I shifted again in this dumb block of a chair, then again, trying to get comfortable. “I know there’s an analogy coming with this and PR, but I’m not following you yet.”
Celeste took another sip of coffee. She took pleasure in this—knowing something I didn’t, making me wait till she was ready to give it to me. Me, I didn’t like holding anything back from people. It made me feel all stuffed-up inside.
“How many advertising agencies are in this town, Casey?”
“Six good ones, maybe. Double that in total.”
“Would you consider that a red or a blue ocean?”
Well, now she was being patronizing. “Red,” I said. There was a little tone, I have to admit. I added, “Obviously.”
“How many people like Ellen live in this town?”
“What do you mean, people like Ellen?”
“People trying to create and capitalize on notoriety through product creation and endorsement.”
“Well, hmmm.” I cocked my head and looked up toward the ceiling. A large mirror hung on the wall. Its wavy glass made it impossible to see yourself clearly. “Minneapolis is technically a second-tier city, so not nearly as many as in New York or L.A. But I can think of at least twenty off the top of my head—”
Local cooking show people, reality show veterans, bloggers, YouTube and Instagram influencers—they were everywhere, pressing cards into my hand, appearing at some event or another at bars or so-called lifestyle boutiques, posting self-promotional status updates and highly stylized photographs designed to make the rest of us feel fat, poor, boring, and envious. That sounds a bit resentful, but I suppose that’s because I was resentful: they were naked with their attention-seeking in a way that I wasn’t, but sometimes wished I could be.
But how, how? First there was the matter of dignity. Also that antenna that let me know how other people were doing and thinking and feeling. You can’t in good faith start an Instagram account dedicated to your daily fitness regimen if you have this antenna, you just can’t; you’d die a thousand deaths before you got your first jump-lunge off the ground. Self-awareness was a liability among personal branders, not to mention other-awareness. You had to, as the saying went, do you. Which so far as I could tell meant act with impunity.
“And is that a red or blue ocean?”
“Okay, okay,” I leaned back in the chair as best I could, given its stiffness, and put my hands up. “Uncle! Red.”
Celeste looked at me like I’d just spoken Portuguese. “Uncle?”
I cocked my head, surprised. “It’s what you say when—”
Before I could continue, she was talking again, opening a slim drawer in her desk and pulling out one of those dense food bars. “I have no problem with staying in a red ocean,” she was saying. “People’s Republic was founded in a red ocean, and we’ve done very well for ourselves. I’ve done very well for myself,” she said, mostly to herself. “But our capabilities are outgrowing the current business model.” She unwrapped the food bar, which had the size and consistency of a cockapoo turd. She took a bite. Chewing, she said, “And that’s where you come in.”
“Me?” I felt my eyebrows go up to my hairline.
My astonishment was not a drill. When you grow up in the Midwest, especially if you attend public schools, you’re conditioned toward the average. Sure, homogeneity is the source of our racism, but it also makes it easy for us to get along. Differences, including intelligence or talent, are shamed and amended, so that we might be compressed to a tolerable middle. Everyone is comfortable because no one is exceptional. Most of my high school class graduated straight to the community college down the road.
Celeste swatted away my incredulity. She did not suffer modesty any more than she suffered fools. “Yes, of course you. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Nothing made my heart swell more than someone powerful telling me I was special. On a large scale, I think this is how fascism works. On a small scale, I listened with slavish devotion as Celeste went into a lengthy explanation of how successful entertainers make most of their money. Turned out it wasn’t through the work itself—music or movies or shows—it was through sponsorships and endorsements. Big, meaty deals that allowed big, meaty corporations to align themselves with the reputation of whatever lucky schmuck they chose to be their “face.” People less real-famous and more Internet-famous were doing the ratchet version of this all the time: writing “sponsored” posts for companies who sent them free swag, earning a percentage of profits if a reader bought something after clicking the embedded referral link. “But there’s a glut of these people,” Celeste said, yanking off a piece of nutritional taffy so hard I thought her teeth would break. “The traditional mixing of personal and corporate branding is tired. We go into that market like we’re doing with Ellen, we’ll be fine, we’ll hold our own. But I don’t want to just hold our own.”
She set down the near-empty wrapper and opened her computer back up, started typing. I knew what Celeste wanted. She craved power the way a college virgin craved sex: all back half of the brain, all alligator impulse. In some way or another she must have gotten screwed over, big time, early on in her life, or maybe just the opposite. Otherwise I could not account for the unabashed aggression that kept her scrambling to the top of every mountain, every hill, hell, every gravel pile.
When she turned the computer around, I saw a white screen and a word I’d never seen before typed in Helvetica.
“Nanü,” she finally said.
“Nanü?” I said.
“PR’s new branch,” she said. “Brokering corporate opportunities for the last untapped creative influencers. Designed to create fresh content for companies that need to hit the reset button, and long-term financial solutions for influencers who have none.”
