To promote the film “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell,” based on the best-selling book by his good friend Tucker Max, public relations and marketing executive Ryan Holiday purchased a series of billboards. Shortly after they began appearing around Los Angeles, he ventured into a deserted intersection at 2 a.m. dressed in black and defaced one of the ads with obscene, 2-foot-long stickers of his own design that implied that Max deserved to have something horrific happen to his genitals.
Holiday, with his girlfriend driving, circled the block and took photos of the billboard from the passenger seat. He then dashed home and e-mailed the photos, under the fictional name Evan Meyer, to two carefully selected blogs — Curbed Los Angeles and Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA — with a note that said, “Good to know Los Angeles hates Tucker Max, too.”
When one of the bloggers (he doesn’t specify who) wrote back to say, “You’re not messing with me, are you?” Holiday-as-Meyer replied, “Trust me, I’m not lying.”
‘Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator,” Holiday’s new book, is both a screed against blog culture and an admission of misbehavior from Holiday, the longtime director of marketing for the controversial clothing company American Apparel.
While the observation that the Internet favors speed over accuracy is hardly new, Holiday lays out how easily it is to twist it toward any end, since “the news is created and driven by marketers, and no one does anything to stop it.”
In the case of “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell,” Holiday’s trickery — further fueled by anonymous outraged e-mails he sent to local websites and women’s rights groups in areas where the film was screening — worked exactly as planned. His pictures of the defaced billboards spread to other blogs, leading to real-life protests, further billboard defacings across the country, and editorials against the film in The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.
Holiday writes that the media can be easily manipulated today because bigger blogs often get their stories from smaller blogs and Twitter, and the mainstream media takes its cue from all of them.
So if you offer juicy information to a series of smaller, strategically selected sites, the information can travel up the chain with predictable efficiency.
“Take the outlet where you’d ultimately like to receive coverage and observe it for patterns,” he says. “You’ll notice that they tend to get their story ideas from the same second-level sites. By tailoring the story to those smaller sites, it sets you up to be noticed by the larger one.”
He cites examples such as how Gawker and Mediabistro are “read very heavily by the New York City media set,” and how Katie Couric has said that she gets story ideas from Twitter. This, he says, means that “getting a few tweets out of the 700 or so people she follows is all it takes to get a shot at the nightly national news.”
The other side of this equation, he writes, is that the nature of the Internet economy has destroyed any pretense of accuracy among blogs and that their inaccuracies often find their way up the media food chain.
Websites make their money by selling ads that are evaluated by the number of pageviews they receive, putting bloggers under constant pressure to produce as many clickable posts as possible.
One example of this pressure is the policy of the blog Business Insider, which, he says, requires writers to generate “three times the number of pageviews required to pay for their own salary and benefits, as well as a share of the overhead, sales, hosting and [CEO Henry] Blodget’s cut. In other words, an employee making $60,000 a year needs to produce 1.8 million pageviews a month, every month, or they’re out. This is no easy task.”
This has created a stunning drop in standards in some areas, such as with an editor from the retail shopping blog Racked NY, who told Holiday that she did all her shopping online — even though retail was her beat — because she simply didn’t have time to walk into a store.
Max, Holiday recalls, once e-mailed the editor of the sports blog Deadspin after they incorrectly guessed the identity of someone in one of Max’s stories. The editor e-mailed back, with stunning candor, “Honestly, I could give a f – – -. You keep doing whatever it is you’re doing, and I’ll do the same.”
This attitude, as Holiday presents it, would seem to be pervasive. He quotes MG Siegler of TechCrunch, “one of the dominant voices in tech blogging,” as having said that in what he and his competitors write, “there’s a lot more bulls- – – than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.” He also quotes TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington saying, “Getting it right is expensive; getting it first is cheap.”
Given this environment, Holiday says that spreading one’s own agenda can be as easy as sending carefully tailored e-mails from a fake address or via some other false pretense, techniques that Holiday has used frequently.
Once, when he wanted certain legal information about American Apparel widely circulated, he alerted several bloggers, who responded with a collective yawn. So he wrote a fake internal memo and e-mailed those same bloggers posing as a low-level company employee, with the note: “memo we’d just gotten from our boss.” The same blogs that rejected the official news, he says, now covered it with a big “EXCLUSIVE!” tag across the top.
