This may be the closest thing to a marketing crystal ball.
And it doesn’t even need aliens!
This month, we are plugging KidSmart! To learn how to donate time, money, or resources, please visit https://kidsmartstl.org/.
SOURCES
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-to-drink-water?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
https://archive.org/details/spacemerchants0000unse
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/392566.The_Space_Merchants
CBS Radio Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we4vWGqrJ2I
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Oh, hey. You caught me a little early today. I’m still reading the news and trying to figure out if there’s anything topical that pertains to marketing.
Let’s see… bad news. More bad news. AI-written news that’s probably not true. A press release masquerading as news. Hmmm.
Oh, look at this! The BBC’s Science Focus says a Canadian Hospital Study has found that we’re drinking water all wrong! You get better hydration if you sip instead of gulp. Hmmm.
No… not interested… swipe left… OK.
Well, I’m officially out of ideas for today’s show. So I guess we’d better go ahead and play the plug… but… hold on! Wait a second! I see something I’ve been wanting to talk about for awhile. I guess today’s as good as any.
This is The Space Merchants, a 1952 science fiction novel by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth that’s about the future of marketing. I like to call it Mad Men selling space. In this case, picking up your family and moving them to colonize Venus, a planet that has five hundred mile an hour winds, horrific lightning storms, an atmosphere that contains all sorts of noxious chemicals and, oh right, no rain or winter snow or usable water at all.
And in the course of this novel, our hero, the star-class copysmith Mitchell Courtenay of the advertising firm Fowler Shocken, is handed the account and told it’s his job not just to promote the market for this ill-advised lifestyle change, but to actually create the market for it, through the same techniques used to convince people to pack their kids lunches containing soyaburgers and regenerated steak and also ice cream, candie and a kid-friendly cigarette.
But he’s coming up against not just rival Madison Avenue agencies who want to steal this account for themselves, but also an ecoterrorist group called the Conservationists who are desperately worried that the only thing sending people to Venus is going to do is deplete the Earth of its resources and make the atmosphere even more polluted with fumes from departing rockets.
And, as Mitch finds out in the course of the novel, the dreams he’s selling are more than just harmless lies to make him rich and famous. They’re masking some truly terrible things.
So hey! Let me walk you through this wonderful novel, because even though it was first published 75 years ago, it anticipated the future pretty amazingly well.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
The Space Merchants opens up with a scene that feels straight out of Mad Men, except, you know, it was written 50 years before it. You’ve got a board room meeting of at the Fowler Shocken Associates agency where the firm’s founder, Fowler Shocken himself, is asking each of his account managers to give a report on what they’ve been doing before he drops the big news about their new account.
And this scene is wonderfully horrifying, because it not only contains details like those children’s lunches I already mentioned, but it also goes into detail about how these ad executives have evolved away from merely selling already manufactured products to using the tools of market research to identify emerging markets and begin cultivating them before a product even exists.
And these ad men – and yes, being written in the 50s, this book makes a point of reminding us that they are men – are more than just people directing the machinations of advertising behind the scene.
In this future world, advertising through short-form videos lasting about 3 minutes are the dominant forms of entertainment, and their creators are as famous as the ads themselves.
Which… hello! That sounds an awful lot like today’s influencer economy, doesn’t it? People creating short-form vertical videos of themselves doing crazy or interesting stuff so they can build an audience and then start selling products to it?
OK, so we then enter into learning about the successful test marketing for one of Fowler Shocken’s most exciting new brands: Coffiest, an instant coffee beverage that contains a simple alkaloid compound in it to make it addictive for a lifetime after ten weeks of consumption.
And because it costs $5,000 to go through an unpleasant detox process to get yourself off of it, they’ve crunched the numbers and discovered that most people would rather just pay the price of drinking three cups a day, with a pot at their bedside at night, just like the label tells them.
But hey, the execs tell themselves. It’s harmless! And they’ve even decided to offer curious test market consumers a thousand dollars in cash and a free vacation to give it a try so they can get them hooked for a lifetime.
And if that sounds far-fetched, can I tell you something pretty shocking? This is something tobacco companies actually did in the 20th century. And maybe even still do. In fact, I found a reddit thread talking about a trip just like this offered to consumers by Marlboro about 15 years ago where they got to go to Montana with a guest and have the vacation of a lifetime plus a bunch of swag and a $1500 check and two $80 Visa gift cards for incidentals. And if you search for the Marlboro Ranch, you’ll see up until recently, it was still a thing!
I’m telling you, this book is amazing. And we haven’t even gotten out of the first chapter.
So Fowler Shocken tees up the room that they’re about to take on their biggest client ever – the United States Government, which wants a major ad firm to help it sell this idea of being the first nation to establish a space colony on Venus.
And as Mitch finds out he’s being promoted to take this on, he also learns that this fast-moving project has to start immediately, because there are other agencies who lost the business and who are already working on their government connections to try to steal it the moment Fowler Shocken Associates stumbles.
After this, there’s a subplot about Mitch trying to get back together with his wife, which I’ll get to in a moment, but which at least tells us something very important about him – he has no morals and is always trying to use the tricks of his trade to manipulate people into wanting to see him in the best possible light.
His ex-wife is an accomplished surgeon and a person of strong moral character, but when Mitch was courting her, he somehow convinced her that he was a tender soul who cared about things. And she believed him.
