social media platforms in the last four years, the winning combination of jabs and right hooks is different now. Communication is still key, but context matters more than ever. It's not just about developing high-quality content, but developing high-quality content perfectly adapted to specific social media platforms and mobile devices-content tailor-made for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr. A mash-up of the best elements of Crush It! and The Thank You Economy with a 2013 spin, here is a blueprint to social media marketing strategies that really works.

    No really, it is. Let me explain.It turns out that drooling dogs and ringing bells are far more important than a logo (thank you Pavlov).Sure, successful businesses have logos--easily recognizable logos. Playboy, McDonald's, Coke. But there's far more to their success than bunny ears, golden arches or a certain shade of red. Stripped of all the marketing lingo, branding is pretty simple: Your brand is all the associations that come to mind when your potential customers see or hear your name.Whether your focus is on personal branding or on branding your company culture--you've got to have more than a fancy logo and edgy color scheme to create brand stickability (you know, a brand your customers can't get out of their heads).Well, there’s a process to capturing attention and getting your foot in the door of your customers’ minds. Here's a taste of some of the personal branding advice you'll find in this book:You must become the first solution your customer thinks of when they have a problem you can solve. How?The first step is to figure out what your audience cares about. What keeps them up at night? What problems can you help them solve? From there, you need to apply these three steps:1) Frequency2) Repetition3) AnchoringIn this e-book, we’ll show you how to figure out what your customers really want. Then we will show you how to apply these three steps to help you become the trusted resource that comes to mind first when your customer’s itch needs to be scratched.Is real and authentic branding going to happen overnight? Probably not. But ask yourself this: Do you want short-term results that lose effectiveness? Or are you willing to invest a bit more time and effort to create long-term results that get better and better?If you're looking for a branding book that promises a quick fix, this isn't the book for you. But if you want to create a brand that sticks like superglue--read this book!Go ahead and let the wimps and whiners have the get-rich quick schemes that fizzle and fall flat like a wet firework. You want to ignite a branding bonfire.

    People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.

    Instead, you start by finding the people who resonate with your message and connect with your ideas, attract them to you, and then - once the audience is there - offering them the things that will help them the most. It's one of those ideas that may seem counter-intuitive at first, but once you think about it for a few minutes, it's hard to imagine how anything else ever made sense.In the Audience Revolution, this idea is explained in detail, along with examples of how this approach to business has been used by successful businesses ranging from Netflix and Copyblogger, to celebrity consultants like Jim Collins and Scott Stratten, to best-selling authors like Seth Godin and Jeff Walker, to internationally renowned speakers like Randy Gage and Mitch Joel.Through their examples, you'll learn how you can apply this Audience First strategy to your online business, to get you better results faster, make you more profitable, and decrease your risk, all at the same time.

    In this straightforward how-to, he offers down-to-earth guidance on crafting an effective and meaningful online platform.In Platform, you will learn how to:Extend your influence, monetize it, and build a sustainable career. Get noticed and start earning money in an increasingly noisy world.  Learn to amplify, update, polish, and organize your content for success.Platform goes behind the scenes into the world of social media success. You’ll discover what bestselling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to gain contacts, connections, and followers and win customers in today’s crowded marketplace.With proven strategies, easy-to-replicate formulas, and practical tips, this book makes it easier, less expensive, and more possible than ever to stand out from the crowd and launch a business.

    SOAR takes the Appreciative Inquiry philosophy and applies it to provide a strategic thinking and dialogue process. The authors have been instrumental in developing this process and will share the concept and case studies to give you the confidence to try SOAR.

     The fact is, in today's world of constant distractions, most business owners struggle to get their marketing messages heard. Authority Content provides a simple process that any company can use to break through the noise. It doesn't matter whether you're the owner of a retail shop, financial advisor, swimming pool manufacturer or an inventor with an ingenious product - this powerful strategy will work for you. Built on the "3 Ps" framework (Present, Product, Promote) this book teaches you a step-by-step system for building authority within your industry thus sky-rocketing website traffic and sales. You will discover how to: Build maximum Authority, in minimum time Have your prospects, clients and Google fall in love with you Turn one day's work into months of content and share it around the web Write your own book easily and in record time Build your brand, sales and credibility Book website: AuthorityContent.com

     Find inside the revolutionary new way to plan a business to create a professional business plan that will help you identify the most effective business strategies for your situation. Take this step to starting your business, achieve independence, and become your own boss. HOW THE BOOK WORKS 1) You will start by learning how to write just a 3-sentence business plan that is so compact that it focuses on only what's most important 2) You will turn the 3-sentence business plan into a 1-page plan 3) Turn the 1-page plan into a professional business plan 4) After you have your business plan, this book gives you skills to make you a stronger entrepreneur BENEFITS OF THIS APPROACH - Write a higher quality business plan with more effective strategies - Complete your business plan faster - Avoid confusion and frustration WHAT KINDS OF BUSINESS IS THIS BOOK FOR This book is designed for businesses like local services, freelancing services, eCommerce, affiliate, self-branded businesses, innovative start-ups, and one-person solopreneur businesses. WHY THE APPROACH IN THIS BOOK IS BETTER To help you learn the business planning process from the ground up, this book gets you started with a very basic business plan and helps you expand it as you make your way through the book. This leads to less confusion and frustration and are more likely to finish your business plan faster and have it be better. THE BOOK IS STRUCTURED AS A BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE One of the chapters in this book is structured as a business plan template with examples for what to write in every section of the business plan. By the end of that chapter, you will have a professional business plan. This book combines theory, templates, and practical examples so you can get the best of all worlds and write your own business plan right as you go through the book. Whatever your learning style might be, this book will be effective for you. MADE TO BE SIMPLE If you find business planning confusing and complex, this book will make it simple for you. It is written in simple and clear language to help you create a great business plan with effective strategies. TRY THE BOOK FOR YOURSELF Invest in your future. Get this book now, start creating a great business plan today so you can start your dream business faster. RECENTLY ADDED IN THE LAST EDITION OF THE BOOK - Business plan example since many people commented that they wanted a business plan example. - Bigger variety of smaller examples across different businesses - Common planning mistakes so you can avoid them PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS FOR THE REAL WORLD A business plan is just a document. While this book will help you create a fantastic business plan document, it will also prepare you for real world business execution. Get this book today and learn to write a business plan, create effective business strategies, and take the step to make your business a success. BENEFITS OF THE BOOK - Step-by-step guidance for writing section of a business plan - Evaluate your target market: Is it big enough? Is it lucrative enough? - Identify and profit from choosing the most effective monetization strategy for your business - Master business planning concepts like the cash flow sta