Robert Lepage’s creative alchemy

This feature by Sarah Greene appeared in the November 2011 issue of Q&Q.

Robert Lepage’s impressive artistic career spans theatre, film, and opera, and includes stints as designer and director for Cirque du Soleil and a Peter Gabriel world tour. The prolific Quebec actor, writer, and director has now added graphic novelist to his list of achievements. The Blue Dragon, first published in French earlier this year by Quebec’s Éditions Alto, appears this month from House of Anansi Press.

Adapted from the play of the same name, the book reunites co-writers Lepage and Marie Michaud, both of whom performed in the original 2008 production. The idea for the graphic novel, first suggested by Lepage’s sister and assistant Lynda Beaulieu, seemed natural given the influence on the play of Hergé’s The Blue Lotus, about TinTin’s adventures in Shanghai; the use of Chinese calligraphy, video, and comic panel-like squares in the set design; and the fact that the central character, Pierre Lamontagne, is a graphic artist and calligrapher.

“We thought a graphic novel would be more faithful, do more justice to the piece,” says Lepage. “We saw it as an opportunity to extend the themes of The Blue Dragon.”

A follow-up to the mid-1980s production The Dragons’ Trilogy, the story is set in modern-­day China and revolves around three characters in a love triangle: Lamontagne, a middle-aged Quebecois artist who lives in Shanghai and runs a contemporary art gallery; his ex-wife, a Montreal-based ­advertising executive hoping to adopt a baby; and Lamontagne’s younger Chinese lover. Just as there are three characters interacting in three languages (French, English, and Mandarin), there are three possible endings to the play and the book. Éditions Alto played on the number by printing a first run of 3,333 copies.

To adapt the highly visual play into print, Lepage and his production company, Ex Machina, imagined how they would present the story as a film. They auditioned a number of Quebecois artists for the project, eventually choosing Fred Jourdain, a young illustrator known for his portraits of rock stars and celebrities. Jourdain’s fluid, vivid illustrations of a rainy Shanghai are conveyed by mixing comic-book art with more painterly images. “He was very strong at expressing emotions on his characters’ faces,” says Lepage.

Anansi publisher Sarah MacLachlan fell in love with this combination of graphica and fine art. “I thought that was an extraordinary thing,” she says. The Blue Dragon is Anansi’s first graphic novel for the adult market (its children’s imprint, Groundwood Books, published the YA title Skim by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki in 2009). Canadian fiction editor Melanie Little met Éditions Alto president Antoine Tanguay last January, at the Canada Council for the Arts’ inaugural translation rights fair in Ottawa, and presented an offer within days.

The graphic novel has also had an effect on the theatrical version of The Blue Dragon, which will be remounted by Toronto’s Mirvish Productions in January. “Our work with Fred had a big influence on the piece,” Lepage says. “Both to make it stronger by simplifying some of the storylines, but also by complexifying some things that needed to be more [complex]. A lot of that came from some of the very rich, effervescent exchanges we had with Fred.”

Lepage says the adaptation was so successful it’s changed his approach to publishing: “Whatever play we come up with we should try to find a format – not necessarily another graphic novel – that is as faithful to our visual approach to the stage as it is [to] the written word.”

Éditions Alto and Ex Machina have continued their partnership, producing a limited-­run souvenir book for Lepage’s production of Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale and Other Short Fables and collaborating on a nine-volume box set for his epic nine-hour opera Lipsynch.

“[Lepage] is a central cultural figure in Quebec right now,” says Tanguay. “Everything he does turns to gold.”

Illustrations by Fred Jourdain, courtesy of Anansi

Toronto Public Library explores money-making options

Following a city mandate to cut $17 million from its operating budget, the Toronto Public Library is looking at ways to bring in more revenue.

On Monday, the library’s board will meet to consider a budget committee report outlining money-making ideas, many of which have already drawn fire for risking to commercialize the library.

The report recommends looking into partnerships with retailers to sell books via the TPL website. It also suggests the library consider selling e-books, possibly through U.S. distributor OverDrive.

