Joe La Pompe: 100 Visual Ideas, 1000 Great Ads

Author: Joe La Pompe

Publisher: Gestalten (2012)

Binding: Hardcover, 224 pages

This is a book you need to stuff in every xmas christmas stocking that belongs to an adgrunt or a student of advertising. It does just what it says on the tin, it'll show you one hundred visual ideas and one thousand (often great) ads. Like Nouveau? Or not, Joe La Pompe's previous book, and his website, this book is full of twin ads. Triplets, quadruplets and octuplets too. But only in a slight visual common note, the ideas differ.

The book is a nice thick hardcover, like a good coffee table book should be, with large images collecting the accidental visual twins. The visual similarities are only the execution. Some of the ideas are exactly the same, while others are not the same at all. Selling vastly different products with pixels. Shilling anything from beers to bratwurst with barcodes. Using MC Escher impossible figures for everything from vodka to Volvo.

These aren't your run-of-the-mill boring executions either, they can be groundbreaking in use of media, fresh in style of execution, and seems so new in visual language until woah, there's like ten of them on this page. Some of the double page spreads are a riddle for those less versed in detecting the idea behind the execution, as the executions will be near identical but the similarity ends there. This is why I think every ad-student should have one this christmas, where each double-page spread becomes a game of finding the identical ideas versus the identical executions. This also makes it a great coffee-table book in any advertising agencies reception, lets see if that creative team you make wait out there for half-an-hour agree which is which before you hire them.

In short, get one, it's fun, and you are not properly ad-obsessed if your library lacks this. And please, you who handles the buying of Xmas-bonus baskets for the creative floor - skip the bottle of bad wine and add this book instead. They'll enjoy it.