Rex Briggs

I JUST finished reading a terrific book, “What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds,” by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. The authors did in-depth research with 30 Fortune 200 companies, measuring more than $1 billion in advertising spend. They concluded that of the $300 billion annual advertising spend in the United States, $112 billion, or 47 percent, is wasted. Not surprisingly, they concluded that marketing is broken and that, as we pointed out last month, just because something worked in the 1980s, it is not necessarily going to work today—although a lot of companies still operate that way. Their research