I flipped back through the conversation we’d just had, trying to put the pieces together. Celeste wore that irritated expression she got when she remembered she has a faster brain than the average model. She said: “Why do you think I asked about your friend? I’m talking about writers.”
I burst out laughing.
“Are you crazy? Writers aren’t influencers! Influencers are like, seventeen-year-olds with a YouTube channel!”
Celeste smiled a crocodile smile. “Yet. Writers aren’t influencers yet. ‘Yet’ is the name of the blue ocean game.”
I was still laughing. Cognitive dissonance does that to a gal: less humor and more the body gasping Does not compute!
“Sorry, sorry, but I just can’t see this happening. Writers are like—I mean, Susan has to lie down after she goes grocery shopping. These people walk around with no skin on. I really can’t imagine them wanting to plug further into social media—”
“Do you know what makes excellent skin?” Celeste said. “The best skin?” She paused. “Money.”
Before I could protest further, she further launched into her pitch. Companies that had fallen out of favor with the general public, or perhaps had never been in favor—oil companies, utilities, recalled meat companies, Dippin’ Dots—could no longer afford or attract real celebrities as spokespeople; no legit star would sign with them. And these lower-cost aspirational celebrities, like Ellen, as well as fledgling social media influencers, were too concerned about dignifying their budding brand to work with these unfavorable companies. But well-known authors, who already had plenty of cachet, were the penny stocks of the fame market. Not only did they have a credible brand name—at least among “intellectual-spendy upper-middle-classers,” as Celeste called them—they also had what these companies really needed and wanted: creative capital whose best functions were language-based. With Nanü serving as broker, these companies could hire authors to be the face (or voice, for the less attractive ones) of their company, or simply hire the authors to help reshape and rebrand their identity through text-based social media platforms.
When she was finished
, I scratched my effortless-looking bedhead hair, which had taken thirty-five minutes and two different hot irons to arrange, and thought: when Susan hears about this, she is going to lose her shit.
But what I said was: “I can see how this would be useful for the companies you’re describing. But the writers? I dunno. I still can’t see them getting on board. Not just because of like, social maladjustment. The ones I know hate, and I mean like, despise, you know, consumer capitalism—”
Now it was Celeste’s turn to laugh.
“I know, I know,” I said. “It’s cliché.”
Celeste was still laughing. I had gotten her good.
I said, “But seriously, Susan doesn’t even buy shampoo, she mixes water with baking soda. She says the beauty industry is a con.”
“Oh God, that is rich,” Celeste finally said, wiping the corner of her eye with her ring finger. “Straight out of central casting.”
I could feel myself getting a little defensive. “Well, you don’t have to put it like that. It’s a serious difference in values. I really can’t see real writers lining up to, whatever, tweet for Exxon—”
Celeste heard the edge to my voice. It steeled her own. “You’ll be surprised what people are willing to do once you put the right dollar amount on the table.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“It’s always that simple,” Celeste said. She sat up straighter, her spine a rod. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I promise you. It’s always that simple.” She reached over the top of her laptop screen and clicked the forward arrow. Up popped these pie charts on the screen that compared authors’ current average earnings (from advances, royalties, foreign rights, speaking engagements, and whatnot) with the projected earnings from Nanü, with consideration given to levels of sponsorship and levels of something called “creative engagement.” The difference in numbers, even at the lowest tier of engagement, was like the difference between a cake pop and an entire cake.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Then I said, “That is a lot of money.”
Celeste said, “And when these writers have this kind of money, when they’re not struggling with teaching jobs or menial office labor—think of all they’ll be able to do. They can finally”—she paused meaningfully—“get back to writing. Whatever they do with Nanü isn’t going to take up nearly as much time and energy as what they do now to make ends meet. And furthermore, it’s ridiculous, frankly almost criminal, how little capital publishers have to work with this day and age. Poor things. Working so hard and having so little to show for it, financially or otherwise—”
“Huh,” I said. “You have a point.”
“As Darwin said, adaptation is the key to survival.”
“Did Darwin say that?”
Celeste continued. “The partnerships which Nanü alone can broker, thanks to the network I’ve built for two decades from the ground up, are crucial to the financial and behavioral health of these writers, like your friend, who”—she laughed again, it was somewhere between malicious and benevolent—“let’s be honest, aren’t exactly known for either.”
She went on to explain that she’d gotten the idea for this enterprise the night after we’d first met with Ellen, while listening to a public radio program about belief and spirituality. “Ordinarily I can’t stand that sort of thing,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But the author they had on was very compelling. Julian North, have you heard of him?”
“Julian North?” I said.
I had more to say, but before I could Celeste continued. “He was talking about the fact that it had taken him ten years to write his new novel because most of his life was taken up with family, teaching, freelancing, editing, cooking, dentist appointments, what have you. And what I realized as he was talking was that someone like Julian might have a mid–six figure salary at the companies we work with and yet here he was, teaching kids to write poetry at some public university for $60k a year and editing cover letters on the side. What a shame, I thought. Here we have talent with huge potential and zero outlet for it. The man is brilliant—”
“Oh my God, isn’t he?” I interrupted. “He’s amazing. He literally changed my life.”
