CLOSE-UP: BOOK REVIEW - MORE BULLMORE. Humour and intellectual brio result in a unique anthology.(Book Review)

Simon Clemmow reviews a book of Jeremy Bullmore's articles and presentations.

There are two kinds of books about advertising. One is the kind that tells you what advertising is, how to do it, measure it and so on.

For my money, essential ones you need to read are Reality In Advertising by Rosser Reeves, Testing To Destruction by Alan Hedges, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind by Ries and Trout, and Competing For The Future by Hamel and Prahalad. Jeremy Bullmore would add the textbooks of Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy and James Webb Young. He is a particular admirer of Webb Young, whom he quotes and refers to frequently in his new book.

In fact, Bullmore and Webb Young have a lot in common. Webb Young practised, taught and wrote about advertising for more than 50 years, from 1912 to 1964. For the whole of that time he either worked for, or was a consultant to, J. Walter Thompson. Bullmore joined JWT as a trainee copywriter in 1954, and stayed with that agency until his retirement (as the chairman) in 1987. Since 1988, he has been a non-executive director of the WPP Group, JWT's parent company.

Furthermore, both men have written some of the wisest words about advertising you'll ever read. Webb Young's seminal book is called How To Become An Advertising Man. In it, he was ahead of his time in identifying how advertising works, understanding the difference between stimulus and response, defining target audiences by factors of taste, interest or habit rather than by demographics, believing that creativity and effectiveness are the same thing rather than different things, and so on.

More Bullmore is a seminal book of the textbook kind too. It's a collection of the pick of the articles, essays, papers, presentations and speeches Bullmore has written over the years. It first appeared in 1991 as Behind The Scenes In Advertising, and now appears 12 years and two editions on - including 66 new pieces which broaden the scope of the original book considerably - subtitled Behind The Scenes In Advertising (Mark III): Brands, Business And Beyond.

It tackles all of Webb Young's issues and more, including the roles and responsibilities of the different advertising disciplines, the sensitivities of the relationship between client and agency, the future of the advertising agency, and the nature of marketing, brands, and business. It seems that there is no advertising or advertising-related subject to which Bullmore hasn't turned his insightful mind and had important and helpful thoughts about.