by Ryan Holiday
Though I’m proud of what I said in that room, and was ultimately proven right, if I had a chance to do it again I would probably say something different. I would say: “What the fuck are you guys talking about this for?”
Are we seriously discussing how Toyota—a multibillion-dollar corporation, that like all others sells us things we can’t afford and don’t need—should have done a better job marketing to us? Toyota is either making faulty cars or it’s not; the response is meaningless public relations bullshit. Are we actually putting our heads together to come up with advice on how to bait the hook so we’re more likely to bite?
Why are we cheering on our own deception?
Because that’s exactly what we are doing when we have conversations about how marketers and PR specialists could do their job better. Like one blogger who complained that Tiger Woods’s press conference apology had “too many cliches” in it. You’re missing the forest for the trees. The whole thing is a cliché. Yeah, it was fake. So are celebrities. At least we can plainly recognize the press conference as a staged event when we see it.
Users on BuzzFeed can actually play a game in which they try to guess if stories will go viral or not, and winners get ranked on a list of “Top Viral Predictors.” Talk about staged—they’re producing content around whether other pieces of content might be read by a lot of other people on the Internet. Nobody online wants to point out how fake and insidious that is because it’s too lucrative.* It’s easier to co-opt readers with marketing bullshit than it is to protect their interests or provide worthwhile material.
Online publishers need to fill space. Companies need coverage of their products. Together blogs, marketers, and publicists cannot help but conspire to meet one anothers’ needs and dress up the artificial and unreal as important. Why? Because that’s how they get paid.
I never got over the shock of discovering that it was basically impossible to burn a blog. No matter how many times I’ve been caught leaking bad info, spinning, spamming, manufacturing news—it never changed anything. The same bloggers continued to cover my stories and bite when I created the news. They don’t mind being deceived, not at all. In fact, it often makes for a bonus “story behind how we got the story wrong” post.
Public relations and marketing are something companies do to move product. It is not meaningful, it is not cool. Yet because it is cheap, easy, and lucrative to cover, blogs want to convince you that it is. And we’ve mostly accepted that, consuming such schlock like it’s news.
ADVERTISING AS CONTENT
Mashable, the influential tech blog, actually keeps a Billboard magazine–style chart called “Top 20 Viral Ads” for each month. Read that again slowly: It’s a chart of popular video advertisements. You know, videos designed to sell viewers more crap.
As the CEO of a viral video agency that did $25 million in billing last year advised me: “Get out there and make your own noise. Advertise the advertising.” The attraction to turning advertisements into content was something I often exploited with American Apparel. Blogs so desperately need material that I would send them screenshots of ads and say, “Here is an exclusive leak of our new controversial ad.” The next day: “Exclusive! American Apparel’s Controversial New Ad.” The chatter about these advertisements always perplexed me: Don’t they know that generally companies have to pay to generate this kind of attention?
It’s the same logic behind the old trick of getting a music video or a commercial banned in order to make it a news story. As in MTV.com reporting “Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ Video Restricted By YouTube, Banned In 11 Countries.” MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore, but they’re still getting attention by writing about the stunts pulled by people who do! Do you think PETA is upset when their proposed Super Bowl commercial is rejected every year? No, that’s the entire point. They get the attention—and they don’t have to pay for the ad space.
But at least the Super Bowl is a big deal. Here’s a tweet from Staci Kramer, editor of paidContent: “Lisa Gurry, @bing director, tells @darrenrovell1 search engine will have 2 mins of ad time in LeBron ‘Decision’ on ESPN. #pcbuzz.”1 Let me translate that gibberish for you: Staci heard a paid representative of one company tell a different reporter that they planned to run a television commercial during a press conference at which an overpaid athlete would announce the team he would play for. Staci felt that was newsworthy buzz and shared it with the world.
I don’t think it’s buzzworthy; I think it is pathetic worship of our own deception.
