Is marketing tuberculosis?

You might know him as the author of YA bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars, but John Green’s most recent book is a nonfiction defense of its own title: In Everything is Tuberculosis, he argues that tuberculosis has shaped everything around us.

For instance: When a hatmaker in the 1850s started coughing up blood, his doctor told him to head West, where the dry air would heal him. The hats in the West, Green writes, “sucked” — they were either “bug-infested, brimless coonskin caps” or “wide-brimmed straw hats that … leaked in the rain.”

So the consumptive hatmaker — one John B. Stetson — designed the cowboy hat.

Upon finishing the book, I fired off an interview request to try to get an answer to my burning question: Could John Green make a connection between marketing and tuberculosis?

John Green

Author, YouTuber, TB fighter

On brand deals

When Green got invited to discuss a possible partnership with Dr Pepper, he was over the moon, so to speak. (He showed up 10 minutes early. To Zoom. Dude really likes Dr Pepper.)

He had a modest proposal: that Dr Pepper sponsor humanity’s relationship with the moon. (Pause for impact.)

Green would make videos about humanity’s relationship with the moon, sponsored by Dr Pepper.

“I‘ve always thought this was a funny idea — that you can’t sponsor a heavenly body, but you can sponsor humanity’s relationship with a heavenly body.”

He didn’t get a follow-up meeting.

Green doesn’t fault Dr Pepper (the missing period isn’t a typo —“it‘s a big part of Dr Pepper’s brand identity, whether they know it or not”). It’s an absurd idea.

But that’s kind of the whole point: “I’m not particularly interested in doing a brand deal for the sake of doing a brand deal. I’m interested in brand deals that can enhance the absurdity and joy in the world.”

On scaling passion projects

Passion is powerful fuel. Whether the endeavor is personal or professional, passion can give you wings and make you soar — and it can bring you a little too close to the sun.

So I asked Green, who’s successfully scaled more passion projects than I’ve so much as dreamt of, what his early-warning system is. How do you know when growth is going to kill what made your project so special?

“I think the most important thing is the very first person you hire who isn’t you,” he says. “Making sure that their values fit, that they share your passion, that they want the same thing out of the project that you want.”

With Crash Course, the educational YouTube channel Green co-founded with his brother, internet science guy Hank Green, the first hire “was a guy who, like me, loves history; who, like me, loves online video; who’s really passionate about trying to reach people with educational media. I don’t think he was concerned with being able to market effectively. I think he was concerned with making awesome videos that became undeniable and that served a real purpose in the lives of the people who use them.” 

On bottom-up marketing strategies

“In some ways with Crash Course, the marketing took care of itself because kids would go into their high school history classes and say to their teacher, “Hey, I think you should watch this show. It‘s really good. It’s called Crash Course.”

“It was really kind of bottom-up that way. The way that we marketed it was essentially marketing it to students and then letting teachers discover it through their kids.”

On ROI and shared values

Green acknowledges that he’s been very lucky in some business ventures, which has let him take risks — it was the runaway success of The Fault in Our Stars, he says, that let him and his brother build their YouTube channel Crash Course for two and a half years before they saw a single dime.

That’s an enviable position for any marketer to be in, but his wisdom is budget-agnostic: “I believe in an ROI that unfolds over long periods of time, not an ROI that can be immediately measurable.”

And “sometimes ROI gets in the way. You know, what you really want to have is a core group of enthusiastic customers. And I think sometimes it’s a mistake to market to what you see as a demographic rather than marketing to a core group of enthusiastic customers.”

Take his coffee company, for instance.

“There‘s no particular demographic. It’s not like we sell coffee to women between the ages of 24 and 30,” says Green.

The common denominator instead is “people who are interested in purchasing coffee in a way that‘s ethically sourced and where all the profit goes to charity. That’s not a demographic audience. It’s more of a vibes-based, values-based audience.”

On risky marketing investments

Although he’s best known for his young adult novels and more recent nonfiction books, Green is also something of a serial co-founder of small businesses — DFTBA, Complexly, and Good Store are but a few.

There’s a through-line of joy in his business ventures; helping small content creators finance and sustain their work, helping nurses-to-be pass their anatomy and physiology exams, selling ethically grown coffee.

“I like working with brands that empower creators and that recognize the benefit of working with creators, which is that you‘re going to be a little bit off the beaten path. That’s what I find most interesting. That’s also the riskiest kind of investment that you can make as a marketer. And so I understand why lots of people don’t make it.”

On authenticity and taking risks with your audience

Green has a remarkably devoted audience that has followed him across platforms, from YA books to YouTube to Instagram to awesome socks. For somebody who describes himself as “extremely risk averse — especially when it comes to taking risks with [my] audience,” he sure has taken a lot of risks with his audience.

“It‘s about answering the call of my own inspiration as much as it’s about and then trusting that the audience will be there one way or another,” he explains. “I mean, if you told me in 2015 that I was going to write a book about tuberculosis, I would have been very surprised. But that’s where my curiosity has led me over the last 10 years. And so I just have to honor that and hope that the audience will be there with me.”

Marketers might call it authenticity, but Green prefers “creative honesty.” “Everybody talks about being authentic to themselves, but that’s a very hard thing to actually be,” he says.

“Whereas when you‘re trying to be honest to your sense of inspiration or spark of curiosity, I think that’s something that I can quantify a little easier.”

On marketing and tuberculosis

So, back to tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease (yes, even in 2025).

Green says that a TB expert once told him that the problem with eradicating the disease is that “tuberculosis doesn’t have a constituency.”

Green’s first reaction was one of incredulity. “I was like, of course tuberculosis has a constituency. It has 10 million people who survive it each year who want to live in a world without it. And it has hundreds of millions of people who are infected with it, who don’t want to become sick with it. This is obviously a disease with a constituency.”

But what that expert meant, Green thinks, is that tuberculosis actually has a huge marketing problem. “Most people don‘t even know that it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, let alone that it’s curable and preventable and has been since the 1950s. And so I think that TB is the ultimate example of a disease in need of a marketing campaign.”

“Malaria,” he says, “had a really good one in the early 2000s with Malaria No More. ACT UP made HIV/AIDS undeniable starting in the 1980s and 90s. We need a similar marketing campaign around tuberculosis.”

And, he adds, “I don‘t have to tell marketers that we live in a very fractured information environment. It’s hard to reach people, with tough messages especially.”

“So yeah, I think [marketing and tuberculosis are] very closely related, because I think one of the reasons why a million and a half people are dying of tuberculosis every year is because we’re not doing a good job of spreading the word about the disease in the rich world.”

Your move, marketers.