I wasn’t bullshitting, either. Julian North was something of a hero of mine; he’d given a talk at my college sophomore year. Though I’d never heard of him prior to the visit, Susan had insisted I come with her to his reading. “Ugh, why?” I remember saying, splayed pantsless on my twin extra-long. It was fall, which meant we’d already cranked up the radiator. “I’m busy.”
“With this?” Susan pointed to the DVD case on my bed. On the front was an image of a curly-haired woman looking wistfully at the New York City skyline. “Case, you know you can’t watch too many episodes in a row, or you’ll get sad. The book is good, trust me. It’s just the kind of thing you’d like.”
“Readings are boring. I can read the book myself.”
“What’s the last book you read?”
I stared up at the ceiling. “Ummm…Machiavelli.”
“Actually read, not the SparkNotes.”
“That’s not fair!”
Susan was more tolerant of my vices those days, indulgent even. And I was less self-absorbed, more willing to appease. It was the honeymoon phase of our friendship, and subsequently, it did not take much more coaxing for me to haul myself out of bed, repants myself, and head with her to the auditorium.
It’d been a packed room, not just with students and faculty but college-town citizens who prided themselves on living in a place with such fine opportunities. Susan said hello to the four people at our school that she liked, I said hello to whomever I could get my hands on, and we sat in the front right corner along with other students from Susan’s creative writing workshop: girls and boys who wore large glasses and looked at you with recrimination if you used outmoded cultural references. I got along well with them, or about as well as a bull gets along with china.
The lights dimmed and the provost came onstage, followed by Julian North. Tall and silver-haired, his gesturing hands thick and capable, he gave an hour-long speech on why writing was the key to self-knowledge, reading a revolutionary act, and compassion the radicalism of our age. It was the usual inspirational college stuff, I guess, but at the time it moved me the way a waterfall crashes through the placid river beneath it. I remembered something I’d always known and too often forgot: that reading meant more than escape. I remembered walking in the woods near my house with my science book after we’d learned taxonomy in school; I remembered pointing to the trees while saying out loud, “You are a birch, you are a maple.” I remembered resting my hands on their trunks and how they felt like cheeks; I remembered knowing them and in turn, being known.
That’s what Julian was saying up there. How words saved you from yourself. How when we called things by their right names we became bound to them, we were freed from the great alone. “We must write our hearts,” he’d said at the end of his address. When the house lights rose, I pounded my hands in applause and turned toward Susan with tears in my eyes. She nodded; there were tears in her eyes, too.
We got in the long line to get our books signed. When it was my turn, I couldn’t stop babbling about how much I loved his speech and how I loved to read and how just then he made me feel so human and boy, come to think of it, maybe I should become an English major, too, just like my best friend Susan.
He smiled graciously. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m glad you came.” But it was the way he said it. Or was it the eye contact? I believed, then, that an understanding passed between us. He saw my entirety, and accepted the lot. I was not used to feeling this acceptance with anyone besides Susan, certainly not with a man. To Casey: Write on! Julian, read the inscription in my book. The words seemed both encouragement and imperative. I was certain he had chosen them just for me.
The very next day I’d marched into the registrar’s office and declared my English major. I didn’t want to be a writer myself; the act of composition had never interested me. But I did want to be around writers, start reading again, use the parts of my brain that could do more than flirt and banter and skid through classes by the skin of my teeth. No, I wanted to sink in my teeth. I wanted, more than anything, meaning.
Meanwhile Celeste was saying more about what went on in Julian’s radio interview, the marketability of even his casual ideas, how it all seemed meant to be. “It’s meant to be,” I echoed reflexively. What was meant to be? It was hard to be a person and a mirror simultaneously. “Totally meant to be.”
“I’d love for you to talk to Julian at some point—” Celeste said.
“Oh wow, really?” I said. The thought made me feel funny inside. I shoved the funniness into the drawer where I kept all my repressed objects.
“—providing all goes well. But for now I need you to work on bringing Ben Dickinson on board as our proof of concept. I spoke to him and he’s expressed tentative interest in running the Instagram and Facebook accounts of Waterman Quartz fountain pens. They have a new line, WQ, they’re hoping to market to younger men. Take him to lunch today and work your magic, will you?” She reached into the drawer where she kept her food bars and pulled something else out. “Which reminds me. I had this ordered for you.”
She handed me an American Express business gold card. It had the word Nanü and my full name, Casey Cornelia Pendergast, stamped on it in silver. This beautiful gold card had the same color and promise of Vegas and Times Square and the Wild West and the very best dreams of the United States of America. When I took it in my hand and felt the weight of a nearly unlimited line of credit, I couldn’t help it, I sighed, “Oh my God!” in orgasmic release.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 6