Saving the World with Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations

If you are interested in improving the world that you live in, I literally beg you to take this article into consideration.  I am not making an original point here.  I am repeating a very nescessary and important point.  The tools of social control have been decentralized, due to the rampant spread of information technology. 

I know hundreds, if not thousands, of good people who have a lot to offer and a lot to teach.  Nearly all of them hold the worlds of marketing, advertising, and public relations in total contempt.  They view it—rightfully so, I might add—as the modern equivalent of black magic, cheap tricks and malicious manipulation.  I am arguing that the only way that will ever be changed is if we get involved with that culture and do it better than the human turds who are currently running that particular circus.

I am not going to argue that I’m right.  I’m just going to lay out the tools that are at your disposal, every second of every day, and urge you to start exploring them and using them to get your message out to the world.  Becuase if you’re reading this, I have to assume you have something more signifigant and positive to say than “DRINK SPRITE” or “SUPPORT THE TROOPS”.

Are you interested?  Let’s begin.

My Basic Point

There is no longer any reason to merely complain about media manipulation and mass mind control, because all of the tools used in the social control system are now accessable to you.  I say that with total confidence because you are reading this—that means you’ve got an internet connection.  For less than $20, you can have incredible success in getting your message out to literally hundreds of thousands of people, thanks to the internet.  By learning how to set up your website effectively, you can let search engines bring people to your message.  By using the Google AdSense tool, you can get your projects to pay for themselves.  By using the Google AdWords tool, you can get even more traffic, and learn how to pitch your messages perfectly to people with virtually non-existent attention spans.

Ask yourself how you honestly expect the people around you to “wake up” if you’re not actively helping them.  If you are willing to commit the next 20 minutes of your life, I will give you all of the tools nescessary to do this.  Where you take it from there is up to you.

The Game Done Changed

When Edward Bernays was engineering social changes on behalf of his obscenely wealthy clients, he had a nearly total monopoly on the tools and techniques of Propaganda, or as it’s known today, “Public Relations.” That’s because it cost a lot of money to pull off staged events, run a print advertising campaign, and buy off celebrity endorsements.  In recent years, a great many authors have discussed Bernays and his legacy, and nearly all of them make comments about how Bernays would be drooling over the tools that would have been at his disposal in 2007.

Personally, I think Bernays would be shitting bricks.

I say that because Bernays was a lot like Clotaire Rapaille, who we have recently covered.  In other words, he was a con man, who not only manipulated the mass population, but more importantly, decieved his clients into thinking that he had insights and powers that he didn’t.  Today, Rapaille invokes Jungian Archetypes and bastardized neurology to convince his wealthy, powerful and gullible clients that he’s got the Inside Scoop on the Global Brain.  Back in the 1920s, Bernays was invoking Freud.

Why do the major advertising companies keep their formulas and methods secret?  Because their formulas and methods are bullshit.  If you’re interested in learning the simple, three-part formula that every major and minor ad house uses, read Ben Mack’s outstanding book Think Two Products Ahead, which re-tools the “proprietary technology” of big corporations for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. 

The vast majority of the people working the Persuasion Industry are lizard-brain primates too obsessed with mere money to understand the scope of their own power.  This is the single biggest reason I want to pass these tools to you, and why I would ask you to pass these tools on to your friends.  We can do this better.  Not only that, we can use this for a better cause.

Accurate Information Kills Bullshit Dead

One reason that major advertising and public relations firms have gotten away with this deception for so long is that getting ahold of real data feedback was extremely hard, and often impossible.  In other words, it was a priesthood. When a priest speaks for God, you and I have no way of independently verifying wether or not he’s being honest with us. 

When the account executive from the ad firms assures the CEO that their new campaign for Sprite has been getting incredible market penetration in the key target demographics, the CEO has no way to verify that—at least, not until the sales figures come in over the course of the next year.  If sales continue to drop in the face of an ongoing ad campaign, then odds are the CEO will either order a new campaign, or move on to another advertising firm.  This is similar to people becoming disillusioned with the Catholic Church, and moving on to an equally bullshit form of Protestant Faith.  (Or worse yet, Scientology.)

Here’s the secret to a successful ad campaign: put ads on TV, and put ads in magazines.  Keep doing that until sales go up. How’s that for a dirty secret? Getting people to buy your product is just a matter of making your product consistently visible. 90% of the creative work that’s being done by major ad firms is highly expensive bullshit, a smoke and mirror routine to maintain the illusion of innovation. 

Google has changed that, radically and perhaps totally.  Are you familiar with Google’s AdWords program? It allows you to target your advertisements to specific keyword searches.  It allows you to target specific geographical areas, even.  Most important of all, it offers this service to everyone, regardless of budget.  You get to set the maximum amount you’re willing to pay each month, so if you’ve only got $10 to spare, you can still get a targeted ad campaign for your website. 

You also get to harvest the data.  You get to find out, every single day, if your strategy is working or not.  You get to find out precisely how well your strategies are working that day.  I am currently in the process of teaching myself how to program the Global Brain.  This is not something any college on Earth can offer me, and I’m doing it for less than the cost of a single class at Harvard. Not one single course for a semester, I mean one single class. I have as many teachers and mentors as I want, and I’m not obligated to a single one of them—when they’re no longer useful, I no longer pay attention to them.

Like Feeding Steak to a Baby

Two of the humans who had the biggest influence on my life are Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller.  They were both brilliant visionaries who are full of concepts essential to the further evolution of the human race and resolution of the world problems we all face, and neither one of them could write clearly and accessably. It takes genuine work to understand what they’re saying.  I personally have found it positively life-changing to put in the time to understand these two thinkers.  But I also know—all too well—that the vast majority of humans will never make that commitment.

