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Are Writers Selling Out to Marketers? Alain de Botton’s “Heathrow Diary”

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I’ve always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London’s Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life – people and planes – in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita’s Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course – from Brian Eno’s "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg’s "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane – de Botton, as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow’s bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research – knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you’re close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the “precarious line between creative independence and commerce,” as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn’t the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: “There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: “That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet,” he said. “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: “I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station.”

And sure – why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller’s See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too – for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do – if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties’ agendas are transparent – as they were in De Botton’s airport project – readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA’s PR agency, told the NY Times that “If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they’d think they’re being marketed to.” Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate “branded conversations” among travelers “through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport — and potentially being a character in the book — and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip.”

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don’t market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create “meaning” for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment – the wealth spreads and generates a “meaning surplus.”

In this case, De Botton wasn’t hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The “Art of Travel” author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book’s free distribution to one of the world’s most frequented travel hubs). Afterwards the book will be available for sale through Amazon’s British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton’s "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers – a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from “Heathrow Diary”

[Image credit: LA Times]

Seen | Unseen

“Everything has symmetry when you just leave it where it is,” mathematician Marcus du Sautoy said in his talk at TEDGlobal in Oxford. Attending a TED conference is as asymmetrical an experience as you can imagine: Nothing is left where it is. The combination of riveting ideas and remarkable people you encounter is purportedly designed to disrupt your balance, routines of thinking, self-esteem, beliefs, values — even your sleep. After TED, you’re no longer congruent with your former self: You have seen things you have not seen before, you feel different, and you have been moved. Things have changed, and you know that only true passions cause real change.

After five days of delving into other people’s passions in Oxford, I felt that it was time to celebrate my own: football, a spectacle that combines archaic competition with sublime pleasure. In his scholarly essay “On the Alleged Dehumanization of the Sports Spectator,” Allan Guttmann describes football matches as cathartic events, “saturnalia-like occasions for the uninhibited.” So, on the first evening after TEDGlobal, I took the Jubilee line to London’s Wembley Stadium to see a rather meaningless preseason game between Tottenham Hotspur and a B-team of Europe’s current champions, FC Barcelona.

I’ve always thought — to paraphrase Pascal — that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not stay in a football stadium. A football arena is my refuge, my cave, my playing field, my “manspace.” After all the elevation, elusion, and enthrallment at TEDGlobal, I was craving a simple point of reference and a naive familiarity that only a football field can offer. Like a good pop song, it provides something archetypal that is immediately and permanently relevant, a way to look at life, a worldview. Football, like all sports, offers clear rules, and thus, comfort in a world of growing ambiguity. It satisfies the unfulfilled stories of our lives waiting to be resolved, catalyzed, and made sense of — by one single elegant sequence of interactions and passes that lead to the eruptive, collective, and yet so private celebration of a goal.

Football is like theater. It condenses all human emotions, all possible developments of a story onto one big stage that lies at the center of our attention for 90 minutes or more. Football gives its players the power to be the “authors of their own ambition,” as Alain de Botton suggested in Oxford, when he spoke about 21st-century career patterns. De Botton heralded tragedy as a more humane way to embrace failure and posited, “Hamlet lost, but he was not a loser.” Football possesses this appreciation for tragedy, too. Hearts will ache. Promises will be broken. Somebody will lose. But losers they will not be.

The football stadium is a space where the boundaries between player and spectator are still defined, but the distance from idea to implementation, the gap between unseen and seen, is negligible. A football game is a train of thought, a breathless stream of consciousness, but it is also the very act of acting itself. What you see is what you get. Football is “the head and hand united,” in the words of Richard Sennett, or better, the head and foot united. It is an accelerated microcosm of innovation, where the idea is the prototype is the product.

Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho once described it as follows: “What I do, always before a game — always, every night and every day — is try and think up things, imagine plays, which no one else will have thought of, and to do so always bearing in mind the particular strengths of each teammate to whom I am passing the ball. When I construct those plays in my mind, I take into account whether one teammate likes to receive the ball at his feet or ahead of him, if he’s good with his head and how he prefers to head the ball, if he’s stronger on his right or his left foot. That’s my job. That is what I do. I imagine the game.”

Players like Ronaldinho or the uniquely gifted Argentine Lionel Messi are artists, and like artists “they set up expectations of symmetry and break them,” as Marcus du Sautoy put it, “[because] in everything, uniformity is undesirable.” Innovation, which is needed to advance on the pitch, is asymmetrical by its very nature. The whole game of football is one big attempt to break symmetry through imagination and beauty.

At Wembley, my gaze traced the distinct white of the chalk marking the sidelines and penalty areas on the field, the calm before the storm, disturbingly quiet. I studied the goals, as they stood there, monolithic and self-absorbed, fully aware of their power to attract and fulfill that one simple desire. I admired their majestic symmetry that is only destroyed when man, goalie, enters the scene.