BLOGGER-SPONSORED CONFERENCES
I love when blogs cover their own conferences as though there was no conflict of interest in hosting an event and loudly proclaiming its newsworthiness to your readers. Blogs often liveblog their own conferences, getting literally dozens of posts out of covering the words that came out of the mouths of the people the site paid to speak. In addition to driving millions of pageviews (and videos and tweets), the real goal of this coverage is to make the conference seem newsworthy enough that people pay to attend next year. The reader who is just browsing headlines sees how many are dedicated to this one event and all the “news” it generates and thinks, “Hey, am I missing something?” No, it’s just an ordinary pseudo-event, with the same hustlers saying things to get attention, only in this case the publisher paid to make it all happen.
Some examples:
TechCrunch hosts TechCrunch Disrupt
AllThingsDigital hosts D: All Things Digital Conference
PSFK hosts PSFK Salons
Mashable hosts the Mashable Connect Conference
GigaOm hosts six different conferences
COVERAGE ABOUT COVERAGE
Within hours of the death of Osama bin Laden, before the body was even cold, blogs were already writing the story of how the story broke. From FastCompany.com (“Osama Bin Laden Dead, The Story Twitter Broke”) to the New York Times’s Media Decoder blog (“How the Bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out”), dozens of blogs quickly moved from reporting the news to reporting news about the news.
Coverage about coverage is not more coverage, though it may feel like it. One is information we can make use of—for example, it’s important to know that a killer like bin Laden is no longer a threat to our physical safety. The other is worthless filler—news that tells us how we were told about the news. Yet blogs write these stories because they are easy, because they are self-promotional and glorifying, and because they make them seem relevant by their association with actually important news.
There is a subset of this coverage that is all the more preposterous. Every few months blogs trot out the tired old story of how to pitch coverage to them. They advise publicists to do a better job e-mailing the blogger and assuaging their ego if they want the blogger to write about their clients. From a reader’s perspective this is all rather strange. Why is the blog revealing how it can be manipulated? In turn, why do we not head for the hills when it is clear that blogs pass this manipulation on to us?
Some favorite headlines:
Rules of Thumb for Pitching Silly Claims to TechCrunch (TechCrunch)
How Not to Pitch a Blogger, #648 (ReadWriteWeb)
DEAR PR FOLKS: Please Stop Sending Us “Experts” and “Story Ideas”—Here’s What to Send Us Instead (Business Insider)
A private note to PR people (Scobleizer.com)
How to Pitch a Blogger (as in, Brazen Careerist, the blogger writing it)
The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity, for Some Reason (Lindsay Robertson, Jezebel, NYMag, Huffington Post)
The unintended consequence of that kind of coverage is that it is essentially a manual with step-by-step instructions on how to infiltrate and deceive that blogger with marketing. I used to be thankful when I’d see that; now I just wonder: Why are you doing this to yourselves?
TOO LOW-HANGING FRUIT
Nothing tires me more than the convergence of moronic marketers and bloggers with little regard for the truth.
At least my plays involved some level
of elaborate strategy. I’ll grant that what I do can be difficult to defend against. It’s one thing when it is possible to plant a story; it’s another entirely when blogs write stories about how people plant stories on their site. It’s another still when the readers are tricked into speculating about how companies can do a better job covering up disasters or blunders.
Only when you see this type of coverage for what it is—lazy, cheap, and self-interested—does it lose its allure; only then can you stop watching your own manipulation as entertainment.
The media and the public are supposed to be on the same side. The media, when it’s functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things. I’ve come to realize that that is not how it is today. Marketers and the media—me and the bloggers—we’re on the same team, and way too often you are played into watching with rapt attention as we deceive you. And you don’t even know that’s going on because the content you get has been dressed up and fed to you as news.
* Especially for BuzzFeed, which uses this information in collaboration with paying brands to make their “advertorial” content more viral.
