Annals of self-promotion

Despite evidence to the contrary, I hate to promote myself. I find the process humiliating. But increasingly, I think, it’s inescapable, which explains why I’m lately very alert to every fresh rationale to make me feel better about something I’m probably going to have to do whether I like it or not. Thus while watching this documentary about Mark Twain on PBS the other night, I was interested to learn how early in his writing life he shamelessly promoted himself, and how aggressively. And how well.
After an early series of travel articles that he wrote was picked up by several newspapers, he decided to leverage this into a publicity event and turn it into a lecture. He rented the Academy of Music, on Pine Street in San Francisco, for 50 (borrowed) dollars. He also spent $150, also borrowed as I understand it, to advertise and promote the event. This was in 1866. The $200 he spent would work out to just over $2,500 in today’s dollars. Twain would’ve been 30 or 31 years old, and I’m pretty sure he’d only started wrtinng for money a year or so before that. A young writer today borrowing and spending $2,500 to promote himself seems kind of brazen.

Anyway, here’s part of what the newspaper ad promoting his “Lecture on the Sandwich Islands” said:

A couple of things about this. First, I think it holds up pretty well. Maybe it’s not going to cut it as a McSweeneys submission or whatever, but for something written in 1866, it’s pretty self aware.

More to the point, the ad assumes an audience that’s already used to the tomfoolery of promotion, and ready to laugh at a knowing critique of it.

This interests me a great deal, because so many analyses of the modern, “savvy” consumer who “sees through” traditional marketing imply that until relatively recently, consumers mindlessly took orders from advertising. In reality, there’s a mountain of evidence that consumers have been able to “see through” (and mock, and reject) advertising for a long, long time. And this might be the earliest example I’ve seen that however “savvy” consumers are today, the widespread ability to see ad hyperbole for exactly what it is, is anything but new.

Morever, this is a good example of how making fun of advertising can be a good form of advertising: Twain’s performance sold out, and he was on his way to an extraordinary career — thanks to his enormous talent, yes, but also thanks to some pretty clever self-promotion.