Below the main stands, I spotted Pep Guardiola, Barcelona’s coach, who had won all possible trophies with his club last season. And I recalled what TEDGlobal speaker Itay Talgam had said in Oxford about great conductors: They create the “conditions for the process to take place.” This is true for great football coaches, too. They simply enjoy watching and letting go — gaining influence as they embrace the loss of control over time and space, as some of the great players have in rare moments.

Spanish author Javier Marías’ story, “In Uncertain Time,” portrays Hungarian football player Szentkuthy, who, in the final minutes of a critical game rallies forward on his own, shakes off two defenders, and overcomes the goalkeeper. All that is then left to do is to slot the ball into the empty net, but even as the whole stadium rises to respond to the goal, he refuses to shoot. Instead, he advances, and stops the ball right on the goal line. Then, as the goalkeeper and the two defenders come running towards him, “Szentkuthy rolled the ball an inch or so forward and then stopped it again once it was over the goal line.” “He had thwarted imminence,” writes Marías, “and it was not so much that he had stopped time as that he had set a mark on it and made it uncertain, as if he were saying, ‘I am the instigator and it will happen when I say it will happen, not when you want it. If it does happen, it is because I have decided that it should.’” Szentkuthy’s action “pointed out the gulf between what is unavoidable and what has not been avoided, between what is still future and what is already past, between ‘might be’ and ‘was,’ a palpable transition which we only rarely witness.”

I was looking at the lush green of the football pitch that still allowed all possible mathematical configurations, all possible combinations of play. Seeing the unseen, I thought, means the ability to create multiple stories. Like dancers, football players interpret space, each in his own way. Everything is possible because anything is possible. Just as life, unfolding, is inevitable, so it goes with the referee’s first whistle: “It ain’t why, why, why, it just is” (Van Morrison). It simply happens — and afterwards, legions of commentators and analysts will attempt to reconstruct it, explain it, and demystify it, in vain.

As the teams entered the arena, 60,000 fans began chanting. The players occupied their positions — both teams lined up in a 4-4-2 formation, in perfect symmetry, anxious for the action to come. How I wished I could have held this moment of uncertainty a little longer, as Szentkuthy did when he stopped the ball on the goal line. I was thinking of my soon-to-be-born daughter and how her life and mine will be immediately and forever asymmetrical from the very minute she enters the world. I was thinking of the endless array of possibilities ahead of her.

Then the game began. I’d seen the substance of things not seen. Nothing would ever be the same again.

From the upcoming special TEDGlobal design mind issue "The Substance of Things Not Seen," available next week

On Travel (including Journeys around the Room)

On board a KLM 747 to Amsterdam, I’m reading Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as a preparation exercise for the TEDGlobal conference in two weeks.

De Botton's musings on travel are the required reading for a frequent traveler like me – a collection of mundane “running to stand still” moments, filled with memorable lines that affect you exactly the way traveling does: they are glimpses of greater meaning, a rejuvenating exposure to “otherness” that not only expands your horizon but also makes you believe again in the naïve assumption that the skies are friendly. It is a book about seeing the unseen (which is not necessarily the unknown). John Ruskin, the painter, is portrayed in a chapter on “Possessing Beauty,” and he chastises the hastiness of modern travelers: “The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he truly be a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

The most remarkable paragraph in the book, however, introduces Xavier de Maistre and his novel A Journey around My Room, the detailed account of a miniature travel experience from sofa to bed and back (with some notable digressions), and a defiant attempt to take Pascal’s famous adage ad absurdum: “The source of all of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Maistre does not know either but at least he is capable of keeping his itinerary limited to an absolute minimum. There are “those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much,” de Botton quotes Nietzsche, before concluding: “Satisfied with the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”

On the Beach

Someone once said that the sound of crushing ocean waves is louder than the engines of a starting plane. As I’m lying here on Poipu Beach in Kauai, I find this to be somewhat accurate. Everything else is quiet though, including my mind. Beach life brings back child memories of vacations with my parents in Tuscany: innocent flings and early scars from over-reaching -- the literal salt in the wounds, the exhaustion after a day out in the water, the crazy sunburn, in short: a premature "desire for anything" (as Walter Salles puts it in Central Station). All this makes me want to slightly paraphrase Pascal: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly on his beach."

Are You Good News?

I'm a news junkie, that is, I'm a good news junkie. And I'm a fan of people who are good news. I have always loved that expression, and, gratefully, met many people who brought it to life.

To say someone is good news is perhaps the best thing you can say about a person, especially in an age in which individuals are turning into mini-media companies. We all have our headlines, op eds, recurring columns, gossip, and human interest stories that we carry with us from cocktail party to interview to board room, sharing them with whomever pays the subscription fee (the attention dividend).

Like in the real media markets, there are more or less popular outlets, and the person who is most popular is often, if not always, the one who is "good news."

