Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Read online

  PRAISE FOR RYAN HOLIDAY AND TRUST ME, I’M LYING

  “Ryan Holiday’s absolutely brilliant exposé of the unreality of the Internet should be required reading for every thinker in America.”

  —Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood

  “Behind my reputation as a marketing genius there is Ryan Holiday, who I consult often and has helped build and done more for my business than just about anyone.”

  —Dov Charney, CEO and founder of American Apparel

  “Ryan is part Machiavelli, part Ogilvy, and all results. From American Apparel to the quiet campaigns he’s run but not taken credit for, this whiz kid is the secret weapon you’ve never heard of.”

  —Tim Ferriss, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek

  “The strategies Ryan created to exploit blogs drove sales of millions of my books and made me an internationally known name. The reason I am standing here while other celebrities were destroyed or became parodies of themselves is because of his insider knowledge.”

  —Tucker Max, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

  “Just as I thought it would—it takes a twentysomething media insider to blow the lid off the real workings of today’s so-called news media. Holiday shows exactly how a handful of dodgy bloggers control the whole system and turn our collective attention into their own profit.”

  —Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and Digital Vertigo

  “When playing for high stakes, Ryan Holiday is my secret weapon. His unique stealth manner makes him essential for winning.”

  —Aaron Ray, partner of the management/production company The Collective with over 150 million albums sold and $1 billion in movie revenues

  “Ryan Holiday is a man you should listen to….[He] has a truly unique perspective on the seedy underbelly of digital culture. Ignore him at your peril!”

  —Matt Mason, director of marketing at BitTorrent and author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

  “In an area where hazy-headed utopianism reigns, Ryan Holiday excels in thinking about the Internet and its future clearly.”

  —Ethan Brown, author of Shake the Devil Off, a Washington Post Critic’s Pick

  “Ryan Holiday is one of the only people brave enough to peer deep into the murky waters of Internet ‘journalism’ to see how fabricated and unfounded information can be spun by greedy, unethical Internet overlords—destroying real people’s lives. The danger is real—no one is immune from this dystopian world.”

  —Julia Allison, syndicated columnist and on-air correspondent, NBC New York

  “Ryan Holiday is real. Not only real, but notorious for creating risqué ads online for American Apparel. How could a kid barely legal to buy a drink be the Don Draper of the Fast Company crowd?”

  —317am.net

  “Ryan Holiday is the Machiavelli of the Internet age. Dismiss his message at your own peril: He speaks truths about the dark side of Internet media which no one else dares mention.”

  —Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late

  “This primer on how to hack the media zeitgeist is so incredibly accurate, it just might render mainstream media completely useless. As opposed to mostly useless like it is now.”

  —Drew Curtis, founder Fark.com

  TRUST ME

  I’M LYING

  TRUST ME

  I’M LYING

  CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIA MANIPULATOR

  RYAN HOLIDAY

  PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

  PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

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  First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Ryan Holiday, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Illustrations by Erin Tyler

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Holiday, Ryan.

  Trust me, I’m lying : the tactics and confessions of a media manipulator / Ryan Holiday.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58371-5

  1. Marketing—Blogs. 2. Public relations—Blogs. 3. Social media—Economic aspects. I. Title.

  HF5415.H7416 2012

  659.20285’6752—dc23

  2012008773

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Minion Pro

  Designed by Pauline Neuwirth

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  BOOK ONE

  FEEDING THE MONSTER

  HOW BLOGS WORK

  I BLOGS MAKE THE NEWS

  II HOW TO TURN NOTHING INTO SOMETHING IN THREE WAY-TOO-EASY STEPS

  III THE BLOG CON: HOW PUBLISHERS MAKE MONEY ONLINE

  IV TACTIC #1: BLOGGERS ARE POOR; HELP PAY THEIR BILLS

  V TACTIC #2: TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR

  VI TACTIC #3: GIVE THEM WHAT SPREADS, NOT WHAT’S GOOD

  VII TACTIC # 4: HELP THEM TRICK THEIR READERS

  VIII TACTIC #5: SELL THEM SOMETHING THEY CAN SELL (EXPLOIT THE ONE-OFF PROBLEM)

  IX TACTIC #6: MAKE IT ALL ABOUT THE HEADLINE

  X TACTIC #7: KILL ‘EM WITH PAGEVIEW KINDNESS

  XI TACTIC #8: USE THE TECHNOLOGY AGAINST ITSELF

  XII TACTIC #9: JUST MAKE STUFF UP (EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT)

