Jesus on Toast

In November of 2004, a woman in Hollywood, Florida, sold a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich on eBay for twenty-eight thousand dollars to a Canadian online casino. The press called it a miracle. The casino called it a marketing expense. Neither of them was wrong.

Dennis Lann has spent forty years inside the trade of commercial persuasion. In Jesus on Toast, he summons twelve dead masters of the craft (Ogilvy, Hopkins, Caples, Schwartz, Halbert, Bernbach, Burnett, Gossage, Krone, Reeves, Sugarman, Wunderman) and brings each of them, in turn, to look at Diane Duyser's sandwich. Each master sees something different. Each is partly right. None of them sees the thing at the center.

The thirteenth master is the silent subject every enduring brand has at its core: the founder who cannot speak, the icon who cannot contradict, the face on the toast that cannot deny. This is the book's argument, and it is the reason the sandwich sold for what it sold for.

Part case study, part séance, part Monday-morning instruction manual, Jesus on Toast is the only book on persuasion you will ever read that treats a piece of burnt bread as evidence and gets away with it.

A fiction.