"What makes a great advertisement?" Nearly four decades ago, an unmatched group of five advertising pioneers first answered that question in "The Art of Writing Advertising." Their entertaining and historically compelling answers will provide advertising professionals with valuable techniques for applying breakthrough creativity and innovation in the workplace.

    By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory. Brick by Brick reveals how LEGO failed to keep pace with the revolutionary changes in kids' lives and began sliding into irrelevance. When the company's leaders implemented some of the business world's most widely espoused prescriptions for boosting innovation, they ironically pushed the iconic toymaker to the brink of bankruptcy. The company's near-collapse shows that what works in theory can fail spectacularly in the brutally competitive global economy. It took a new LEGO management team – faced with the growing rage for electronic toys, few barriers to entry, and ultra-demanding consumers (ten-year old boys) – to reinvent the innovation rule book and transform LEGO into one of the world's most profitable, fastest-growing companies.  Along the way, Brick by Brick reveals how LEGO:- Became truly customer-driven by co-creating with kids as well as its passionate adult fans- Looked beyond products and learned to leverage a full-spectrum approach to innovation- Opened its innovation process by using both the "wisdom of crowds" and the expertise of elite cliques- Discovered uncontested, "blue ocean" markets, even as it thrived in brutally competitive red oceans- Gave its world-class design teams enough space to create and direction to deliver built a culture where profitable innovation flourishes Sometimes radical yet always applicable, Brick by Brick abounds with real-world lessons for unleashing breakthrough innovation in your organization, just like LEGO. Whether you're a senior executive looking to make your company grow, an entrepreneur building a startup from scratch, or a fan who wants to instill some of that LEGO magic in your career, you'll learn how to build your own innovation advantage, brick by brick.

    Today we're all digital explorers, seeking out online ratings, peer reviews, videos, and in-depth product details as we move down the path to purchase. At Google, we call this online decision-making moment the Zero Moment of Truth-or simply ZMOT. Download "Winning the Zero Moment of Truth", a free, powerful new video-enhanced eBook by Jim Lecinski, Managing Director of US Sales & Service and Chief ZMOT Evangelist at Google. Jim shares how to get ahead at this critical new marketing moment, supported by exclusive market research, personal stories, and insights from C-level executives at global leaders like General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, and VivaKi. If you're a marketer, a CEO, a sales rep, or an aspiring entrepreneur, this video-enhanced eBook will help you understand this shift in the marketing landscape and show you the strategies it takes to win.

    You'll find a collection of the major lessons and shortcuts we've learned that will shift the odds in your favor. We're sharing our tips, secrets, and advice in a frank, founder-to-founder discussion with you.We make no bones about our bias. We're on your side, the founder's side. While venture capitalists, investors, and accelerators/incubators can add great value in the startup ecosystem, this book isn't about their points of view. We'll tell you where our interests as founders diverge from those on the other side of the table--investors, bankers, advisors, board members, and others--and what to do when that happens. The Startup Playbook is not a recipe, it's not a template, it's not a list of tasks to do. It's our insider's guide to starting a company and running it successfully in those critical early months. Between us, we've started over a dozen high-tech software companies and raised over $500 million in investment capital. We've acquired over thirty-five companies, had three of our startups go public, sold six of them, and we made billions of dollars for shareholders. We've also invested in over eighty startups, advised and mentored over two hundred companies and actively worked with venture capitalists (VCs), incubators, and accelerators to help launch many other new startups.We've had plenty of failures, too. And we've probably learned more from those than from the successes. We share those lessons as well. The Startup Playbook is full of our advice, guidance, do's, and don'ts from our years of experience as founders many times. We want to share our hard-earned knowledge with you to make success easier for you to achieve."This book is extraordinarily fresh and exciting. In an accessible, straight talk fashion, this book is a manual, and an inspiration. The Startup Playbook is smart and avoids the 'I am so smart' over-writing endemic to the genre. Read this as it is presented. You'll be doing yourself a tremendous favor."-- Amazon Reviewer

