• Ad Age, Wednesday, August 9, 2006 1:15 PM

A new book about advertising has good news and bad news for marketers. The bad news first: almost 40 percent of all ad budgets are wasted. The good news: there are things you can do to make sure your advertising works. The book, "What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds," was written by Rex Briggs, a veteran market researcher and founder of the firm Marketing Evolution, and Greg Stuart, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. "What Sticks" will be released next month, and is the result of five years of research on campaigns from 36 of the nation's top advertisers. In addition to hardcore number crunching and analysis, the book is said to be accessibly written and filled with anecdotes and confessions by the authors to illustrate how broken and dysfunctional the marketing industry is. "I spent the first decade of my career as an agency media guy," Stuart told Ad Age. "I felt like a charlatan the entire time. ... I knew in my heart of hearts that we collectively, not just Greg Stuart, did not know what we were doing in spending clients' money." Contained in the book's initial chapters are some remarkable revelations, including the allegation that two of the Big Three automakers used to base their annual media budgets on one another's prior-year measured-media spending.

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