So then it falls upon me—and you, if you happen to agree with me—to take the valuable, important concepts of Leary and Fuller and translate them into a more digestable, understandable format for those other humans. 

Take a look at Bruce Eisner’s perfect website, Intelligence Increase.  There’s not a lot of content, but every word is a gem.  That site stands as a single, simple monument to one of Leary’s best concepts.  People doing searches on “how to get smarter” will wind up visiting that site and genuinely benefitting from the information there.  Most of the people who come across that site will only know Leary as “that crazy LSD guy,” and that’s fine.  Because the site still works, it still communicates it’s message.  It is focused and conscise.

The site opens with some great advice, words I have written down in countless journals and emailed to a thousand people, words I have lived by for over a decade now:

1.  Continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive.

2. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what’s happening now.

3. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.

Why You Should Care

Ignore the money.  Forget the marketing.  This is science.

The money is great, on one hand, because you can trade in digital money for actual, paper money which can buy food, water and beer.  That’s not relevant to the science, though, and that’s actually not why this topic should interest you. 

The money is also great because it offers you highly accurate feedback data in real time.  If that sounds trite, consider this: in the field of political science, people like Leo Strauss and Francis Fukayama are allowed to publish entire books of their mere opinions, and they are considered giants in their field.  Nobody found out until years down the line, after their opinions were used as the basis of actual legislation and foriegn policy decisions, that they were in fact disasterously wrong.

That’s because in far too many academic disciplines, there is no mechanism to test the connection between academic theories and the real world.  People are allowed to make unfounded guesses, and if those guesses “seem right” to enough people, consensus is achieved and it takes decades for someone to sucessfully introduce new ideas. 

Learn Thyself

One hidden benefit of becoming an entrepreneur that nobody told me about: it’s like a free psychoanalysis session every day.  My theories are constantly tested and refined based on incoming data, and I am completely surprised far more often than I am vaguely right. 

When I make decisions and guesses, most of my reasoning is invisible to me.  Do you feel that way about your own thinking?  I mean that most of the assumptions that I make, most of the beliefs that shape my theories...I don’t even consciously realize they exist. By nescessity, since I cannot reconsider my entire life experience every time I make a decision, I operate on basic assumptions, and as I get older and learn more, I wind up with more and more hidden programming.

This might also be true for you, but it would be reckless to speculate.

The advantage of being verifiably wrong on a regular basis is that I’m being forced to examine the reasons why I’m making the wrong decisions.  I’ve definitely found some interesting programming in this head of mine. 

Get Started Right Now

I try to write minimally, but as Yoda teaches us, “trying” is merely a form of failure.  Thank you for indulging me.  Here is the treasure:

1. Get a Domain.

This is the first step, but think on it.  Getting the right domain name is key, because that’s the foundation of everything else you’re going to build.  You would think that all the good domains were taken back in 1997, but believe me, you’d be wrong. I was f***ing flabbergasted that skilluminati.com was available, and I’ve had a number of people asking to buy it since.  The fact is, most of the domains have been bought by businesses and by “URL speculators,” who are parasite scum without a shred of imagination. This means there’s a lot of great real estate still open for someone as creative and intelligent as you.  You can start over at GoDaddy, which lets you search for potential domains and tells you, instantly, wether or not they’re taken.

2. Get Set Up.

I’ll make this easy for you, too: just get a good CSS template and plug your content into it.  Here’s two excellent resources for exactly that: CSS Tinderbox and Twentythree’s Templates.  (I used one of Twentythree’s templates to set up the Wombaticus Rex website, since we’re both weirdos who use numbers for a name.  Thank you.)

3. Learn Your SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimizaiton.  To get an idea of what I’m talking about, go to google and do a search for “simple fuck.” I have already posted an article on this process over at Skilluminati Research.  Let me know if it was useful.

4. Plug Yourself In.

I have also prepped a Skilluminati info-packet on understanding the digital economy.  Computers have radically altered the face of economics, mostly because of the accuracy and volume of data I was discussing earlier.  For a great, rapid-fire introduction to all of the tools at your disposal for tracking your own site, check out this SEOmoz collection of every publicly available web statistic known to mankind.

If you’re interested in a seriously amazing academic essay on the topic of how economies actually work, check out this Manuel DeLanda zinger: Markets and Anti-Markets in the World Economy. 

Futher Reading for Curious Primates

Hitwise—Essential.  Overall information on traffic trends on the internet.  You’d be amazed by how much information these people give away for free—an invaluable service.  Get caught up in the data center, print out the white papers and reports, and keep current with their various blogs.

For a directory—The Directory—of advice on promoting your website and/or blog, look no further than Steve Olson, who maintains a great resource titled “How this blog attracted 100,000 visitors in the first 30 days.” We like Steve, Steve is good people.

Remember Ben Mack?  He wrote another amazing book that you might really dig, called Poker Without Cards.  Nearly everyone I’ve passed it on to loved it, and it’s a very mind-altering piece of work.  He specifically addresses, from a life-positive and free-thinking perspective, the modern day War of the Magicians that’s going on every day, hidden in plain sight. 

Ben has also been generous enough to provide some of his most potent and educational material for free, in the following articles:

1. On the viral marketing concept of Social Proof.

2. On the physics law of entrainment as it applies to human culture.  Probably one of the most amazing articles I’ve found this year, but perhaps that’s just me.

3. A look at Captology and online persuasion techniques that will provide you with abundant brainfood and, hopefully, inspiration.

And finally, check out Lightspeed Venture Partners, who run an archive of current and valuable resources on what Viral Marketing means here and now in 2007.

You are armed.  Everything is changing.  David is Goliath.  We are winning the fight.  You can help.