Marc Schultz

Pardon my Geek
July 20, 2007

As long as Harry Potter fans have carte blanche to geek out in every public forum available this week (and next week, and probably for a few weeks after that) I'm going to have to gush, as briefly as I can, about the Transformers movie, which I finally got around to seeing last night.

But this is my costume for the Harry Potter party.

But this is a book blog, so I'm going to rein it in here and tell you about Max Barry's debut novel from 1999, Syrup, which I happen currently to be reading. Barry had a pretty great little book in last year's Company, which is, like Syrup, a fast-paced satirical romp through modern corporate culture (with a heart). In the case of Company, there's a great, extended gag on publishing that crops up midway through. In the case of Syrup, it's Transformers that crops up midway through. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Syrup is about marketing. Obviously, marketing is a big fat easy target for satire, and as compensation of sorts Barry does away with attempts to invent a fictional company and just uses Coca-Cola (there's a note up front that reads, in part, "A sendup about marketing and the soft-drink industry is unthinkable without Coca-Cola"). And, to his credit, it isn't easy to satire well a target that big, but Barry pulls it off with smarts, laughs and insider savvy; as quoth PW, "this clever debut satire by 25-year-old Australian writer Barry will have readers nodding in agreement and quoting it to their friends."*

So what happens midway through Syrup is, there's a new project devised by Coca-Cola's hotshot young marketing talent, their biggest and most brilliant ad campaign ever: a full length, blockbuster $140 million motion picture (produced in association with Universal Studios) starring Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow and Coca-Cola. The idea is that product placement isn't enough -- isn't nearly enough -- and so, in this movietisement, Coke is the driving force behind the plot, a character in itself and, essentially, the hero of the story.

And eight years later, what do we have? A full length, blockbuster $150 million motion picture (produced in association with Paramount Studios) starring General Motors vehicles, of every possible make and model, as the heroes!

And it makes perfect sense: no matter how invested I was (er, am) in the characters, the world and who's going to get their hands on those energon cubes, Transformers the cartoon was always and foremost an ad for toys. And so it still is. Brilliant.

* "mktg case study #6: mktg cigarettes... The best part is that you get to defend the act of selling a product your customers can't stop buying by claiming they have freedom of choice."

Posted by Marc Schultz on July 20, 2007 | Comments (1)