Marketing by Publishing Your Own Book

For several years, one of the hottest advertising agencies in San Francisco has been Goodby, Silverstein. They're famous for the quality of their creative, and a couple of years ago, I also got an inside look at how they pitch new business. Part of how they do it is by publishing a book.

As I recall, the pitch was for Pacific Bell. At the end, they gave each PacBell executive who attended the presentation a custom-designed book. The book itself was kind of dreck -- it was a compilation of half-baked biographies of the creative team, and some marketing baloney about the firm.

However, it was beautiful. The designers at Goodby, who are really talented, had done an incredible job. The cover had a set of really neat illustrations of the different forms of communication through history,and so on. It was a thing of beauty, and a giveaway that the recipients of the pitch hung onto for a long time as a memento.

In today's blog post, David Maister explores how technology has made publishing your own book easy, quick and relatively painless. It's a good read. If you have the content, creating a book is easy, and it's an unbelievably impressive thing to give clients. What used to take a team of professional designers weeks can now be done in a matter of days, for a lot less money.

Read the post. It's instructive. And you may just have a book in you after all.

Comments

[michael]

In my younger days I had a press agent who told me if I wnated to be an expert I needed a book - and that book can be self published - a book makes what one says - SO...nice read - your blog.