Free Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday Page A

titillation, and dogmatism. Whatever will ensure transmission.
    The media is in the evil position of needing to go negative and play tricks with your psyche in order to drive you to share their material online. For instance, in studies where subjects are shown negative video footage (war, an airplane crash, an execution, a natural disaster), they become more aroused, can better recall what happened, pay more attention, and engage more cognitive resources to consume the media than nonnegative footage. 5 That’s the kind of stuff that will make you hit “share this.” They push your buttons so you’ll press theirs.
    Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair—these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy—those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter—these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation. Online games and apps operate on the same principles and exploit the same impulses: be consuming without frustrating, manipulative without revealing the strings.
    For those who know what levers provoke people to share, media manipulation becomes simply a matter of packaging and presentation. All it takes is the right frame, the right angle, and millions of readers will willingly send your idea or image or ad to their friends, family, and coworkers on your behalf. Bloggers know this, and want it badly. If I can hand them a story that may be able to deliver, who are they to refuse?

    GIVING THE BASTARDS WHAT THEY WANT
     
    When I design online ads for American Apparel, I almost always look for an angle that will provoke. Outrage, self-righteousness, and titillation all work equally well. Naturally, the sexy ones are probably those you remember most, but the formula worked for all types of images. Photos of kids dressed up like adults, dogs wearing clothes, ad copy that didn’t make any sense—all high-valence, viral images. If I could generate a reaction, I could propel the ad from being something I had to pay for people to see (by buying ad inventory) to something people would gladly post on the front page of their highly trafficked websites.
    I once ran a series of completely nude (not safe for work, or NSFW) advertisements featuring the porn star Sasha Grey on two blogs. They were very small websites, and the total cost of the ads was only twelve hundred dollars. A naked woman with visible pubic hair + a major U.S. retailer + blogs = a massive online story.
    The ads were picked up online by Nerve , BuzzFeed , Fast Company , Jezebel , Refinery29 , NBC New York, Fleshbot , the Portland Mercury , and many others. They eventually made it into print as far away as Rolling Stone Brazil, and they’re still being passed around online. The idea wasn’t ever to sell products directly through the ads themselves, since the model wasn’t really wearing any of it—and the sites were too small, anyway. I knew that just the notion of a company running pornographic advertisements on legitimate blogs would be too arousing (no pun intended) for share-hungry sites and readers to resist. I’m not sure if I was the first person to ever do this, but I certainly told reporters I was. Some blogs wrote about it in anger, some wrote about it in disgust, and others loved it and wanted more. The important part was that they wrote about it at all. It ended up being seen millions of times, and almost none of those views was on the original sites where we paid for the ads to run.
    I wasn’t trying to create controversy for the sake of controversy. The publicity from the spectacle generated tens of thousands of dollars in sales, and that was my intention all along. I had substantial data to back up the fact that chatter correlated with a spike in purchases of whatever product was the subject of