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A preview of future book jackets, Fay Weldon style
In 2000, Bill Fitzhugh published Cross Dressing, a satiric/comic novel about advertising and hyper-consumerism. When he realized that the book (his third) wasn’t going to get much attention, he started wondering how to change that, and decided that it would be handy to get corporate sponsorship. According to his story, he’d already written most of the book and there were several scenes involving cocktails. So he simply wrote in the name “Seagrams” and, voila, product placement in contemporary fiction was on the move. (Imagine how much money Carver could’ve made off all that whiskey in his stories.) Fitzhugh claims that he used the already-existing element of the cocktails because he didn’t want to interfere with the structure and integrity of the book, and also because he’s lazy. Makes sense to me.
Fay Weldon, however, wasn’t so noble. She was paid £18,000 by Bulgari, an Italian jeweler, for mentioning the Bulgari name a dozen times in her book, The Bulgari Connection, which came out in 2001. This sponsorship was widely disparaged by authors such as J.G. Ballard, Ricky Moody, and Michael Chabon, but Cathy’s Book did the same sort of sponsorship with cosmetics in 2006. (Supposedly that book was also finished before being corporately whored-out, and the only changes were in changing generic cosmetics and colors to Proctor & Gamble brands and color names.)
This is not exactly a new thing. Patronage was the way things worked for centuries; artists were supported by wealthy people (or organizations) in exchange for their art. (See “Michelangelo,” and “Medici, House of.”) What put an end to patronage was not the realization that it was some kind of sleazy form of selling out, but mass consumption. If your art was only available to a handful of rich folks because of high publication costs and narrow distribution channels, you had to have financial support in order to create it. But since capitalism has opened up more markets and created a huge middle class, art has been commoditized and widely available. You don’t have to be rich to buy a copy of a Michael Chabon book. But while there are some dozens (hundreds, maybe) of writers making a living by sales, most don’t, just as there were never hundreds of thousands of artists being financially supported by monarchs and such. Most contemporary artists teach or otherwise work to support themselves. A few get grants, which are a sort of mostly benevolent form of patronage.
When an artist receives a Guggenheim or a grant from the NEA, people celebrate. It’s a glorious achievement. It buys the artist time to work without worrying about, you know, finding food and shelter. But most grants don’t ask for anything in return; a speech, maybe, or perhaps an appearance or two at fundraising events, that sort of thing. When a corporation forks over cash or products in exchange for exposure, you’re diving headfirst into waters well-sailed by film and television.
Some groups are pissed about product placement and stealth advertising in visual media, whining that placements “don’t allow us to have the usual veil of skepticism we have when we watch a standard commercial.” Oh, boo-hoo. For one thing, most product placements are pretty blatant; when the opening shot of a scene is of a logo, are you really fooled? Or when shows like “The Closer,” which my mother-in-law is crazy about, input incredibly stilted sections of dialogue allowing one character to explain to another how easy and intuitive it is to use the new Prius’s navigation system (and then the other person responds with an out-of-character and equally stilted, “My, that’s so easy, anyone could do it!”), do you really not realize you’re watching a commercial? Yes, it’s infuriating when the product interrupts the story for a minute to give you a feature rundown, but it’s not underhanded, is it? What I mean is, a reader who experiences the same kind of blatant product worship is going to put down the book unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
There are regulations for how much advertising can show up in children’s TV shows, and regulations deterring smoking in video, and there was a ban on product placement in the UK up until last year, but what exactly are people afraid is going to happen? That television shows will consist of nothing more than people eating at Applebee’s, then getting in their Ford Focus and driving to Wal-Mart to buy some Oneida cutlery, which they then put to use in some hilarious hijinks also involving Red Bull and a Swingline stapler? (Who would watch that anyway?) Better yet, some folks want television networks to alert the viewer when a product is on=screen, using such things as a flashing red light or a scrolling notice at the bottom. Um, doesn’t that just make the product stand out more? (Do you want full-page ads between chapters of a novel?) And wouldn’t a viewer then focus, at least momentarily, on figuring out which product is being advertised rather than watching the show?