Another suggestion is to increase fines for overdue books to approximately double the current rates, which could be paired with “a different fine schedule for low-income users.” Other ideas range from used book sales to charging for parking. From the Toronto Star:

[The report] also recommends creating a new fine for people who put holds on books and don’t pick them up … [and] expanding advertising channels and opportunities including an advertising bookmark and getting sponsorship of WiFi services.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

NOVELS

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Sept.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. • Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. • A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past.

Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. • Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. • Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian-Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. • Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharmas’ tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. • Gayla Reid returns with her first novel since 2002’s Closer Apart. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Come from Afar (Cormorant Books, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an Australian nurse who falls into a relationship with a Canadian soldier from the International Brigade.

Haitian expat Dany Laferrière is back with his third novel in translation in three years. The Return (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., Aug.) tells the story of a 23-year-old Haitian named Dany who flees Baby Doc Duvalier’s repressive regime and relocates to Montreal. Thirty-three years later, Dany learns of his father’s death in New York City, and plots a return to his native country. David Homel translates. • Another Montreal resident, poet Sina Queyras, has a novel out this fall, the author’s first. Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books, $20.95 pa., Oct.) is about one day in the lives of five siblings haunted by the death of a brother years before. • Infrared (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl., Sept.), the new novel by Nancy Huston, is about a photographer who travels to Tuscany with her father and stepmother. Employing internal dialogues with the photographer’s mental doppelgänger, Huston opens up her hero for exposure and provides an intimate picture of her interior life.

CanLit mainstay David Helwig returns with a novella, his first since 2007’s Smuggling Donkeys. Killing McGee (Oberon, $38.95 cl., $18.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a professor’s dual obsessions with the assassination of D’Arcy McGee and the disappearance of one of his students. • Toronto-based poet Dani Couture returns with her first novel, a surreal and iconoclastic take on that perennial CanLit staple: the family drama. Algoma (Invisible Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of a young child falling through the ice and drowning. • Shari Lapeña also has a novel about a perennial CanLit concern: raising money to allow one time to write poetry. Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass, $19.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of a stalled poet who takes a job writing advertising copy to start a poetry foundation.

Jamaican-born novelist, poet, and non-fiction author Olive Senior returns to long-form fiction with Dancing Lessons (Cormorant, $22 pa., Aug.), about a woman looking back on her life after a hurricane destroys her home. • Memoirist Frances Greenslade (A Pilgrim in Ireland, By the Secret Ladder) has a debut novel out this August. Shelter (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl.) is a coming of age story about two sisters searching for their mother, who abandoned them after their father was killed in a logging accident.

Not one, but two novels this season extend the burgeoning CanLit focus on towns that have been/are about to be flooded (after Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, and Michael V. Smith’s Progress). Tristan Hughes’s Eye Lake (Coach House, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is about the town of Crooked River, Ontario. Named for a river that was diverted to make way for a mine, the town harbours secrets that surface when the river reclaims its original course. • And in September, Goose Lane Editions will publish Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned ($19.95 pa.), about the suspicions, secrets, and emotions that flare up when the township of Haverton is scheduled to be flooded to allow for the construction of a massive dam.

Edward Riche follows up his Thomas Head Raddall Award winner The Nine Planets with Easy to Like (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a satire about a screenwriter and oenophile who dreams of travelling to Paris, but is trapped in Canada by an expired passport and a growing Hollywood scandal. Relocating to Toronto, he bluffs his way into the upper echelons of the CBC. • Former president and CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar was forced out of his position under a cloud of scandal after accusations of sexual harassment. Davidar’s new novel, Ithaca (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), is, perhaps not coincidentally, about the rise and fall of a publishing star.

Canadian literary icon Michel Tremblay returns with a new novel, the first in a trilogy. Set in 1913, Crossing the Continent (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., Oct.) takes the author’s characters out of Quebec for the first time, to tell the backstory of the people who populate his Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal series. Long-time Tremblay collaborator Sheila Fischman translates.

