Literature Isn’t Native Advertising. But What If It Was?

https://twitter.com/nybooks/status/520598088680239104
Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” isn’t native advertising for Orkin Pest Control. But what if it was?

George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t native advertising for Sparkling ICE and Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey… but a brand manager can dream.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most powerful novels about the Great Depression, and Welch’s is one of the most powerful brands in grape juice. Can’t we put 2 and 2 together?

I read Moby-Dick hoping to find great native advertising for whale watching trips and was disappointed to find Mr. Melville threw away an opportunity.

Joan Didion’s The White Album doesn’t really have anything to do with the Beatles or a wedding albums supplier, but what if Joan Didion only only wrote essays about brands? Wouldn’t those brands be that much more fascinating?

Edgar Allan Poe once famously said, “Quoth the Raven, nevermore!” Each Sunday Baltimore Ravens fans cheer, “Go Ravens!” Historians will debate which phrase is more viral, but people who love the power of telling stories through brands will never think of one without the other.

On the surface, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has nothing to do with photo messaging start-up apps, but isn’t James Joyce’s lyrical language the perfect brand building tool for Snapchat?

Just throwing this out there, but would anything be taken away from the ending of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening if the author devoted a page to the ten hottest two-piece bathing suits on sale at Walmart?

Chipotle recently published content by Jonathan Safran Foer and Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for content in 1993! If you are a content producer, you have to ask yourself: is there any open patch of un-contented space that I could content up with enough branded content that we are all of us — every single brand, consumer, and content-producer in the whole wide world — content?