I don’t often plug books that I like on this blog, but perhaps I should start. I just read a little advertising book on the plane titled “Bang!” by Linda Kaplan Thayer and Robin Koval. Once you get past all of the self-promotion and incestuous name-dropping, you will find some great nuggets of advertising wisdom.

The chapter that prompted me to buy a hundred copies of this thing to hand to some any account person I happen to run into this week before I forget I wrote this was the bit surrounding the Aflac Duck.

Service marketing is challenging, much more challenging than selling products. A service is not something tangible. We are effectively selling a promise, and a promise cant sell itself like an iPhone or a Bentley. I have worked on a number of financial services accounts over the years, and frankly those are the toughest brands to produce breakthrough work. It’s hard to find something memorable to say about retirement planning, and even harder to find a risk taking client in this line of work.

So back to the Aflac story the author points out “What’s sexy about Cancer insurance? This is serious stuff. Imagine the reaction when the creative director walked into the account person’s office and said, “what if we used a duck?” – what do you think the account guy said – “we are not showing this to the client, it’s inappropriate, silly, irresponsible etc.”

In fact the concept never made it to the client. Fortunately a creative who pushed to sneak the duck ad into testing effectively ran the agency. The rest is history.

So ask yourself this question. How many ideas have been killed before they hit your desk, let alone made it to the client because of an overly controlling account person everyday?

The Aflac Duck ads have an unprecedented recall of 92%, in fact most Americans can’t say Aflac without quacking. I hope they fired that account guy.