CMO Holiday Reading List (And Other Works Of Fiction)

Looking for a little light reading this Christmas? Here is a goodie bag of stories that feature marketers in entertaining, if not always flattering, ways.

Somewhere in his voluminous new collection of diaries, Alan Bennett writes how stories about great works of art never really work. Why? Because, at some point, you’re going to have to give a glimpse of the great work, which inevitably disappoints. After all, if the author could have written a great work of art, they wouldn’t have bothered to write a story about it.

By the same token, stories and novels that feature marketing and advertising types tend not to focus on great creative campaigns or masterstrokes of brand strategy. Because great marketing is highly context-specific, trying to show great work in fictional form is really hard. That’s why the best pitching scenes in “Mad Men” are those that relate to real products (like the famous Kodak Carousel scene). If you could really do great marketing, after all, you probably wouldn’t need to write a novel about it.

Then, too, the targeting, influencing, and promoting professions are viewed with a certain scepticism by the general public, who often see its proponents as subtle schemers trying to part them from their money. On top of that, marketing is a specialism, and one woman’s specialism is another woman’s blah blah jargon fest. And even where some of the core concepts of marketing are at least partially understood, the suspicion lingers among civilians that things like brand identity, thought leadership, or search marketing can’t possibly be real things that actual people take seriously, let alone build a job around.

So my selection of fictional moments involving marketers and marketing isn’t particularly flattering. You don’t often come across a marketing manager as romantic lead or against-all-odds heroine. But, for a little light seasonal reading, there is much here to enjoy and maybe even to learn from …

The Circle , by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers invents a company called The Circle, a sort of amalgam of Google, Facebook, and Apple, which presents itself as a sophisticated liberal institution, full of radical and progressive ideas, as befits its roots in 60s utopianism. Only, as the Circle’s reach grows, so its strictures and practices become increasingly autocratic and controlling. Its slogan—“all that happens must be known”—is as eloquent of the company’s data/tech capabilities as it is sinister.

Surveillance comes to be equated with freedom, privacy with theft. Mae, our heroine and a Circle employee, gets taken to task by HR for not sharing or responding enough in her social networks. Politicians and other influencers bow to pressure to “go transparent,” which means having their entire waking lives streamed live to the world. Children are to have a chip implanted in a bone, ostensibly to prevent abduction.

In one chilling scene, the Circle proves its reach by tracking down a fugitive in real time and almost provoking a lynching, then applies the same techniques to an ex of Mae’s, who is resolutely analogue and has decided to go off grid. He doesn’t make it.

The Circle is a great thought experiment of a novel that presents an often very credible scenario that’s clearly rooted in lots of research. It articulates a very contemporary anxiety about the trade-offs we make between personalisation and privacy, autonomy and conformity, convenience and control. It has all the makings of a prescient classic.

New Grub Street , by George Gissing

New Grub Street tells the story of two very different writers at a key moment in British social history. It is the late Victorian era, the mass reading public has emerged as a commercial force, new magazines and periodicals are booming, and the professional hack writer emerges to fill them with content. Some will make it, others won’t.

Edward Reardon is serious and earnest. He writes what he is moved to write, has aspirations to high art, reads the classics in his spare time. Jasper Milvain writes whatever anyone will pay him to write, is realistic about his strengths and weaknesses, and spends his leisure networking with publishers and editors.

The theme of the book, as Orwell put it, is “not enough money.” Reardon’s initial modest success fades further as he fails to move with the times; he falls into penury, grows weaker, and eventually dies. Jasper rises from nothing to editorial celebrity, and ends up marrying Reardon’s beautiful widow.

Itself written at a rate of 4,000 words a day, the book also details—as few have before and since—the nuts and bolts of work, the economics of survival, the struggles with self-doubt and deadline pressures, the rivalries and prejudices that can make or break a career. And it is oddly reminiscent of our own age.

One fellow hack, Marian Yule, looks at the welter of material being churned out and wonders if a writing machine couldn’t do it all better. “Surely, before long, some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today’s consumption.”

In the last decade and a half, of course, we have witnessed the rise of a new new Grub Street, peopled by an army of ex-journalists, and seo copywriters, and brand storytellers all plugging away at the digital coalface. “Literature nowadays is a trade,” says Jasper. “Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.”