But what does that mean -- "good news"? And why are some people "good news" and others aren't? Here are a few observations: "Good news people" are aggregators -- they have perfected the art of recycling the best stories out there and telling them as if they were their own. Good news people have a great willingness to syndicate and share their stories. Furthermore, good news people have real news to share, news that are changing every day -- like the New York Times, they are always the same and never the same. You know what you get and what you don't. Good news people are trusted, consistent, and reliable, but they're also unpredictable and whenever you meet them they have fresh points of view. That's because they're open minded and constantly looking for provocative new ideas and thoughts. They're simply good. They warrant for quality and improve your life whenever they touch it.

Don't get me wrong, good news people are not just wearing a bright sunny smile -- they are authentic, genuine, and interesting. As Stefan Sagmeister says: "Everybody who is honest is interesting." You like watching them and listening to them. You like to watch them listen. Radiohead is good news. Nic Harcourt is good news. Barack Obama is good news. My friend Julian is good news. My wife is good news. If you have a lot of good news people around you, your life will be a great reading, every day.

Egonomics or How Can Humility Survive in a Capitalistic, “Dog Eat Dog,” Market?

David Marcum and Steven Smith, the authors of "Egonomics - What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (Or Most Expensive Liability)," are convinced that "ego has more power to help a company (or to hurt a company) than almost anything else. In fact, ego is the invisible line item on every company's profit and loss statement."

Guy Kawasaki has interviewed Steven Smith ("Are You an Egomaniac? Ten Questions with Steven Smith") and it's a great (and healthy!) read.

Here's an excerpt:

Kawasaki: How can humility survive in a capitalistic, "dog-eat-dog" market?

Smith: That’s the cool thing we discovered in our work, and the perceived "weakness" of humility is the assumption even in a question like this one. Humility is the only real way to become great, everything else being equal. As a trait, humility is the point of equilibrium between too much ego and not enough. Humility has a reputation of being the polar opposite of excessive ego.

In fact, the exact opposite of excessive ego is no confidence at all. Humility provides the crucial balance between the two extremes. When Jim Collins did his work in Good to Great, humility was one of only two characteristics he discovered that separated leaders capable of leading good—even very good—performing companies, and leaders who made their companies great performers. And all of those leaders who lifted their companies to greatness and sustained them for over fifteen years did it in the same dog-eat-dog world everyone else was in. Humility was custom made for the dog-eat-dog business world.

Read the entire interview

The Telephone Book of Manhattan and the Ecstasy of Truth

In a NY Times interview, Werner Herzog, the legendary German filmmaker, responds to accusations that he’s taken liberties with facts in some of his documentaries and his latest feature, “Rescue Dawn:”

"If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I’m imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate."

This statement reminds me of Stephen Glass and also the controversy around fabricated interviews with celebrities in the German SZ-Magazin (the equivalent to the NY Times magazine) several years ago, marking the end of “pop-journalism,” a free-spirited, highly damatized and subjective approach to documenting people and events (long before Lonelygirl15!).

I must say I still have a lot of sympathy for the pop-journalists, and I wholeheartedly agree with Herzog. I’m not saying making up or distorting facts is a prerequisite of great journalism, but facts can appear wrong when the solipstic truth behind them is not meaningful. Storytellers – and that includes both filmmakers and journalists - know too well that the moral of the story is that there is no story without moral.

Ultimate Laughter and Perfection: Thomas Bernhard

My favorite magazine -- The New Yorker -- has finally honored my favorite author -- Thomas Bernhard -- in a grandiose article by Ruth Franklin, “The Art of Extinction.” The Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet is widely acclaimed as one of the most provocative postwar writers in Europe but is little known in the US. Long before like-minded French enfant terrible Michael Hollebeueq, Bernhard established himself as a notoriously misogynistic hermit, an “Uebertreibungskuenstler,” an “exaggeration artist” and manic perfectionist who lacked faith in human relationships and only believed in the power of language to describe the shortcomings of an otherwise unbearably imperfect existence that was doomed by mental and physical diseases and an ever-present undercurrent of callous nihilism. Franklin describes Bernhard’s style, obsessively precise in its redundancy, as “linguistic sadism”: “Not only do his novels, pushing every idea to its extreme, require a similarly extreme form; he also took pleasure in prose that is hyperbolic, over the top, even joyful in its own insanity.”

I’ve adored Bernhard since I was a teenager. I liked reading about Bernhard as much as I liked reading him because it was hard to make it through a novel from beginning to end without losing your mind; pushing you closer to the edge and sometimes even beyond was Bernhard’s program. His short stories, poems, and dramas are more accessible although not easier to digest. Throughout his writing, there is a hidden tenderness, a pompous musicality, and a bleak sense of humor that can be hilarious.

At the end, though, for Bernhard, the glass remained less than half empty. In 1988, he died by assisted suicide, after long suffering from lung ailments. He remained a provocateur beyond his death: In his last will, he forbade the publication, production, and recitation of his works in his native Austria for 70 years. One final laugh, one final correction.