Holiday also created fake controversies, such as sending half-naked photos he couldn’t use for legal reasons to the feminist blog Jezebel under the pretense of their having been leaked from the company’s servers, or placing purposely provocative ads on the company’s website and falsely stating they were part of an upcoming campaign just to generate scandalous articles.
Holiday used these tactics for more nefarious ends as well. When a friend had a problem with a powerful talent agent, Holiday says he advised him to “draft a letter announcing his intention to file an embarrassing lawsuit, which he could then leak to the gossip blogs.”
While the friend was never serious about filing suit, the leaked letter made its way to TMZ, ESPN and others, and the friend received a $500,000 payment “to go away.”
While Holiday’s own examples of media manipulation and “spread” — the ability of a story to get picked up by other outlets — may affect just his company, sometimes the consequences are far greater.
He talks about the Terry Jones case, where the Florida pastor burned a copy of the Koran. While journalists initially ignored the event, a freelancer for a French wire service couldn’t resist. When his story wound up on Yahoo and Google News, it then made its way up the blogosphere and into other news outlets, ultimately resulting in riots in Afghanistan that left 27 people dead. Forbes categorized the incident as an example of “when Journalism 2.0 kills.”
Political campaigns use the exact same strategy, meanwhile, to create viral controversies.
Of course, those who live by the blog die by the blog, as Holiday discovered.
Holiday devotes an entire chapter to his feud with Jezebel blogger Irin Carmon (now with Salon). According to Holiday, when several bottles of a new American Apparel nail-polish line cracked in the stores, the company pulled the polish from the shelves, intending to replace them with new bottles. Carmon somehow received an internal company memo about this and e-mailed Holiday early one morning, saying that a story was about to be posted but that she would “be more than happy to update or post a follow-up.”
The post was online by the time Holiday woke up, with the headline, “Does American Apparel’s New Nail Polish Contain Hazardous Material?” and Holiday’s follow-up explanation, which he claims fully refuted her story, wound up as merely a short update at the bottom of the original post. The ensuing controversy, he says, led to the “undoing” of the nail-polish company they were working with and a $5 million lawsuit by American Apparel against the company, later dismissed.
While it’s a bit rich to ask for sympathy after all the lies he peddled, Holiday still froths as he explains how Crain’s New York e-mailed him to ask if American Apparel would be closing any stores due to the financial crisis. When Holiday answered with an emphatic “no,” the paper “found a real-estate agent who didn’t work for American Apparel to say we might.”
This led to the headline, “American Apparel Likely To Shed Some NY Stores,” which was then picked up by blogs including AOL’s DailyFinance, which included the company in a slideshow titled, “10 Leading Businesses Shuttering Stores Because of Downturn.” The tale came full circle a week later, when Crain’s ran another story, “Unraveling American Apparel Could Put NYC Stores on the Block,” which then turned up on Google Finance and “started the same chain all over again.”
Throughout the book, Holiday presents examples of the damage blogs can do, such as citing how the blog Engadget “posted a fake e-mail announcing a supposed delay in the release of a new iPhone and Apple operating system,” which led to a $4 billion drop in Apple’s stock price.
But Holiday fails to mention that much of that value was recovered within a day, when news of the hoax was made public.
Could it be that the Internet, while flawed, is still occasionally self-policing enough to correct problems?
Holiday — who at one point refers to blogging as “digital bloodsport,” and at another compares it to the Salem witch trials — mentions a whisper campaign Facebook commissioned about Google’s privacy issues, and claims that Google’s declining to make a detailed public statement was their version of quaking in their boots. Of course, the Internet giant could also have just decided that, as it sometimes is, silence is the best public-relations strategy.
He also cites the case of the video producer who approached the French food corporation Danone, telling them that he had created two videos — one a fun spoof of one of their products, the other a far nastier one — and asked for a fee-per-view if he released the first one instead of the second. While Holiday calls it “extortion via viral video,” he leaves out the fact that in the end, the company apparently wasn’t that frightened, since they ultimately refused to pay.
Then again, on the Internet, bad press is forever. For every company or individual that successfully turned the tables or manipulated the message their way, there are plenty of others done in by bad reviews and snippets of video — legitimate complaint or no.
At the very least, “Trust Me, I’m Lying” provides valuable food for thought regarding how we receive — and perceive — information.
“You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well,” Holiday writes. “You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs.”