Deleted Scene

The Marketing Lecture

I cut this short scene in an early draft: it’s kind of amusing, but slams the brakes on the storyline. Unlike the “sex” and “sex, sex, sex” sections at the end of Chapter 13 (which also put the story on hold), this didn’t contribute enough to stay. It did convey a little of Scat’s cynicism for marketing, but that was established pretty well already.

Originally, this scene came immediately after “an epic dinner with 6.“ Especially at the start, I wrote a lot of flashbacks, exposition, and fantasy sequences. But the more the story asserted itself, the more these things intruded.

time out

On the first day of my marketing course, the lecturer walked in and wrote on the board:

Marketing is the world’s only truly useless industry. It does nothing except create advertising people don’t want to watch, products people don’t need to buy and expenses that must be absorbed into the purchase price of everything they touch.

“Okay,” the lecturer said. “I’m lying, of course. What’s wrong with this statement?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause, then some mature-aged student came up with the sort of pathetic answer that made the rest of us glad we hadn’t spoken up. The lecturer wrote it on the board, and for the next 55 minutes we thought up useful things marketers did. By the end, the lecturer had covered the board with our ideas and we were all feeling pretty smart.

“You’re all wrong,” he said. “None of you picked what was wrong with it.”

He stared around the room until the mature-aged student couldn’t contain herself any longer and asked, “So... what is wrong with it?”

The lecturer, who I still regard as the only one of my teachers who truly understood marketing, said:

“There are two truly useless industries. The other is accounting.”

I've taught marketing, but no, I never did this.