The book seems to suggest that the post-truth Milvain deserves to succeed for his resourcefulness, and, although it doesn’t exactly condone his approach, it will appeal to anyone who has ever had a sneaking admiration for the talents of the true hack. “Honest journey-work!” says Jasper, at one point of his morning’s facile scribblings. “There are few men in London capable of such a feat. Many a fellow could write more in quantity, but they couldn’t command my market. It’s rubbish, but rubbish of a very special kind, of fine quality.”

Who Moved My BlackBerry? by Martin Lukes/Lucy Kellaway

This is one of those rare very funny books that you end up buying again and again to give to people. It’s a spot-on satire of corporate office life in the 21st century, largely told through the emails of marketer Martin Lukes, and it’s particularly good at skewering the buzzwords of corporate and marketing speak and the platitudes of personal development.

As Lukes tells a headhunter: “We have gone beyond traditional marketing into a new age of synchronicity across functionalities.” Quite so.

Lukes is the sort of man who sends motivational emails to his own children in the style of a management guru, and who engages in heated negotiations with his life coach Pandora (“Strive to thrive!”) over what percentage “better than my bestest” he can be.

But I don’t really want to tell you too much about this one if you’ve not read it, because it’ll spoil the fun. A lot of lay readers imagined this book was completely fantastical and OTT when it came out. Little do they know.

Infinite Jest , by David Foster Wallace

It’s 1,104 pages long, it’s got 96 pages of arch footnotes, and it’s sheer brilliance from start to finish. Infinite Jest is set in a dystopian American near-future, and deals—among many other things—with tennis, addiction, optics, Canadian separatism, pharmacology, tattoos, disfigurement, and childhood trauma. Its three main settings are an addict’s halfway house, a hot-housing tennis academy, and a mountain ridge.

It’s full of riffs on popular culture, the excessive consumption of which Wallace equates with addiction, and of parodies of marketing and advertising language and ideas. Most famous, perhaps, is the book’s notion of “Subsidised Time,” under which years are no longer known by their numerical reference but by their corporate sponsor, e.g. “Year of the Whopper,” “Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar,” and—my favourite—“Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile.”

Most of the action of the novel takes place in “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” believed by DFW fanboys and girls to be 2009.

Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread , by Chuck Palahniuk

Among the more characteristic gross-out stories of this 2015 short story collection by the author of Fight Club and Snuff , there’s an interlinked trio of unexpected animal fables: How Monkey Got Married, Bought A House, and Found Happiness in Orlando ; Why Aardvark Never Landed ; and Why Coyote Never Had Money for Parking .

Couched as traditional fables, they tell stories of animals who become employed by Llewellyn Food Product Marketers, Inc, and the rivalries, challenges, and compromises they endure in order to survive corporate life. By making these characters animals, Palahniuk paints a picture of the workplace as Darwinian jungle, and what a lot of fun he has in the process.

Monkey, for instance, can sell snow to the Eskimos. “Blessed was Monkey with charm, and when she smiled at Stag or Panther or Eagle, they smiled in return and sought to buy whatever product Monkey was shilling. She sold cigarettes to Badger who did not smoke. And Monkey sold beef to Ram, who did not eat meat. So clever was Monkey that she sold hand lotion to Snake, who had no hands!”

Monkey’s career success grows, but she ends up being forced to market a highly dubious cheese with a problematic smell of burning hair, a hint of salmonella (and something else). The tension mounts as Monkey’s rival Coyote throws down the gauntlet in an extreme challenge for promotion…

Five Go On A Strategy Away Day , by Bruno Vincent

Would you rather die than play a trust exercise with your co-workers? Then this one’s for you. “It was time for the Annual Lupiter Fünckstein Away Day […] during which Julian knew he would be expected to show leadership, inspiration, and encouragement to the others. There were, however, several impediments to this. First was that he loathed team-building exercises: he fundamentally disagreed with the idea of them; he hated the manner in which they were carried out; he found the measurement of their successes to be entirely dubious and their actual outcomes frequently unhelpful; and, of course, they prevented everyone from getting on with their real work.”

Booked into a swanky hotel next to the jolly motorway services, the five must learn how to work better and grow as a team. But messages sneaked through the hotel dumb waiter point to a secret smuggling ring (either that, or a dodgy romance between Shelly in Production and Luke in the Postroom).

One of a series of new Enid Blyton books for grown-ups—others include Five Go Gluten-Free , Five On Brexit Island , and Five Give Up The Booze —this is the ideal stocking filler for the workshop facilitator in your life.