Hello all,
I recently read the book Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. It's basically a book about his time at American Apparel, when he used a variety of controversial techniques in order to generate publicity for his company. One example was him buying a billboard and then defacing it himself, and sending photographs to a news agency to report on it. He created a method called "trading up the chain", in which you could get news coverage on a very small blog with little editorial standards, then use that blog in order to get the attention of a bigger blog, and a bigger one, etc. until you ended up getting coverage on behemoths like the L.A.Times and the New York Times.
This book has been used as a playbook by a number of people. It was used by a vegan activist in order to get hundreds of thousands of views on a website published by Fox News that redirected to a slaughterhouse. It was used by a guy that created a fake company that delivered glitter to your enemies (that he sold for $100k). It was used by a member of Donald Trump's team, and the author was even asked to join Donald Trump's team. It was the favourite book of an alt-right poster Mike Cernovich, who now has over 1 million followers on X.
So basically, I was heavily inspired by this book and would like to incorporate some of its ideas into my marketing strategy. The idea that anger and controversy is what gets attention and clicks makes me want to tap into some of these ideas in order to spread awareness about my business. As well, I can use it to spread my own personal brand centered around myself, because more attention and more clicks means more potential ways of marketing my business, more potential investors, and greater leverage.
My one idea was (since I am building an app with the use of AI), I could schedule an anti-AI protest at the same time as my app release. I think this would be newsworthy and bring me attention, at the very least locally, but then I could "trade it up the chain" in order to get attention maybe even nationally (here in Canada).
But, like Ryan Holiday says in the book, manipulating the media is like playing with fire and can quickly burn you as well. I think that's a risk I'm willing to take, because a boring marketing strategy might be lead me nowhere in comparison to doing something truly outrageous and newsworthy that can bring me (and my business) attention.
Thoughts?
I recently read the book Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. It's basically a book about his time at American Apparel, when he used a variety of controversial techniques in order to generate publicity for his company. One example was him buying a billboard and then defacing it himself, and sending photographs to a news agency to report on it. He created a method called "trading up the chain", in which you could get news coverage on a very small blog with little editorial standards, then use that blog in order to get the attention of a bigger blog, and a bigger one, etc. until you ended up getting coverage on behemoths like the L.A.Times and the New York Times.
This book has been used as a playbook by a number of people. It was used by a vegan activist in order to get hundreds of thousands of views on a website published by Fox News that redirected to a slaughterhouse. It was used by a guy that created a fake company that delivered glitter to your enemies (that he sold for $100k). It was used by a member of Donald Trump's team, and the author was even asked to join Donald Trump's team. It was the favourite book of an alt-right poster Mike Cernovich, who now has over 1 million followers on X.
So basically, I was heavily inspired by this book and would like to incorporate some of its ideas into my marketing strategy. The idea that anger and controversy is what gets attention and clicks makes me want to tap into some of these ideas in order to spread awareness about my business. As well, I can use it to spread my own personal brand centered around myself, because more attention and more clicks means more potential ways of marketing my business, more potential investors, and greater leverage.
My one idea was (since I am building an app with the use of AI), I could schedule an anti-AI protest at the same time as my app release. I think this would be newsworthy and bring me attention, at the very least locally, but then I could "trade it up the chain" in order to get attention maybe even nationally (here in Canada).
But, like Ryan Holiday says in the book, manipulating the media is like playing with fire and can quickly burn you as well. I think that's a risk I'm willing to take, because a boring marketing strategy might be lead me nowhere in comparison to doing something truly outrageous and newsworthy that can bring me (and my business) attention.
Thoughts?
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