Many years ago, I reviewed a quite fascinatingly dull book. It was a history of the Otis Elevator Company, and it was just as interesting as a ride in an Otis elevator – but a whole lot longer. I was baffled: who would think such a book would fly with the general public?
Turns out, this was that strange species of vanity publishing, the corporate history. Some time later I had dealings with the author, who was wanly gracious about my unkind review, and explained that it had seemed a bit peculiar to him too that someone at Otis had thought to release it to the general public rather than, say, stopping at producing a few leather-bound volumes to adorn the bookshelves in the Otis Elevator Company’s C-suite.
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They’re familiar, though, by now, those liminal things – exercises in reputation management or corporate self-flattery, presented as forms of public entertainment or even art. The CEO memoir can fall into this category too. Some examples can break through and stand on their own merit, if the CEO is a lively character. My friend Giles Coren ghosted Sir James Dyson’s memoir way back when, and the book did very well: Giles has nothing but gratitude for Sir James’s generosity with the royalties over and above a flat fee.
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But nowadays, hardback books are starting to look distinctively passé. Nobody, after all, reads the wretched things. Just look at the statistics in this, our National Year of Reading: sales of non-fiction books fell 8.4 per cent by volume in one year to summer 2025. If you want to burnish your reputation with the public these days, the latest accessory is your own feature film or glossy multi-part documentary. And these have had… mixed success.
In the pretty successful camp, we can place that four-part Netflix documentary about Robbie Williams, in which our hero sat in his underpants watching old footage of himself and mumbling resignedly about his mental health struggles. It was kind of riveting, in its way, and it certainly ‘did numbers’, as its producers probably like to say.
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Likewise, I think – though this was just too bizarre to fit straight into the reputation-polishing-artwork category – the Lego movie about Pharrell Williams. Was it promotion for Pharrell or promotion for Lego? Nobody quite seems to know. Maybe a bit of both. Still, top marks for surrealism. (Let’s not go there with The Lego Batman Movie.)
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In the first-successful-then-kinda-unsuccessful camp, we can place David Beckham’s self-produced Beckham, which gave us the human side of old Goldenballs. Watch him faffing around with his expensive barbecue! See him keeping bees! Fast-forward past that unpleasantness with the nanny! It was much watched, it was widely agreed to show our man in a sympathetic light, and with the Netflix deal and the surge in business that followed it was reportedly worth more than £80 million to him.
Congratulations and laurels, then, to Nicola Howson, former head of PR powerhouse Freuds, who now runs Beckham’s personal PR as well as Studio 99, the family’s own film production company, which also made the three-part series about Victoria’s life and eponymous fashion label. (Howson was also the person who convinced Succession actor Fisher Stevens to present David’s doc in 2023, even after he’d turned her down three times.)
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It seemed like a triumph – until David and Victoria’s son Brooklyn dropped his little truth-bomb on Instagram (cost of posting: £0 – there’s asymmetric warfare for you) and it started to look a little different. The more inflated the reputation, the more dramatic the effect when a well-aimed pinprick punctures it.
And then, of course, we come to Melania. I, for one, am still marvelling at the Godzilla-like bigfooting of that one. We’ve all heard of public-private partnerships, but this was off the scale. This one, you could see as a corporate vanity project in which the world’s only hyperpower starts to look like a wholly owned subsidiary of the family business.
Most corporate-reputational boondoggles involve some sort of calculus about what the market will bear.
Jeff Bezos, for reasons which it would be impolite to guess at, paid $40 million – the most ever paid for a documentary in human history – for the worldwide rights to show the documentary about the First Lady. So far it is thought to have taken about 10 per cent of that, despite efforts by MAGA propagandists to pack the aisles and present it as the most successful documentary in history. The Daily Beast reported that active members of the US military were ordered to buy tickets and go and see the movie in the cinema.
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In the UK, which so far does not fall under the Pentagon’s chain of command, there was only a single ticket sold for the first 3.10pm screening on the opening Friday at Vue’s flagship Islington branch in London.
Leveraging the heft of a nation-state to brute-force box-office sales is something that hasn’t been tried since the runaway bestsellerdom of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. In that respect, it can be seen as a piece of successful one-upmanship, relative to the Beckhams. (Perhaps – if the reports are to be believed – Victoria now regrets organising a separate engagement party for her eldest after learning that DJT would be at the one organised by the bride’s father, Nelson Peltz.)
At any rate, it is power, I dare say, that the PR panjandrums of the Otis Elevator Company can only dream of. How many cinemas are there in Greenland, I wonder?
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 99. Click here to subscribe