    But what if it only had to be a decision of a weekend and it didn’t cost a fortune?In 48-Hour Start-Up, Fraser Doherty uses his experience building a multi-million-dollar company to attempt an experiment; starting with a blank piece of paper, he sets out to start a profitable new business over a weekend, without relying on any technical ability whatsoever. He succeeds and you can, too.By following his journey, in which Fraser shares all of his lessons and mistakes, he will explain all of the shortcuts and online tools that make it possible to:Come up with a business idea without the guessworkCreate a kick-ass brand, website and on-line marketing campaignPromote your product48-Hour Start-Up pioneers the idea of a microbusiness, a creative outlet, income stream and business you can run in your spare time at the weekends without having to quit the day job. This book is perfect forYoung entrepreneursStudents learning about start-upsEstablished entrepreneurs looking for shortcutsTeams within corporates who want to create a more innovative and competitive environment

    Successful methods of dealing with problems have become outmoded. To be successful, you can’t just be good. Youalso need to be creative.In Creative Intelligence, innovation expert Bruce Nussbaum charts the making of a new literacy, Creative Intelligence, or CQ. From corporate CEOs trying to parse the confusing matrix of global business to K-12 teachers attempting to reach bored kids in increasingly wired classrooms, creativity is viewed as the antidote to uncertainty and complexity. Creative Intelligence embodies a bundle of specific literacies that increase our ability to navigate the unknown. It’s a skill-set that explorers have tacitly used for eons but which, only now, is explicitly revealing its secrets to us.Nussbaum explores how people and organizations are learning to be more creative in work and in life, and investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their CQ—and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. Creative Intelligence shows readers how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original by drawing insight from anthropology and culture rather than psychology and the brain. Smart and eye opening, it introduces us to the next evolutionary step and our future. Ultimately, Creative Intelligence will show readers how to boost their creative capacity, build creative confidence, and connect creativity with capitalism in a new form--Indie Capitalism--that could, and should, replace Finance Capitalism.

    Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.Eyal provides readers with:• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.• Actionable steps for building products people love.• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

    Enriched with examples from previous Ogilvy campaigns for international brands such as Coca-Cola Louis Vuitton IBM and American Express this book reveals the secrets of successful advertising in the twenty-first century.

    You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a new business model or analyze and renovate an old one.2) Co-created by 470 strategy practitionersBusiness Model Generation practices what it preaches. Co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book was financed and produced independently of the traditional publishing industry. It features a tightly-integrated, visual, lie-flat design that enables immediate hands-on use.3) Designed for doersBusiness Model Generation is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new, innovative models of value creation: executives, consultants, entrepreneurs and leaders of all organizations.

    She discusses important design strategies, interviews influential Web community-builders, and provides the reader with templates and questionnaires to use in building their own communities.

    As surprising as that may sound, it's the natural result of the world going digital. Marketing must move faster, adapt more quickly to market feedback, and manage an increasingly complex set of customer experience touchpoints. All of these challenges are shaped by the dynamics of software--from the growing number of technologies in our own organizations to the global forces of the Internet at large.But you can turn that to your advantage. And you don't need to be technical to do it.Hacking Marketing will show you how to conquer those challenges by adapting successful management frameworks from the software industry to the practice of marketing for any business in a digital world. You'll learn about agile and lean management methodologies, innovation techniques used by high-growth technology companies that any organization can apply, pragmatic approaches for scaling up marketing in a fragmented and constantly shifting environment, and strategies to unleash the full potential of talent in a digital age.Marketing responsibilities and tactics have changed dramatically over the past decade. This book now updates marketing management to better serve this rapidly evolving discipline.Increase the tempo of marketing's responsiveness without chaos or burnout Design continuous marketing programs and campaigns that constantly evolve Drive growth with more marketing experiments while actually reducing risk Architect marketing capabilities in layers to better scale and adapt to change Balance strategic focus with the ability to harness emergent opportunities As a marketer and a manager, Hacking Marketing will expand your mental models for how to lead marketing in a digital world where everything--including marketing--flows with the speed and adaptability of software.

