Jokes and Love: What I Market My Brand for Platform Now

About 11 years ago a book agent said he wouldn’t publish my book no matter how good it was and he gave me a definition of platform I had never heard before and told me to get marketing.

But I wanted to write. I hated marketing.

I was bitter and whined, but then I had an idea and it is working.

I showed my mom a lot of Beatles and said why not be like Paul and John who teamed up, despite their differences, made each other better and made the world better.

Why not market with Beatlesque jokes, love, sharing, and teamwork, because I don’t care about money. I just want to write and maybe get published.

So I stopped wallowing, and here is what I do.

I briefly shot off a business letter, because I told my parents I would watch a movie with them. I messed it up but I fixed it after the movie.

Earlier, I had told my dad about Gin and The Flamingo Kid so I was going to pick that.

But you can’t get the Flamingo Kid anywhere so I thought for about 15 seconds.

Pretty Woman is my mother’s favorite movie and Garry Marshall directed both so I chose Nothing in Common, which he also directed.

It was close to perfect. Nothing is perfect, chasing it is madness, but I try.

My dad loves free movies so I paid for it and lied about it (white lie – we all lie a bit – I’m pretty honest – but a white lie from time to time is fine, if it has honest intentions and isn’t too serious – and all I do now is gently joke.)

My mom loves movies with award winners, and Tom Hanks is in it and has awards.

Tom Hanks plays a guy who tells jokes doesn’t follow rules and get things done, like I want to do, but he puts family first and that’s my agenda too.

It was filmed at Northwestern, while I was there and they paid to send me there.

It is about a mother, father, and son and their relationship and it all applied.

The father has diabetes and so do I and my father. It fit near perfectly on every level.

It has Hector Elizondo who was in Pretty Woman and every movie of Garry Marshall’s. My dad likes him from the Tim Allen show he likes.

It has a swimming scene, and I’ve been taking my mom swimming.

It had a lot of references to the Beatles being a team.

There were subtitles for my mom and my dad chose the volume. There’s usually yelling, but no one raised their voice.

At the end, my mom said, “Look at your dad he is crying.”

I told him that was Jackie Gleason’s last movie and he was awesome in it, and after Jackie said, “Tom Hanks was going to be the most celebrated and best actor in the world.” That happened.

Then sadly, Jackie Gleason died from diabetes.

We talked about Jackie Gleason playing Minnesota Fats in the Hustler, and I told my dad that Minnesota Fats wasn’t calling himself Minnesota Fats before that movie. Then I told them stories about Leo Durocher starting with how he hustled the best pool player in the world to get to Yankees training camp and then stole Babe Ruth’s watch and got traded. Then he married Loraine Day and was on Mr. Ed and the Beverly Hillbillies and my mom said, “Wow, I haven’t heard that name for years.”

I’d already seen it, so I was doing five other marketing things on my phone while I watched it.

My mom said you amaze me, which is awesome because that is what I most wanted.