The one sentence summary
Brands should do things and tell people, working with their community to recombine ideas constantly.
WHAT THE BOOK SAYS 
- This is a guide to modern advertising ideas: what they are, why they are evolving, and how to have them.
- It explains how to package ideas to attract the most attention, and provides a robust model for influencing human behaviour.
- Among the issues grappled with are:
- Paid attention: how much is it worth?
- Media = bandwidth: people can only cope with so much at once.
- Communication is persuasion, but attention is like water.
- Brands are socially constructed ideas. Brand experiences build brandgrams in our heads. This is based on Daniel Schacter’s belief that memories are encoded in the brain as engrams – neuron-firing patterns.
- All market research is wrong because we don’t know why we do what we do, and the gulf between claimed attitudes and intentions and actual behaviour is vast.
- Customer service is a form of marketing. And technology is a medium.
- But the medium isn’t the message any more.
- The difference between content, media and advertising is vanishing.
- Do things and tell people: that’s how to behave in a world of infinite content.
- Talent imitates and genius steals: it’s a recombinant culture.
- People will pay more for something they have paid attention to.
- There can be only one strategy.
- Brands are behavioural templates.
- Integration is the interoperation of parts, not one idea in many places.
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
- It’s a wide-ranging piece of work spanning communication theory, neuroscience, creativity, innovation, media history, branding, and emerging technologies.
- It contains a toolkit to guide the reader though advertising, branding, and planning.
- Liminal spaces are the places in between, where different cultures mix and interact, and where hybrid forms are created.
- Brands can become social by listening, responding, nurturing, creating social objects, being transparent, and joining the conversation.
- Do it with the community, don’t just say it.
- Unleash creativity through constraint.
WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
- There’s no single point of view as such. It’s more of a useful primer for anyone needing to get up to speed with the full span of issues in modern communications.