    Think Nike, Starbuck's, Xerox, and Kleenex, and you're thinking brands in the biggest and most lucrative sense. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, marketing guru Al Ries, together with Laura Ries, has put together the authoritative work on brands and branding -- organized in a short, pithy book that can be read and digested in as brief a time as an airplane ride.

    This involves taking detailed and technical product information and distilling it into key marketing and sales messages as well as working among several teams in an organization to plan and execute product releases and launches. This book is a must-have for anyone who works as, or with, a Product Marketing Manager. It not only explains the role but focuses on practical applications of the information presented and ties everything together with entertaining life lessons and anecdotes collected through years of experience by the author as well as interviews with his colleagues and other industry experts. If you are considering a career as a Product Marketing Manager, are new to the profession and looking for guidance and clarification, already have many years of experience in the role and are looking for new inspiration and ideas, or are interested in learning what a Product Marketing Manager colleague of yours is responsible for within your organization, this book is for you.

    While most B2B startups obsess over scalability and tracking, Drift takes a different approach. In This Won't Scale, you'll find insider lessons and plays from the Drift Marketing team that have helped the business grow at a hypergrowth rate. It contains 41 plays organized into easy-to-read and reference chapters. Keep it on your desk, thumb through it when you're looking for inspiration and come back to it over time. You’ll discover not only Drift's abnormal approach, but also hear never-before-told stories and learn how to implement Drift's marketing plays into your own marketing strategy.

    Designing anything for people is tough, because we’re inherently complex and...well...messy. Which means that things like market share and ROI don’t come easy. But time and effort spent finding the right problems to solve allows designers, developers and product teams to take quantum leaps forward in exceeding the expectations of everyone involved. In Think First, Joe Natoli shows you exactly how to do this, using lessons learned from his 26 years as a UX consultant to Fortune 100 and 500 organizations. You’ll find proven principles, step-by-step methods and straightforward, jargon-free advice that can be applied to any kind of digital product. Think First proves that while people are indeed messy and complex, designing for them doesn’t have to be. Here’s what a few well-respected UX practitioners and authors had to say about Think First: “A very practical guide to success in business.” – Dr. Don Norman, Director of the DesignLab, UC San Diego and Author of The Design of Everyday Things “Think First is a practical guide to UX that makes sense of strategy and structure. Highly recommended!” – Peter Morville, Bestselling Author of Intertwingled “For designers and developers, understanding strategy and UX is an increasingly necessary skill. Joe Natoli’s Think First demystifies these foundational ideas in a very conversational, easy to read style.” – Ilise Benun, Founder of Marketing-Mentor.com and Author of 7+ Books Author Joe Natoli explains why he believes Think First is unlike any other book on the subject of UX strategy and design: "I didn’t want to write yet another book that covers the narrow, tactical pieces of the design process," he says, "because great design and great UX are the result of multiple activities across multiple people, roles and disciplines. It’s everybody’s business. Think First walks you through everything that must be considered to create great UX — and gives you a roadmap to make it happen." Think First details Joe's no-nonsense approach to creating successful products, powerful user experiences and very happy customers. He share countless lessons learned from more than 26 years as a UX consultant to Fortune 500 and 100 organizations — including a few he's learned the hard way :-) Think First serves as a roadmap to building a solid foundation for UX that’s strong enough to withstand any weather as projects move into design and coding. Here are just some of the things you’ll learn: - Simple user research methods that anyone can perform — even if you’ve never done research of any kind. - The right questions to ask stakeholders and users at the outset of any (and every) project. - The 3 crucial questions you must ask of every client, every time. - How to tell the difference between what people say they need vs. what they really need. - A better, simpler way to generate meaningful UX requirements at the outset of the project. - How to figure out what features and functions will result in great UX and deliver value to both users and the business. - How to avoid scope creep and the never-ending project scenario.