He gives away his secrets here and there as the book goes on – it’s narrated in the first person, so he’ll tell you about how he makes facial expression number three or seizes on a persuadable moment in a conversation or how he changes his positioning to shift the flow of conversation. One of his favorite tricks, on brand for the 1950s, is to get a drink in someone’s hand to make them more pliable.
And that’s why when Mitch meets with Jack O’Shea, the celebrity and space hero who’s the first man to have ever visited Venus, he doesn’t bat an eye when he learns that Jack is a fraud who was sent there mainly as a publicity stunt. Jack was selected because of his size – he’s a little person who would require less food and oxygen on the trip, and he was zipped into a reclamation suit to take care of his bodily needs and affixed to a chair he couldn’t leave for the entire 80-day round trip. The ship was on autopilot the whole time, and even when he tried to take the controls to land it, he couldn’t do much because the atmosphere temporarily blinded him.
And Jack tells Mitch, in no uncertain terms, that there’s nothing on Venus anyone would ever want. It’s hot. It’s desolate. It’s poisonous. It’s windy enough to blast exposed rocks into dust. Colonists will live their entire lives inside structures designed to protect them from all of this.
Mitch sees his angle. The Earth is crowded and people want to get away from that. Once they get to Venus, there’s no easy way back. And if these colonists can become dependent on Fowler Shocken products like Coffiest in the meantime, his boss will be happy!
Now, from here, the story moves into intrigue as Mitch faces actual danger from rival agencies and encounters terrorist events from the Conservationists and begins trying to untangle a mystery he stumbles upon that ultimately results in people thinking he’s dead. He winds up in Costa Rica and, finding his own identity stolen, has to go by an alias as he’s forced into what’s essentially prison-like labor for a manufacturing company called the Chlorella Corporation that’s effectively taken over the country and which presses people into working in their factories.
And this is where we meet Chicken Little.
Mitch has, up to this point, been one of the people writing ads about Chicken Little, this amazing packaged mystery meat that tastes like chicken and which has been positioned to the public as being natural and healthy. By this point in the book, we should known better because the story’s been very clear with us that only wealthy people can afford to eat real meat.
As it happens, Chicken Little is real meat, and there’s plenty of her to go around. But “she” is not a chicken. “She” is a gigantic, pulsating blob of flesh that started out as a lump of heart tissue and just kept growing. Mitch’s new job is to be one of the people providing “her” with a constant supply of nutrients while carvers cut giant chunks of “her” and send them off for trimming, shaping and packaging.
Kinda sounds like how they make a McRib or a Chicken Nugget, doesn’t it? Or the efforts toward providing vat-grown meat cultured from living cells?
And this is one of the most interesting and horrifying scenes in the book, because it pulls back the veneer of what people like Mitch are selling us and reminds us that what’s being produced, more often than not, has a dark side beneath that shiny packaging we see in the store.
Mitch eventually does get his life back, and he finds himself more sympathetic to the Conservationists after all his experiences. It turns out his ex-wife is one of them, and that was pretty much why she fell out of love with him – she had morals and scruples as a physician who was spending her days saving people’s lives while he was in love with the idea of being powerful enough to influence millions to make terrible decisions like sending their kids to school with starter cigarettes or to drink a product like Coffiest.
One of the most interesting parts of Mitch’s journey involves him applying his star class copysmith skills to help the Conservationists rewrite their literature. When he’s first recruited to their cause during his time in Costa Rica, he’s handed a pamphlet called Contact Sheet One and starts laughing at it because he finds it far too intellectual and fact-based to be persuasive.
He takes it upon himself to rewrite it so that even a low-class laborer in his current position could read it and understand it. And I absolutely love this because it’s yet another opportunity for our unlikely hero, now humbled by everything he’s been through, to still apply those pragmatic, cynical marketing skills he’s developed towards the betterment of mankind.
Later on in the book, he has to use those same skills to undo all of the work Fowler Shocken Associates has done to sell eager consumers on being the first visitors to Venus so he can instead give those seats to the Conservationists, who’ve been working behind the scenes to be the colonists who start a new world since they’ve determined Earth may be a lost cause.
And let me tell you, because Frederick Pohl wrote a sequel to this book in 1984 set many years later – that naked idealism doesn’t work out so well for them. But you have to read The Merchant’s War to find out why.
But there’s one more thing I want to mention, and that’s that Mitch’s seeming antagonist in this book, a guy named Matt Runstead, is actually kind of my personal hero in the story, because he heads market research for the Fowler Shocken Associates agency and he’s constantly using his knowledge of data and consumer insights to make his own moves.
The book portrays him as a craven opportunist who blows it when he arranges a coup at the marketing agency, but it turns out that’s all a ruse for what he’s really up to, which is far more noble.
And again, this is one of the reasons I love this book so much as a marketer – it takes a really savvy and interesting person to be able to navigate the corporate world and pretend to play the rottenest game possible in the name of transforming things from the inside. I won’t tell you what happens or how he does it, but I will say, this is a really smart novel and if you love marketing, you should definitely read it.
Sure, it’s a bit dated in places – men definitely rule this world of the 1950s projected forward, and everybody in this book smokes! – but it’s a lot of fun all the same.
The authors are both long departed, so I’ve put a link in the show notes where you can borrow it for free from Archive.org. And there’s also a CBS radio show dramatization that makes great listening if you’re in the car.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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