Frédéric Beigbeder
Lire 26.900

'My name is Octave and I dress in APC. I am an advertiser: yes, I pollute the universe. I am the one who sells you all that sh..t. The one who makes you dream of things you will never have. Always blue skies, always beautiful girls, perfect happiness, retouched in Photoshop. Slick images, music in the wind. When, after saving up, you manage to pay for the car of your dreams, the one I launched in my last campaign, I will have already made it go out of fashion. I will be three trends ahead, making you constantly feel dissatisfied. Glamour is the country you never arrive at. I intoxicate you with novelty, and the advantage of novelty is that it never stays new. There is always a newer novelty that makes the previous one old. Making you drool is my mission. In my line of work, no one desires your happiness, because happy people don't consume.

Your suffering boosts commerce. In our jargon, we have baptized it “post-purchase frustration.” You can’t live without a product, but as soon as you own it, you need another. Hedonism is not humanism: it’s a cash-flow. Its motto? “I spend, therefore I am.” But to create needs, one must stimulate jealousy, pain, dissatisfaction: these are my ammunitions. And my target is you.

I spend my life lying to you and am handsomely rewarded. [...]

I interrupt your movies on TV to impose my logos [...]. I recycle my slogans in your favorite magazines [...]. I am Everywhere. You will not escape me. Wherever you rest your eyes, my advertising reigns. I forbid you to get bored. I forbid you to think. The terrorism of novelty helps me sell emptiness. To stay on top of the wave, there must be emptiness underneath [...]. I establish what is True, what is Beautiful, what is Good. I cast the models you’ll be drooling over in six months. By printing them on billboards, you will christen them top models; my girls will put any woman over 14 in crisis. You idolize my choices. This winter, you’ll need breasts above your shoulders and a barren waist. The more I play with your subconscious, the more you obey me. If I praise a yogurt on the walls of your city, I guarantee you’ll go buy it. You believe you have free will, but one day or another you’ll recognize my product on a supermarket shelf and purchase it, just to taste it, believe me, I know my trade.

Mmm, it’s wonderful to penetrate your brain. I revel in your right hemisphere. Your desire no longer belongs to you: I impose mine. I forbid you to desire at random. Your desire is the result of an investment calculated in billions of euros. I decide today what you will want tomorrow.

[...]

To reduce humanity to slavery, advertising has chosen the soft approach. We live in the first system of man’s domination over man against which even freedom is powerless. Indeed, this system bets everything on freedom, it’s its greatest invention. Criticism only serves to highlight it more, pamphlets to strengthen the illusion of its honeyed tolerance. It subdues you with elegance. Everything is allowed, no one comes to beat you if you make a mess. The system has achieved its goal: even disobedience has become a form of obedience.'

(from the book)

With the first title 'Lire 26,900', a novel about the world of advertising, written by an advertiser who was then fired from the agency where he worked after the book was published in 2000.

By telling the story of an advertiser who tries in every way to get fired from the agency where he works, the power of advertising and the ruthlessness and cynicism of the advertisers’ environment are presented.

'Euro 13.89' is not a great novel, but its strength lies in its structure made of chapters almost all alternated with pages of never-realized advertising scripts, like TV movie interruptions – and YouTube videos –, and in explaining everything about advertising and the environments it relates to (agencies and festivals).

I had heard about this book from the philosopher Umberto Galimberti and read a passage of it in one of his talks, where he spoke about the market, on YouTube, and one day I found it in a second-hand shop for less than 1€.

And without much conviction, I bought it.

'Do you advert think?'

('Do you advertise thought?')

(BLUR, 'Advert' – 1993)