• WSJ (paid subscription required), Monday, March 20, 2006 12:30 PM

If you're looking for some inspirational reading, check out ad industry veteran Jerry Della Femina's survey of the "Five Best Books on the Art of Advertising" in the Wall Street Journal. The list highlights books from industry pioneers such as David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, "the father of advertising's creative revolution in the early 1950s," and Rosser Reeves, who invented the term Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. Della Femina includes two instructional choices: Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, "the definitive 'how to' book about advertising from the ultimate man in the gray flannel suit"; and A Technique for Producing Ideas-- "only about 60 pages long, but no one has done a better job than [author] James Webb Young of explaining how we get ideas and, most important, the steps we all must take to stimulate our minds and produce ideas." Others on the list teach by example, such as The 100 Greatest Advertisements 1852-1958, "a collection of 100 print ads that achieved phenomenal results ('His Master's Voice,' RCA Victor; 'The Pause That Refreshes,' Coca-Cola)," in which "creators tell how the ads were conceived and what they achieved."

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