  BOOK TWO

  THE MONSTER ATTACKS

  WHAT BLOGS MEAN

  XIII IRIN CARMON, THE DAILY SHOW, AND ME: THE PERFECT STORM OF HOW TOXIC BLOGGING CAN BE

  XIV THERE ARE OTHERS: THE MANIPULATOR HALL OF FAME

  XV CUTE BUT EVIL: ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT TACTICS THAT DRUG YOU AND ME

  XVI THE LINK ECONOMY: THE LEVERAGED ILLUSION OF SOURCING

  XVII EXTORTION VIA THE WEB: FACING THE ONLINE SHAKEDOWN

  XVIII THE ITERATIVE HUSTLE: ONLINE JOURNALISM’S BOGUS PHILOSOPHY

  XIX THE MYTH OF CORRECTIONS

  XX CHEERING ON OUR OWN DECEPTION

  XXI THE DARK SIDE OF SNARK: WHEN INTERNET HUMOR ATTACK
S

  XXII THE 21ST-CENTURY DEGRADATION CEREMONY: BLOGS AS MACHINES OF HATRED AND PUNISHMENT

  XXIII WELCOME TO UNREALITY

  XXIV HOW TO READ A BLOG: AN UPDATE ON ACCOUNT OF ALL THE LIES

  CONCLUSION: SO…WHERE TO FROM HERE?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  WORKS CITED

  FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  IF YOU WERE BEING KIND, YOU WOULD SAY MY JOB IS IN marketing and public relations, or online strategy and advertising. But that’s a polite veneer to hide the harsh truth. I am, to put it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the Internet to do it.

  I have funneled millions of dollars to blogs through advertising. I’ve given breaking news to blogs instead of Good Morning America and, when that didn’t work, hired their family members. I have flown bloggers across the country, boosted their revenue by buying traffic, written their stories for them, fabricated elaborate ruses to capture their attention, and courted them with expensive meals and scoops. I’ve probably sent enough gift cards and T-shirts to fashion bloggers to clothe a small country. Why did I do all this? Because it was the only way. I did it to build them up as sources, sources that I could influence and direct for my clients. I used blogs to control the news.

  It’s why I found myself at 2:00 A.M. one morning, at a deserted intersection in Los Angeles, dressed in all black. In my hand I had tape and some obscene stickers made at Kinko’s earlier in the afternoon. What was I doing here? I was there to deface billboards, specifically billboards I had designed and paid for. Not that I’d expected to do anything like this, but there I was, doing it. My girlfriend, coaxed into being my accomplice, was behind the wheel of the getaway car.

  After I finished, we circled the block and I took photos of my work from the passenger window as if I had spotted it from the road. Across the billboards was now a two-foot-long sticker that implied that the movie’s creator—my friend, Tucker Max—deserved to have his dick caught in a trap with sharp metal hooks. Or something like that.

  As soon as I got home I dashed off two e-mails to two major blogs. Under the fake name Evan Meyer I wrote, “I saw these on my way home last night. It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think. Good to know Los Angeles hates Tucker Max too,” and attached the photos.

  One blog wrote back: You’re not messing with me, are you?

  No, I said. Trust me, I’m not lying.

  The vandalized billboards and the coverage that my photos received were just a small part of the deliberately provocative campaign I did for the movie I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. My friend Tucker had asked me to create some controversy around the movie, which was based on his bestselling book, and I did—somewhat effortlessly, it turns out. It is one of many campaigns I have done in my career, and by no means an unusual one. But it illustrates a part of the media system that is hidden from your view: how the news is created and driven by marketers, and that no one does anything to stop it.

  In under two weeks, and with no budget, thousands of college students protested the movie on their campuses nationwide, angry citizens vandalized our billboards in multiple neighborhoods, FoxNews.com ran a front-page story about the backlash, Page Six of the New York Post made their first of many mentions of Tucker, and the Chicago Transit Authority banned and stripped the movie’s advertisements from their buses. To cap it all off, two different editorials railing against the film ran in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune the week it was released. The outrage about Tucker was great enough that a few years later, it was written into the popular television show Portlandia on IFC.

  I guess it is safe to admit now that the entire firestorm was, essentially, fake.

