January 18, 2012
The best/worst print book ad of 2011
by Melville House
Book ads have always been pretty generic. Open any book review this weekend and you’ll see a lot of “unique,” “striking,” “devastating,” “masterpieces,” of “glorious fun,” “brilliantly rendered,” and “uniquely satisfying.” “Major treats,” “from places never dreamed of.” “Worthy additions and “intriguing tales” that “can’t be recommended enough.”
Boring right? We’ve all seen these before so when an actually “unique,” “striking” ad comes along it’s “a surprise and a delight.”
The ad we discussed most in the office this year was Harper Perennial’s “Reading Cat’s What’s Up!” ad. I’ll let it speak for its glorious self:
Genius right? It embraces a superficial commercial appeal all while giving a knowing wink. I don’t need to explain why this ad delights, it just does. Everybody loves kittens and if you’re looking at this ad in N+1 you probably love books as well. Case closed, let’s all start printing money. But wait… there’s something wrong here. Scroll down a little. . .
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Now, can you name a single book that appeared in that ad?
Just one.
There were four so this should be easy. . .
Having a hard time? Yeah, so did we. The ad is eye catching but for all the wrong reasons. It markets the Harper Perennial brand brilliantly but the individual titles get lost in the adorable kitten orgy. And for that reason this is the best and the worst print book ad of 2011.
We’ve always enjoyed imagining the creative meeting where this ad was born. Kudos to Harper for running with something so unorthodox and if you’re the brain behind this ad we’d love to hear from you, if only to put a name to all the good times we’ve had enjoying your work. Genuinely—well done!
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10 Comments
“Cat’s what’s up”??? WTF? Does it mean “catch what is up!” or “cat is what is up!”? Or is it total nonsense?
Hahaha. Henry I think that’s part of the point. “It doesn’t matter what it means. It gets the people going!”
The whole ad is stupid. Not being a cat person, I would have skipped over the ad entirely thinking it was about kitty litter or each book was a different kind of cat food . Very poor planning, advertising people.
I actually did remember one of the books (The Call, probably because it was the first one). But I’m not sure this ad’s recall is any better or worse than many of the ads seen in magazines or on air. We’ve all see the “Mayhem like me” car insurance ads, but how many can remember which insurance co. it’s for? Or which mobile phone co. does the commercials that make other networks seem “so 27 seconds ago”? (I couldn’t tell you).
Hahaha! Best/worst blog post of all time.
This is not quite related and it’s loving praise of Harper Perennial but I have long felt their TITLES are too samey and unmemorable. They’re all like The Thing We Did or The Time She Felt That Way. I guess this is a better title rubric than the countervailing trend, The [Plural Noun] but I still rack my brain trying to remember which I read, It Could Be Worse You Could Be Me or Everything Is Wrong With Me (both HP books!) Uh, anyway. Titles are hard.
It’s supposed to be like the phrase “That’s what’s up.”
I couldn’t work out what it meant either. It looked like a greengrocer’s apostrophe to me but then I thought, surely not.. this is publishing, right? Or not right. Who knows!
Do you think those apostrophes are supposed to make it mean “cat IS what IS up”? Jesus, it gets worse and worse.
Haven’t a clue Dennis. It’s a mythterwy, as Toyah sang back in the 80s