Bronze Seeks Silver

Lessons from a Creative Career in Marketing

By: Mat Zucker

Narrated by: Mat Zucker

Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Marketing was destiny for Mat Zucker - the perfect cocktail of creativity, art, and salesmanship. Half-guidebook, half memoir, Bronze Seeks Silver surfaces 30 years of lessons from an ad veteran in selling brands, building relationships, and managing careers.

Follow Mat as a secretary at an ad agency paying his dues; as a writer, learning how to copy accents from West Virgina libraries and researching the phenomenon of spanking parties; then as a rising creative leader creating global ad campaigns, meeting everyone from Mike Strahan to Alicia Keys.

With this candid and hilarious telling, Mat gives aspiring marketers the gift of what he's seen and learned.

©2020 Matthew Zucker (P)2021 Matthew Zucker

Insightful, funny, inspiring -- a great listen

This is a terrific guide for anyone who's worked in the ad industry or who has considered it. It's also an inspiring book about creativity, one that will make listeners eager to come up with out-of-the-box ideas of their own. The humor and delivery make it all such a pleasure to listen to.

Excellent audiobook, part memoir, part guide book

Mat Zucker is a writer, a strategic marketing consultant, a recognized creative, and a respected veteran in advertising and marketing. With Bronze Seeks Silver: Lessons from a Creative Career in Marketing, Mat Zucker takes the listener into a professional journey spanning almost 30 years in the advertising industry.

I’ve always been fascinated by ads, PR, and communications, by the way they are presented to the public, by the creative process, and by what message a specific spot or campaign tries to put out there. This being said, I jumped at the opportunity to review this insightful audiobook.

Mr. Zucker recalls his experiences in the advertising industry, he explains every high and every low to us as listeners and he shares valuable and important lessons that he learned throughout his impressive career.

This book is part memoir, part guidebook to everyone who wants to understand how this industry works, and I absolutely appreciated the fact that the author took the time to record the audiobook version himself.

Mat Zucker reads in a really pleasant tone, he perfectly explains each situation, keeps a perfect pace and he manages to be awkward, successful, or even funny at just the right moment in his performance. I’m glad that he decided to record this in his own voice and not put it out for someone else to tell this story.

Bronze Seeks Silver: Lessons from a Creative Career in Marketing by renowned Ad veteran Mat Zucker is a really captivating narrative experience and those interested in advertising, marketing, PR, and communications should not miss it!

There are a lot of important lessons to be learned and it’s always better to be taught by someone who is the best at their job. Newcomers to the advertising industry, veterans, or even those with just a passing interest should definitely pick up this audiobook! Who knows, maybe they will discover a passion for it!

Better Than Cats

I laughed. I cried. It was much better than Cats. I’m going to listen to it again and again.

A Really Enjoyable Book of Insightful Stories

I have to start this review off by stating that I both went to school for marketing (after trying 3 other majors first). I am fascinated by marketing and the different things/ways that marketers are able to get us as consumers to spend our hard-earned cash. AND that I have worked marketing-adjacent for the past 6 years (I work in Advertising Technology). So, I point this out to make sure that as a reader of this review - you understand that I love marketing and I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to it. So I'm going to be reviewing it from that lens.

So, Bronze Seeks Silver starts off with an introduction from Zucker with a little about who he is and then jumps right into stories related to the different positions and jobs he's held at various companies. Now, that can sound like he's just showing off, but it's nowhere near that. Just hearing about the job search reminded me of my recent excursion into looking for a new job and it was MUCH easier to find a job with LinkedIn, the Internet, etc. But each different story from each part of Zucker's life was a little lesson on its own. And it didn't feel like an "I messed this up so you should do it this way" it wasn't even a "and now you need to do this" but it was a really neat and interesting basically mini case-studies that showed what happened, how it was handled and how he's taken that into every job since then.

I won't point out any of the lessons since if that sounds interesting to you, you should definitely check the book out. But know that they're not all marketing-related. Some of them are just ways to deal with difficult people or competitive coworkers. Some are around how things played out because of choices he made or ways that he went about things. It all felt very "realistic" and helpful even in today's job market. Mat feels like one of those people that I would find at a job and I would instantly try and siphon off as much information as I could since that's the best and fastest way to not only learn about the company and the industry but the best way to make lasting connections and ensure that you're successful in your career. You don't have to do all of the work - you have to learn from those before you who have and adapt that to your current problem.

Overall, I really enjoyed my reading of Bronze Seeks Silver. I think that Mat had a lot to share and he did with this book. Sometimes books like these just feel preachy or like someone trying to make a quick buck. But Bronze Seeks Silver was full of really interesting stories from a creative career in marketing (as the book states).

Since this is an audiobook review, I wanted to talk about the audiobook quality. I'm always a little wary/worried about a self-produced, self-recorded audiobook. And for good reason, I've heard some really bad ones over the years. Zucker does a fairly good job at narrating his own work and I honestly think that some of the stories were definitely better told directly from him. But, saying that there were some things that I want to call out so that an audiobook listener doesn't feel misled by my review. There are some mouth noises, there were some weird gaps in the audio, a few times Zucker powered through a sentence when he probably should have backed off. And the room that it was recorded in has random noise (I think it was cars passing by, but I couldn't tell) along with that "empty room" feel that you get when it's recording more than just your voice (think hearing the room around someone when they talk instead of just them). Now, I point these things out because I know that a lot of audiobook listeners are brutal when it comes to these issues in books from a professional. Zucker is not one when it comes to audiobooks and if you think that will bother you but this book sounds good to you - I highly suggest you pick up the ebook version of it.