• Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 11:15 AM

Dan Neil doesn't think much of Alex Bogusky and John Winsor's new book about advertising. He feels it's short-winded (150 pages of large type), self-serving (why don't marketers realize that the ad guys are the smartest guys in the room?), cliché-ridden (break down silos!) and self-evident (better products tend to sell better, duh).

So why even bother excerpting from the review? Well, if for no other reason than to retell the joke that Neal repeats that William Shatner once told on "Saturday Night Live": "'Star Trek' is really popular in Japan," he said, "where it's known as 'Sulu, Master of Navigation.'"

Despite their impeccable credentials, Bogusky, co-chairman of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, and Winsor, who was CP&B's vice president and executive director of strategy and innovation until he created crowd-sourcing agency Victors & Spoils last month, fall into the same self-glorifying and self-referencing trap, according to Neal. It's not that the tenets of "Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves" are half-baked. It's more that most "all of them could be found in an employee handbook from Procter & Gamble in 1955," Neal writes.

Crowd-source reviews for the book on Amazon, on the other hand, are running favorable.

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