Selling Capitalizm
Jennifer
Government
"It's simply impossible
to be cynical enough about marketing." This observation
comes not from some radical, anticapitalist culture
jammer but from the editor of the weekly trade magazine
Advertising Age, warning readers that product
placement and other marketing tactics have become
so pervasive and duplicitous that they've begun to
"stampede the boundaries of consumer tolerance."
At what point, he asks, "does the consumer become
so jaded that the messages lose effectiveness?"
One answer to this question is suggested by Jennifer
Government, a funny and clever novel by Max Barry
that's set in the "near future." In the
book's opening pages, we learn of the latest guerrilla
marketing campaign from Nike: to build buzz, the shoe
manufacturer orders up a carefully orchestrated series
of shootings at stores selling its new line of sneakers.
"We take out 10 customers, make it look like
ghetto kids, and we've got street cred" to spare,
a Nike marketing executive explains. "I bet we
shift our inventory within 24 hours. . . . Talk about
edgy. This defines edgy."
Just to reiterate: this is merely a satirical novel, not an investigative report. Even so, one wonders what the real-life lawyers at Nike and various other corporations with cameos in Jennifer Government will think of the book, which makes a very spirited attempt to be "cynical enough about marketing." The plug-a-few-customers-for-profits initiative — which comes off quite nicely for Nike's sales and earnings — is only the beginning, and sets in motion a much bigger showdown designed to impress even the most jaded reader.
Barry, a 29-year-old Australian who lives in Melbourne, paints a world dominated (even more so than the one we live in) by corporations and "capitalizm." Here marketing imagery is present on a scale that makes the nightmarish total ad immersion of the film Minority Report seem subtle. Individuals even carry the names of the organizations they work for — a hapless young man named Hack Nike is drawn into the deadly shoe promotion by two ruthless marketing executives, both named John Nike — leaving the unemployed with no surnames at all. As in 1984, the planet seems to have been carved into a handful of massive nation-states (Australia is part of the United States). But Big Brother is a private enterprise, geopolitics are irrelevant compared with transnational corporate competition, and frequent-flier programs have morphed into huge affinity schemes that link companies in NATO-like alliances. Institutions like government and the police still exist, but they're so weak that in order to finance, say, an investigation of the Nike slayings, they must raise money from the victims' families.
It is in this way that an agent called Jennifer Government is able to pursue the case of the Nike killings. And it's fairly clear that her motivations are unusually strong. She seems to have it in for one of the John Nikes. In addition, the bar code tattoo under her left eye is a good hint that she used to work, enthusiastically, in the private sector and perhaps has scores to settle. As for John Nike, at first he actually seems to be in trouble with headquarters for the shoe-selling stunt, but soon he commandeers power on a global scale as he advocates a take-no-prisoners style in the increasingly pitched battle between the two big frequent-buyer alliances. "Battle" is not a metaphor: with corporations free to hire anyone from street gangs to paramilitary groups (the police are available for a fee, and so is the National Rifle Association), establishing brand dominance can easily spiral into armed strikes.
Barry is obviously up to more than letting an amusing thriller unfold against a heavily branded backdrop. At times, he even seems to be aiming for a kind of ad-world version of Dr. Strangelove. As the action heats up, John Nike lectures the honchos of Nike and its allies: "Let's not pretend these are the first people to die in the interests of commerce." Finally, he advocates sweeping government out of the picture once and for all, and by any means necessary. "Just do it," he concludes.
The new corporate world Barry portrays is outrageous, but he doesn't exactly seem outraged by it. In fact, he appears ambivalent, almost fatalistic — this is "capitalizm" run amok, but it's more funny than scary. Hack Nike eventually signs on with a group of anti-big-business pranksters who pull stunts like spray-painting "feed me" on a billboard image of a rail-thin woman in a Gap outfit. But their antics seem small and a bit pathetic. The experience transforms Hack, allowing him to stop being a mindless cog, but for a moment it also looks to be turning him into a selfish jerk, although Barry never quite gets around to fleshing this out.
It's probably not fair to criticize Jennifer Government for failing to make the reader angry enough to toss a chair through a Starbucks window. Even the most ambitious social satires tend to have rather limited power in the real world, and Barry is surely more interested in entertaining than in preaching or inciting. And he is entertaining. For the first hundred pages or so, he unleashes enough wit and surprise to make his story a total blast. If the last two-thirds of the book don't quite live up to that promise, it's because keeping up the breakneck pace means sketching too many flat characters and a plot that tends toward the black-and-white. The novel is written in a style concerned less with an enduring shelf life than with quickly satisfying the customer. There's a bustling cast, the nonstop action is broken into 86 easily digestible chapters, and most of the exposition is in the form of dialogue. Barry rarely has the patience for a paragraph that lasts more than a few sentences.
Presumably, he's after the same under-35 peers that the advertising world is targeting. And it may be that maintaining his tone — a little disgusted, highly amused — is a more effective strategy than trying to lead the overt backlash Advertising Age was so worried about. Recently, when that same journal published the results of a poll about product placement, the most surprising revelation was that 35 percent of the respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 said the practice is "not pervasive enough." If taken at face value, this is startling. But I prefer to think that what it really means is that 35 percent of the people in that age group thought the question was too ridiculous to deserve a serious answer.
Either interpretation might help put those Nike lawyers at ease when they're thinking about how much of a threat. Jennifer Government is to the company's reputation — and about Max Barry's intent. My review copy includes a brief summation of publicity plans that include a "guerrilla marketing campaign," as well as a report that the film rights have already been optioned. This is good news. Jennifer Government could be a very diverting movie. And, needless to say, the opportunities for ingenious product placement are just about unlimited.
This review appeared in the February 16, 2003 edition of the New York Times Book Review.
