Review: Brand Anarchy

Brand Anarchy: a book that takes the urban sprawl of our current media landscape, flattens it to its foundations and reconstructs it, explaining how and why each structure looks and stands in the way it does.

Authors Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington draw on their combined forty years’ experience in the media and communications sector, to take the reader on a crashing joyride through the past present and future of public relations, pointing out important landmarks and sharing insights alluding to the industry’s evolving architecture.

Ten chapters, broken down into index-note-style headings, make quick referencing easy, whilst the informal language, injections of wit and cynical undertones, make the reading experience more pleasurable, unlike some of the more didactic offerings of the same genre.

Avoiding industry clichés, Brand Anarchy doesn’t focus solely on what digital has to offer, instead demonstrating the importance of an integrated media and hinting at where the print and broadcast industries are heading.

Additional weight is added with influencers from the media world, including Alastair Campbell, Greg Dyke and Francis Ingham, providing commentary, alongside carefully selected industry case studies that serve to shine a spotlight on good and bad practice.

One of the key problems for a book like this, in a fast changing world, is the danger it becomes out of date and irrelevant when it is finally published. In the case of Brand Anarchy, Earl and Waddington have future proofed the content, by not merely focussing on what is happening now, but, in addition, extrapolating and analysing major industry trends, past and present, to illustrate, for the reader, a theoretical future.

As Waddington explained: ‘We locked down the majority of the content for Brand Anarchy in September 2011.

‘We tried insofar as possible to write about trends rather than specific situations and technologies so that the book had a reasonable shelf life.’

Whether an industry professional or someone with an interest in the media world, Brand Anarchy is certainly a great addition to the book shelf.