Dr Hill has an important point. It's not a very original one, but it's a central one: recent neurological research confirms that advertising works mostly via non-verbal, intuitive communication and produces an emotional effect.
Therefore, we should tell intriguing, colourful stories that have the product message centrally embedded in them. This probably wouldn't have been news to Bill Bernbach or Leo Burnett, but until now it's been harder to prove to your CFO than that "product X washes 37 per cent whiter".
The value of Dr Hill's book is that he provides a handy summary of recent literature on the whys and hows of emotional advertising. So, if you're new to the business or a little behind on your reading, there is much that is interesting here. In particular, he makes a powerful case that if we are to make emotional advertising, we need better research to find out 'What people can't or won't tell you'. Most strategy and advertising research is done by asking people what they think.
The problem is that even if people know what they really think (and they won't, if it's true that 95 per cent of thought and 80 per cent of advertising communication is subconscious), they may not want to tell you and the other seven people in the focus group: "Data based on verbal input, filtered on a conscious basis, doesn't guarantee accuracy - no matter how many people are interviewed."
And if it seems obvious that we should be doing more ethnographic research, more interpretation of drawings and relying more on our instincts, then why aren't we? Looking around at the research carried out across Asia, it privileges the head fairly heavily over the heart, with very little of the extra care, time, money and imagination that is required to winkle out more truthful truths. So, attention to the topic is long overdue.
The problems start when Dr Hill begins to add his own ideas. The author knows we respond to emotional stimuli because he's founded a company that wires people up to machines to prove that we're intuitive.
The rest of us know that because we're humans living on planet earth, with friends, children and family.
What's more, he proposes using, in effect, lie detector technology to measure whether people like the communications being offered to them.
In other words, his solution doesn't wean the marketing community off its reliance on the provable. It encourages us to measure the intuitive.
It encourages us all to cling ever more tightly to the life raft of data and check our humanity and our imagination at the door.
"Walt Disney," we are told in the book, "was said to have gotten down on his knees in the theme park to learn what a six-year-old child would see."
The author then qualifies this with "Walt was brilliant and went with his instincts. For the rest of us, the trick is to find a reliable research tool up to the task".
We shouldn't forget that we are all capable of understanding humans because (outside of the office) we are, of course, human ourselves.
To find out the truths people can't or won't tell us, we should avoid research (in the accepted sense): we should talk to our mothers, get down on our knees with our children, and hire people who are brilliant and go with their instincts.