XXI
THE DARK SIDE OF SNARK
WHEN INTERNET HUMOR ATTACKS
ONCE, KNOWING A CLIENT WAS ABOUT TO BE HIT WITH a questionable lawsuit (a shakedown via the media), I suggested we respond by embracing the absurdity rather than fighting against it. The first thing we did was file a countersuit that included all sorts of completely trivial but hilarious details about the plaintiff, along with other juicy bits of gossip. Then I sent both our lawsuit and the original to bloggers—and instead of denouncing or denying anything—I made some jokes in my e-mail. It was all to hint: Make fun of the lawsuit instead of taking it seriously.
Humor is an incredibly effective vehicle for getting pageviews and spreading narratives. So I made the easiest story for blogs to write the one in which they made snarky fun of the entire mess. To me that was better than having a serious discussion about a seriously untrue claim against my client. Plus, after the first blog gave the plaintiff (instead of the defendant, my client) the rougher treatment, all the other blogs outdid themselves to give it worse. They made the other party the fool instead of us and ignored any of the potentially negative accusations in the lawsuit.
In this case I felt the end justified the means, since the original lawsuit was dubious. It saved us from being unfairly criticized. Yet it struck me how easy it was to use snark to distract the media and shift the nature of their coverage. I saw that encouraging snark worked just as well for untrue facts as it does for true ones. And that it was impossible to truly control.
Though it worked to my advantage this one time, I’ve seen this impulse to mock and snark exact incredible costs on clients. I’m sure that sounds weird, because humor seems like such an innocent thing. It seems that way until you watch a client say something that a blogger misconstrues in order to make fun of them. Or you see some site air a suspect accusation against someone—say, that a politician had an affair—and then other blogs, readers, and comedians use that as material to make snarky jokes. The way they see it, it’s not their job to prove whether the accusation is true. They’re entertainers. The whole subject’s sketchy or inaccurate origins get lost once the jokes pile up. All that matters is that people are talking about it. And once blogs do this, they will not relent. Not until the subject is reduced to a permanent caricature.
DEFINING SNARK
New Yorker critic David Denby came closest to properly defining snark in his book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. He didn’t succeed entirely, but “[s]nark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness [with] the nasty, insidious, rug-pulling, teasing insult, which makes reference to some generally understood shared prejudice or distaste” will do.
My definition is a little simpler: You know you’re dealing with snark when you attempt to respond to a comment and realize that there is nothing you can say. The remark doesn’t mean anything—though it still hurts—and the person saying it doesn’t care enough about what they said, or anything else for that matter, that would allow you to criticize them back. If I call you a douche, how would you defend yourself without making it worse? You couldn’t.
Yet a snark victim’s first instinct is to appeal to reason—to tell the crowd, Hey, that’s not true! They’re making this up! Or appeal to the humanity of the writer by contacting them personally to ask, Why are you doing this to me? I try to stop these clients. I tell them, I know this must hurt, but there’s nothing you can do. It’s like jujitsu: The energy you’d exert in your defense will be used against you to make the embarrassment worse.
I’m not always successful. Once, in the middle of some ridiculous controversy, Dov put out a statement that said that anyone who actually believed any of it could call his personal cell phone to talk about it. All this did was create something else for blogs to make fun of—the CEO posting his cell phone number online!—and generate about a thousand prank phone calls.
Snark is profitable and easy for blogs. It’s the perfect device for people with nothing to say but who have to talk (blog) for a living. Snark is the grease of the wheels of the web. Discussing issues fairly would take time and cognitive bandwidth that blogs just don’t have. It’s the style of choice because it’s click-friendly, cheap, and fast.
Bloggers love to hide snark in adjectives, to cut an entire person down with just a few words. You find it in nonsensical mock superlatives: Obama is the “compromiser in chief.” Jennifer Lopez is Hennifa Yopez. Dov Charney is pervy and lives in a “masturbatorium.” Jennifer Love Hewitt gains a few pounds and becomes Jennifer Love Chewitt. Tucker Max is rapey. What do these words mean? Why do bloggers use them? Lines such as these are intended not so much to wound as to prick. Not to humiliate but to befuddle. Not to make people laugh but to make them smirk or chuckle. To annihilate without effort.