A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, lately one of the most fertile spots for Canadian writing, Michelle Butler Hallett crafts genre-busting stories and novels that frequently experiment with gender and perspective. Her new novel, Deluded Your Sailors (Creative Book Publishing, $21.95 pa., Sept.), focuses on the culture industry from the perspective of Nichole Wright, who makes a discovery that puts a government-funded tourism project in jeopardy, and a shape-shifting minister named Elias Winslow. • Another Newfoundland native, Kate Story, has a novel out with Creative this season. The follow-up to 2008’s Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore ($21.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of Pearl Lewis, an emotionally damaged, charismatic woman who is seen at different stages in her life.

In 1972, Christina Parr returns to her hometown of Parr’s Landing, a place she fled years earlier. The dirty secret of Parr’s Landing? A 300-year-old vampire resides in the caves of the remote mining town. Christina learns why she should have stayed away in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications, $17.95 pa., Oct.). • English literature professor Janey Erlickson struggles to make headway in her academic career while caring for a tyrannical toddler in Sue Sorensen’s comic novel A Large Harmonium (Coteau Books, $21 pa., Sept.). • Paul Brenner, a Vancouver lawyer, dines with his son, Daniel, one Friday evening. The next day, Brenner receives word that his son has been murdered. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, $21.95 pa., Oct.), the first novel from Stephen Gauer, examines a father’s grief and a lawyer’s faith in the legal system.

SHORT FICTION

Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering. October sees the publication of Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House Canada, $24 cl.), the first collaboration between author Douglas Coupland and well-known illustrator Graham Roumieu.

D.W. Wilson currently lives in London, England, but is a native of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship from the University of East Anglia, Wilson’s debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), is a suite of stories about good people doing bad things.

Novelist Anne DeGrace has her first collection of short stories on tap for September. Flying with Amelia (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl.) spans the 20th century and crosses vast swathes of territory. Wireless telegraphy, German POWs in Manitoba, the Great Depression, and the FLQ crisis all crop up in her stories. • David Whitton’s story “Twilight of the Gods” was included in the 2010 sci-fi anthology Darwin’s Bastards. The story also appears in Whitton’s first solo collection, The Reverse Cowgirl (Freehand, $21.95 pa., Oct.), which sports the most sexually suggestive title for a collection of CanLit stories since Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method.

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum follows up her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning debut collection Once (a Q&Q book of the year for 2009) with The Big Dream (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of linked stories about the lives of workers at Dream, Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. • The Maladjusted (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), Toronto writer Derek Hayes’ debut collection, focuses on people who run afoul of the dictates of polite society. • Also from Thistledown, Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin ($18.95 pa., Sept.) examines contemporary women in both Canadian and European settings.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Anansi puts Rob Ford on a streetcar

When House of Anansi Press was strategizing its marketing campaign for The Little Book of Rob Ford, a collection of “quips, quotes, and colourful comments” from Toronto’s mayor, it took a more subtle approach than NOW Magazine’s controversial nudie cover. They put Ford on the side of a streetcar.

Anansi’s director of publicity Laura Repas says the idea originated with one of Ford’s own quotes: “If you get stuck behind a streetcar you’re stuck! Enough with the streetcars!” Originally Anansi wanted to do a vinyl advertising wrap that would cover the entire car, but with a price tag of more than $20,000, the bold idea was cost-prohibitive. Repas says that poster ad on the side of the TTC streetcar was “an amazing deal,” especially considering the “happy accident” timing of Ford’s new transit plan announced on Thursday.

The book, conceived a day after Ford was elected and released on Feb. 16, does not have a huge marketing budget outside of the streetcar ad, which runs on the Queen Street line: “It goes by City Hall and it’s such a great, long route,” says Repas. Anansi also organized direct outreach to unconventional bookretailers like bike stores and “edgy, fun giftshops,” and set up a Tumblr page to promote the book. Anansi’s Twitter and Facebook followers are encouraged to send in their photos of the TTC ad for a chance to win a package of spring 2011 titles.

New media “unconference” in Toronto this weekend

It can be a little tricky staying on top of the latest in new and social media these days. A few hours at PodCamp Toronto this weekend could be time well-spent in figuring out how to make better use of these tools for your business.

On Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 at Ryerson University, the self-described “unconference” will bring together hundreds of professional and amateur Web content producers and online community-builders – writers, bloggers, digital publishers, e-commerce professionals, Web designers, photographers, and podcasters among them. The event has dozens of free sessions, a number of which might be of interest to publishing professionals. Saturday is particularly meaty, with presentations on copyright and social media, social media trends for business, the legalities of blog advertising, online reputation management, core messaging, plus a roundtable on e-book trends, and a panel discussion on community management (a.k.a. online customer service). The schedule is available at the PodCamp Toronto 2011 website. Though the conference is free, there is a registration process.

Last year’s event attracted nearly 900 participants. A video archive of sessions from 2010 is available here.

Copyright holders “greedy” say Woodlief, Curtis

In a July 9 Wall Street Journal article, Tony Woodlief argues that current practices for securing permission to reprint copyrighted material are too intricate and costly to survive. He cites his own experience writing a memoir and attempting to secure permission to use copyrighted material as chapter epigraphs:

When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.

Woodlief writes that the compromise between rewarding artists for creating original works and allowing the appreciation and dissemination of those works to be as easy and widely available as possible has been historically skewed too far in the former direction.

The copyright thicket is a growing frustration among writers and editors. One editor of a popular literary anthology (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from publishers) confirmed that many publishers pursue illusory short-term profit at the expense of both profit and art. By demanding fees that most people won’t pay, they forsake free advertising for the artists they claim to protect. If restaurants behaved that way, not only would they deny you the right to take home leftovers to your dog, they’d try to charge you for smelling their food when you pass by.

It’s a clever analogy that has only one problem: it’s wrong. The proper analogy would involve someone walking into a restaurant, going up to the pass, taking some food off a plate, walking out and handing the food to a passerby on the street without paying for it, but charging the passerby a fee, which is then pocketed (Woodlief’s “modest advance” is surely combined with a royalty scale in his contract).

This minor inaccuracy, however, does not prevent Richard Curtis from picking up on Woodlief’s line of reasoning and extending it to encompass enhanced e-books that incorporate other media such as video and music:

What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

Curtis goes on to bemoan the process of tracking down permissions for copyrighted material, which he calls “extremely tedious,” as though the relative interest level of the task itself renders it untenable. He suggests that in the digital era, the battle over copyright “is intolerable and will simply have to stop.”

The rationale for this conclusion seems to be that traditional copyright protections make the production of enhanced e-books too complicated, meaning that only “auteurs” who produce, write, edit, direct, and score their own material will be able to create them. The faulty assumption here is that just because a particular technology (i.e. the ability to “mash up” videos, text, music, etc. to produce enhanced e-books) exists, everyone should be able to exploit it without restriction. This is the new digital fundamentalism, and it is deleterious to the notion that artists deserve to be adequately compensated for their artistic output.

It is, however, a notion that is becoming accepted if only through repetition. Jonathan Lethem (in “The Ecstasy of Influence”) and David Shields (in Reality Hunger) have both made the argument that artistic products should be freely available to be recombined, plagiarized, and enhanced as anyone sees fit. The ability to do this is made manifest by the digital tools that are now at our fingertips. Arguing that these digital tools are poisonous to the process of artistic creation is reductive, but so is the notion that the copyright battle currently underway “is intolerable.”

The luddites of dead tree media versus the thieving, arrogant tech whores

Over on TechCrunch, there’s a new-media old-media throw-down involving the website and both Fortune magazine and Simon & Schuster. In a nutshell, Fortune asked TechCrunch’s Michael Arlington to post an excerpt from Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick’s new book The Facebook Effect, published by Simon & Schuster. They sent Arlington the excerpt, and Arlington reprinted it in its entirety, including praise and pre-sale links, not understanding he was supposed to excerpt the excerpt. Fortune then got angry and is claiming copyright infringement.

From Arlington’s blog post on TechCrunch:

Just six minutes after e-mailing to tell me how great the post was, Fortune e-mailed again telling me that in fact they had only wanted me to post exerpts of the excerpts, not the whole excerpts…That was just before 6 am on May 6. I had been asleep for two hours. Fortune then called me three times between 6 am and 7:30 am.