  I designed the advertisements, which I bought and placed around the country, and then promptly called and left anonymous complaints about them (and leaked copies of my complaints to blogs for support). I alerted college LGBT and women’s rights groups to screenings in their area and baited them to protest our offensive movie at the theater, knowing that the nightly news would cover it. I started a boycott group on Facebook. I orchestrated fake tweets and posted fake comments to articles online. I even won a contest for being the first one to send in a picture of a defaced ad in Chicago (thanks for the free T-shirt, Chicago RedEye. Oh, also, that photo was from New York). I manufactured preposterous stories about Tucker’s behavior on and off the movie set and reported them to gossip websites, which gleefully repeated them. I paid for anti-woman ads on feminist websites and anti-religion ads on Christian websites, knowing each would write about it. Sometimes I just Photoshopped ads onto screenshots of websites and got coverage for controversial ads that never actually ran. The loop became final when, for the first time in history, I put out a press release to answer my own manufactured criticism: TUCKER MAX RESPONDS TO CTA DECISION: “BLOW ME,” the headline read.

  Hello, shitstorm of press. Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

  I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow. But because of the way that blogging is structured—from the way bloggers are paid by the pageview to the way blog posts must be written to catch the reader’s attention—this was all very easy to do. The system eats up the kind of material I produce. So as the manufactured storm I created played itself out in the press, real people started believing it, and it became true.

  My full-time job then and now is director of marketing for American Apparel, a clothing company known for its provocative imagery and unconventional business practices. But I orchestrate these deceptions for other high-profile clients as well, from authors who sell millions of books to entrepreneurs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I create and shape the news for them.

  Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain—from a tiny blog to Gawker to a website of a local news network to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real.* Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I “leak” a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the Internet are exploited to change public perception—and sell product.

  Now I was hardly a wide-eyed kid when I left school to do this kind of PR full time. I’d seen enough in the edit wars of Wikipedia and the politics of power users in social media to know that something questionable was going on behind the scenes. Half of me knew all this but another part of me remained a believer. I had my choice of projects, and I only worked on what I believed in (and yes, that included American Apparel and Tucker Max). But I got sucked into the media underworld, getting hit after publicity hit for my clients and propagating more and more lies to do so. I struggled to keep these parts of me separate as I began to understand the media environment I was working in, and that there was something more than a little off about it.

  It worked until it stopped working for me. Though I wish I could pinpoint the moment when it all fell apart, when I realized that the whole thing was a giant con, I can’t. All I know is that, eventually, I did.

  I studied the economics and the ecology of online media deeply in the pursuit of my craft. I wanted to understand not just how but why it worked—from the technology down to the personalities of the people who use it. As an insider with access I saw things that academics and gurus and many bloggers themselves will never see. Publishers liked to talk to me, because I controlled multimillion-dollar online advertising budgets, and they were often shockingly honest.

  I began to make connections among these pieces of information and see patterns in history. In boo
ks decades out of print I saw criticism of media loopholes that had now reopened. I watched as basic psychological precepts were violated or ignored by bloggers as they reported the “news.” Having seen that much of the edifice of online publishing was based on faulty assumptions and self-serving logic, I learned that I could outsmart it. This knowledge both scared and emboldened me at the same time. I confess, I turned around and used this knowledge against the public interest, and for my own gain.

  An obscure item I found in the course of my research stopped me cold. It was a mention of a 1913 editorial cartoon published in the long since defunct Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper. The cartoon, it said, showed a businessman throwing coins into the mouth of a giant fang-bared monster of many arms which stood menacingly in front of him. Each of its tentacle-like arms, which were destroying the city around it, was tattooed with the words like: “Cultivating Hate,” “Distorting Facts,” and “Slush to Inflame.” The man is an advertiser and the mouth belongs to the malicious yellow press that needs his money to survive. Underneath is a caption: THE FOOL WHO FEEDS THE MONSTER.

  I knew I had to find this century-old drawing, though I wasn’t sure why. As I rode the escalator through the glass canyon of the atrium and into the bowels of the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library to search for it, it struck me that I wasn’t just looking for some rare old newspaper. I was looking for myself. I knew who that fool was. He was me.

  In addiction circles, those in recovery also use the image of the monster as a warning. They tell the story of a man who found a package on his porch. Inside was a little monster, but it was cute, like a puppy. He kept it and raised it. The more he fed it, the bigger it got and the more it needed to be fed. He ignored his worries as it grew bigger, more intimidating, demanding, and unpredictable, until one day, as he was playing with it, the monster attacked and nearly killed him. The realization that the situation was more than he could handle came too late—the man was no longer in control. The monster had a life of its own.