Published in 2019, Orlando Wood’s book ‘Lemon’ uses a unique mix of neuroscience, art history and advertising effectiveness research to shows how an increase in abstract, left-brain thinking has spread across business and popular culture, undermined creativity and made advertising less effective. I’ve summarised the book for those who haven’t read it.

In 2020, James Hurman and Peter Field partnered with Cannes Lions and WARC to publish The Effectiveness Code. The seminal white paper introduced two important marketing frameworks: Creative Commitment and the Creative Effectiveness Ladder. I’ll summarise both below for those who haven’t read the report.

In the autumn of 2018 the Account Planning Group (APG) collaborated with Wiemer Snijders to publish Eat Your Greens. The book is a collection of articles written by 35 experts in marketing and communications. In each chapter, a contributor describes how they apply a principle of marketing science. Here’s a summary of five of my favourites.

In 2010, Les Binet and Sarah Carter began publishing a monthly ‘myth busting’ article for AdMap. 18 years later, and with support from the APG, Binet and Carter collated 66 of these essays to form the book ‘How Not To Plan’. Here’s eight of the book’s lessons that resonated with me most.

In 2020, The B2B Institute from LinkedIn published a report called “2030 B2B Trends: Contrarian Ideas for the Next Decade”. Here’s a summary of five themes that the paper covers.

How Brands Grow Park 2 is written by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Where the original book covered the theory of how brands grow, Part 2 explores how to put this theory into practice. I’ll summarise it here for those who haven’t yet read it.

In their book The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Peter Field analyse the IPA’s Databank of 996 campaigns that were entered into the IPA Effectiveness Awards between 1980 and 2010. Here’s 8 lessons from the study for those who haven’t yet read the book.

Since 2010, Professor Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow has become one of marketing’s most influential texts. It concludes with 11 law-like patterns, discovered by analysing data spanning many decades, countries & categories. I’ll summarise the laws, along with a supporting quote, here.

In Seducing the Subconscious Robert Heath makes a counterintuitive claim: The less attention an ad receives the more powerful its affect. The book supports the theory with research on attention, processing, filtering, learning and memory. This post summarises the research as well as Heath’s provocative conclusion.

Back in 2019 the LinkedIn B2B Institute commissioned the first-ever B2B cut of the IPA dataset. In the report that followed, Les Binet and Peter Field explored the 5 principles of growth in B2B marketing. Here’s a summary.