And of course most of the numerous articles and blog posts on advertising in literature say that advertisements already have a place alongside writing: in magazines. But why is it okay for advertisements to show up alongside creative prose in the New Yorker, but not in a novel?
[Related side note: We’ve accepted corporate donations as appropriate for public television support; why not for writers? Why not register yourself as a nonprofit and allow people and companies to write off their donations to you? Because you can’t become a 501(c)(3), and most other nonprofit types don’t allow for donors to write off their donations on tax forms. Would rewriting the tax code to allow for this help? Or would this just create some king of regulatory monstrosity? How do you decide who gets to be a nonprofit? Do you have to have two or three books out, first? Do you have to be a full-time writer? What if you band four or five authors together and form a foundation? Let’s sort out the issues and get started. This feels like a good idea to me.]
How closely do we need to watch this sort of thing? Should I avoid having a character stop in at a rest area along the highway for fear of indirectly advertising for those volunteers with the coffee and cookies? Would I be out of line to say a character drank a Bug Light, even if that’s exactly what he/she did? Are readers going to start thinking that every single brand name in a piece of writing is the influence of a monetary/goods exchange?
In the end, a reader is going to like or dislike a book for the same reasons she always has. And if there are product mentions, they only add another level of difficulty for the writer. That is, if the placements are handled unobstrusively and used to create a sense of the world (people really do drink Coca-Cola, eat at Pizza Hut, and drive Chevrolets), then they won’t be bothersome. But if they seem out of place (a character explaining the various benefits of Camels of Marlboros when all that was needed was for him to light up) or throw the ready out of the flow of the story, then it’s not going to bode well for the reader’s impression of the text. So I figure if an author manages to get paid a couple of thousand bucks to mention Sprite a half-dozen times, I’m only going to have a problem with it if it feels forced. Look at it this way: if you read a story about a guy who loves baseball, it’s probably going to feel more natural to the reader if the guy is obsessed with an actual team and not something you made up. Characters who populate the world we live in usually (not overwhelmingly, but usually) seem more genuine than characters in fictional towns using fictional products. So if there’s some reason your charcter needs to mention what brand of toothpaste she uses, and you can convince Colgate-Palmolive to give you $80 or $8,000 for the mention, I say more power to you.
But there’s a line somewhere that shouldn’t be crossed. I don’t know where it is; it might be getting paid up-front and then writing with the product/company in mind, like Weldon did. (In her defense, the book was essentially an in-house marketing deal; 750 copies were printed and distributed at a corporate party, and it wasn’t until later that HarperCollins picked it up.) But think about Shakespeare’s plays, which often extolled monarchical virtues on the surface and took subtle jabs if you paid attention. That’s what Fitzhugh was going for, putting product placements ina novel that was lambasting hyper-consumerism. Tongue in cheek, irony, etc. The point is that a good piece of writing is about much, much more than the products and services used. When you write in products, you run the risk of alienating your readers and taking them out of the story, so you’re going to have to be damn good about it. It’s a risk, and it comes down to having faith in your writing and your readers. I would love to see a skilled author take a whack at product placement, just to see what happens. Rick Moody, I dare you.
I just read Rick Moody’s story in Electric Literature, “Some Contemporary Characters,” that was told through tweets. For a short story class I’m taking at Lighthouse, a writing center in Denver, we were asked to write a piece of a story in another “genre”; I wrote mine in social worker case notes. How about writing a story through advertisments–a series of ads? I think this exercise could be funny and therapeutic.
That’s funny you mention that. I moonlight at a local journal called SpokeWrite, and one of the fiction pieces in the upcoming issue is written in the form of advertisements (with a few bits of dialogue/interaction mixed in). That’s part of what got me thinking about the subject.
I think any time a writer has to do something s/he isn’t comfortable with or used to, it can be only beneficial. Breaking the rules is the best way to learn how to bend them.