The Fat Red Book for Creative Revolutionaries. (Wear Boxing Headgear When Reading)

Caveat Emptor: The Book Got Hands

Eugene Cheong has spent four decades making work that refuses to be ignored.

Over the course of his career at Ogilvy Asia Pacific, including his final ten years as Chief Creative Officer, he accumulated more than 250 Cannes Lions before eventually stopping count. He also led the network to seven consecutive Creative Network of the Year titles and was named by D&AD as one of the 50 greatest copywriters in history.

In 2020, he was given his walking papers. With three months’ severance. Oh, the joy of working for bean counters. What happened next became a book.

Cowards Don’t Go to Heaven is a 13,000-word manifesto built around eight creative habits that Cheong believes are the only antidote to what he calls the great creative pollution: a tsunami of forgettable, disposable and algorithmically optimised work slowly suffocating the industry like a boa constrictor.

It is not an exercise in self-aggrandisement. It is not a self-help book. Instead, it asks a question: Is the Horseshit Sensurround making you gag?

Good. So is Cheong. This book is his answer. The entire book was written by hand. Not typed. Written.

Every one of its 13,000 words was created using Indian ink and charcoal.

As Marshall McLuhan once observed, the medium is the message. In an age of AI-generated content, the decision to write every word by hand is itself an argument about craft, authenticity and what it means to create something that truly belongs to you.

Illustrated with 71 hilarious drawings by British illustrator Simon Spilsbury, the book is as much a visual experience as it is a written one.

It is what is known in German as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Spilsbury’s mischievous drawings do what Oscar Wilde prescribed: they make the truth easier to swallow.

The book was launched at D&AD headquarters in London on 9 June to considerable fanfare.

A social media campaign and accompanying Slap film were produced by Manila-based creative agency GIGIL. In the film, a hand emerges from between the pages of the book and slaps an unsuspecting creative into enlightenment.

The campaign has since been viewed across 11 countries, while the book is reportedly close to selling out in Asia. The word is out.

For Malaysian creatives and marketers, Cheong needs no introduction. His influence on the regional industry spans generations.

The eight creative habits he prescribes—courage, idealism, curiosity, playfulness, free-spiritedness, intuition, authenticity and persistence—are not abstract philosophy.

They are the lived practices of someone who has been in the room when some of Asia’s greatest work was created.

“99.99% of advertising is pollution. Forgettable. Invisible. It contaminates culture and wastes the brief lives of the people who make it. This book is about the 0.01%, and the backbone it takes to get there.”

In an industry being reshaped by artificial intelligence, that vertebral column has never mattered more.

Cowards Don’t Go to Heaven is published by Victionary, Hong Kong.

To order a copy of the Fat Red Book, visit: https://bit.ly/OrderCDGTH