SNARK IN ACTION: A MOST EFFECTIVE WEAPON
You can see snark (and its problems) embodied in Nikki Finke, the notorious Hollywood blogger, and her annual tradition of “live snarking” Hollywood award shows on the blog DeadlineHollywood. One year, Finke’s live snarking of the Academy Awards was filled with constant criticism that the show was “gay,” because it had too much singing and dancing. Funny, right? The height of incisive comedy, to be sure. After repeatedly calling it the “GAYEST OSCARS EVER,” Finke turned around and railed against the academy’s choice to recognize comedian Jerry Lewis with a humanitarian award because of “antigay slurs”—jokes he’d told during his telethon that raised more than $60 million for muscular dystrophy. “Humanitarian my ass,” she wrote. Good one, Nikki.
This is snark in its purest form: aggressively, self-righteously full of shit. Finke had made her own gay jokes just minutes before, but somehow she’s not only not a hypocrite, she’s superior to Lewis, even though he actually got off his ass and helped people. Snark is magical that way. You can see why bloggers love to use it.
Denby said that snark is an attempt to “annihilate someone’s effectiveness.” Well, that’s exactly what happened to Scott Adams, the famed creator of Dilbert. In addition to the massive audience he had through his comic, Adams became popular online as a blogger, due to his controversial opinions. By all accounts he relished this ascendancy—going so far, I think, as to deliberately stir people up through politically incorrect posts. He loved the attention and traffic that blogs gave him.
Then, in 2011 Adams published a series of posts on his blogs about supposedly unfair restrictions society puts on men regarding sex and gender roles. Although his post was poorly thought out, it was by no means a new topic. Many people—from evolutionary biologists to feminists to comedians—have attributed social problems like infidelity and violence to repressed male emotions and genetics. But the blog cycle lined up so that Adams was wrong for touching the subject. He had set himself up to be sna
rked.
By that I mean he became a victim of relentless, vitriolic attacks. According to Jezebel, Adams’s post could best be paraphrased as: “Now I am going to reveal my deeply-held douchebag beliefs.” (Bitch magazine snarkily reduced it further: “Scott Adams, Douchetoonist.”) Or as another blog began, “Let’s check in with our old pal Scott Adams—Dilbert creator, former Seattleite, and raving lunatic who spends his days being his own best friend. What’s that crazy kook talking about now? Rape? Dick Tweets? This should be good.”
Adams said some dumb things, but he had not said any of that. He was accused of advocating rape. Though he’d actually said nothing close, he was misquoted and mischaracterized, first humorously and then in serious outrage. A petition titled “Tell Scott Adams that raping a woman is not a natural instinct” was started and got more than two thousand online signatures.
The response utterly disoriented and overwhelmed Adams. First he tried to delete his post, but that just brought more attention to it. Then he repeatedly tried to defend himself and clarify what he’d really meant. As I tell my clients, that’s the equivalent of a squeaky cry of, “Why is everyone making fun of me?!” on the playground. Whether it happens in front of snarky blogs or a real-life bully, the result is the same: Everyone makes fun of you even more.
So it went for Scott Adams, no longer best known online as a famous, generation-defining cartoonist but a cross between a buffoon and a misogynistic rape apologist. Everything he does is now a convenient chance for blogs to link readers to their hilarious past coverage, to rehash the same jokes, and to repeat the same accusations. It’s a hole Adams simply cannot dig himself out of.
If I had been advising Adams, I would have told him that you lived by the sword of online attention, and now you may have to die by it. In other words, I would tell him to bend over and take it. And then I’d apologize. I’d tell him the whole system is broken and evil, and I’m sorry it’s attacking him. But there’s nothing that can be done.