After a tense conversation with Fortune‘s managing editor, Arlington received an email from Simon & Schuster threatening legal action unless the post was taken down. This is ironic, not just because it’s a book about Facebook, but the post in question reads like a glowing, slobbering press release and is published on a website with 9.2 million unique visitors per month. This appears, as Crissy Campbell pointed out on Twitter, to read like Simon & Shuster is threatening to sue TechCrunch for what is essentially free advertising.

Douglas Coupland video clips available on iTunes

Fans of quirky writer, visual artist, and Canadian cultural icon Douglas Coupland can watch three free video clips inspired by his new novel Generation A via the iTunes Store.

Set in the near future, Generation A revolves around five people from different parts of the world and their shared experiences of being stung by bees in a time when bees have supposedly become extinct.

 The clips were developed by Toronto-based production company Crush Inc. in collaboration with Coupland and his publisher, Random House Canada.

In the 10-minute clip “Generation A – 10 Questions for Douglas Coupland,” the author is seen trapped in a sterile white room with a psychologist’s couch and yellow coffee mug, answering questions posed by a faceless female questioner with a clinical British accent. Coupland provides answers to questions such as, “What is the most evil letter?” (answer: j) and “What is the loneliest letter?” (m). He also provides long-winded philosophical replies to unheard inquiries:

 The reason we have books, the reason we have stories … it allows someone else to come in and hijack your internal voice for awhile so that you don’t have to do any of the work. When you hear a story and when you read a story, it sort of somehow ennobles our life … 

In order so that we don’t go crazy, we imagine that our lives have to be stories … whether or not it’s true, it sort of works.

The clip is frequently interrupted by brief “commercials” advertising a fictional television news team and a drug called “Solon CR,” both of which are featured in Generation A.

The other two clips correspond to some aspect of the novel. “Colour Samples” is narrated by a character who eases his mind by concentrating on unique paint colours, while “The Tragic Death of the Channel Three News Team” tells the story of a religious cult bent on killing celebrities, beginning with the Channel Three News Team, in a graphic novel-inspired animated feature.

The film clips will be available on iTunes until Sept. 14. 

Publishers Weekly up for sale … again

Publishers Weekly announced this morning that it’s being put up for sale. Reed Business Information, which publishes over 400 trade publications including PW, Library Journal, and School Library Journal, intends to sell most of its properties in order to escape the uncertain advertising market.

This is the second time that parent company Reed Elsevier has tried to rid itself of RBI: the company put the group up for sale last year, but later took it off the market due to depressed demand. At the time, The New York Times reported on potential buyers for RBI and its publications:

Analysts estimated that Reed Business Information would fetch at least $2 billion. Potential buyers could include Apax Partners, a British private equity group whose Incisive Media division bought American Lawyer Media last year for $630 million.

Some buyers may be more interested in specific titles.

“I think they’ll come out as a group first, and then depending upon market reaction, they may have to bundle some of the publications,” said Michael Parker, a managing director of the merger and acquisition advisory firm AdMedia Partners.

The division’s primary rival, Nielsen Business Media, has also been the subject of sale speculation, although the company denied the rumors.

Are e-book ads the way of the future?

The Internet’s been abuzz with news of some recently filed Amazon patents. A blog post on the Fast Company website looks at two of the patents, which point toward a new future in which ads are embedded in e-books.

The patents are designed to solve a supposed problem: that “out of print or rare books … typically do not include advertisements.” For electronic versions of magazines, the inclusion of advertising makes sense, as this would merely reflect how print magazines are already constructed. But if Amazon intends to use these patents for all materials available on the Kindle, including books, readers will start to get understandably uneasy. From Fast Company:

Would you be happy reading a copy of The Hobbit, only to find an embedded ad for pedicure treatments on certain pages? The framework for this to happen isn’t clear from the patent, though it would be reasonable to expect Amazon to start by offering the ads in books with discounted prices. Or the ads could appear in texts by self-published authors who need to fund their work but don’t have the backing of a traditional publisher. That would be a sensible way for Amazon to get the public accepting the idea, and it would be a great sales hook for Amazon to entice advertisers into the scheme in the first place.