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

the conversation. Armed with this information, I made it my strategy to manufacture chatter by exploiting emotions of high valence: arousal and indignation. I’d serve ads in direct violation of the standards of publishers and ad networks, knowing that while they’d inevitably be pulled, the ads would generate all sorts of brand awareness in the few minutes users saw them. A slight slap on the wrist or pissing off some prudes was a penalty well worth paying for, for all the attention and money we got.
    In the case of American Apparel, this leveraged advertising strategy I developed was responsible for taking online sales from forty million dollars to nearly sixty million dollars in three years—with a minuscule ad budget.

    HIDDEN CONSEQUENCES
     
    I use these tactics to sell products, and they work—lots of product gets sold. But I have come to know that the act of constantly provoking and fooling people has a larger cost. Nor am I the only one doing it.
    You probably don’t remember what happened on February 19, 2009, and that’s because nothing notable happened—at least by any normal standard. But to those who make their living by “what spreads,” it was an incredibly lucrative day, and for our country, it was a costly one.
    During what was supposed to be a standard on-camera segment, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli had a somewhat awkward meltdown on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He went off script and started ranting about the Obama administration and the then recently passed stimulus bill. Then he started yelling about homeowners who bit off bigger mortgages than they could chew, and Cuba, and a bunch of other ridiculous stuff. Traders on the floor began to cheer (and jeer), and he ended by declaring that he was thinking about having a “Chicago Tea Party” to dump derivatives into Lake Michigan. The whole thing looked like a shit show.
    CNBC was smart. They recognized from the reaction of their anchors—which ranged from horror to mild bemusement—that they had something valuable on their hands. Instead of waiting for the video to be discovered by bloggers, news junkies, message boards, and mash-up artists, CNBC posted it on their own website immediately. While this might seem like a strange move for a serious media outlet to make, it wasn’t. The Drudge Report linked to the clip, and it immediately blew up. This was, as Rob Walker wrote for The Atlantic in an analysis of the event, a core principle of our new viral culture: “Humiliation should not be suppressed. It should be monetized.” Instead of being ashamed of this crappy television journalism, CNBC was able to make extra money from the millions of views it generated.
    The real reason the Santelli clip spread so quickly was a special part of toying with the valance of the web. Originally the clip spread as a joke, with the degree of amusement being determined by where the viewers fit on the political spectrum. But where some saw a joke, others saw a truth teller. An actual Chicago Tea Party was organized. Disaffected voters genuinely agreed with what he said. Santelli wasn’t having a meltdown, some thought; he was just as angry as they were. On the other end of the spectrum, not only were people not laughing, they were horribly offended. To them this was proof of CNBC’s political bias. Some were so serious that they endorsed a conspiracy theory (launched by a blog on Playboy.com , of all places) that alleged the meltdown was a deliberately planned hoax funded by conservative billionaires to energize the right wing.
    Regardless of how they interpreted Santelli’s rant, everyone’s reactions were so extreme that few of them were able see it for what it truly was: a mildly awkward news segment that should have been forgotten.
    Of all the political and financial narratives we needed in 2009, this was surely not it. Reasoned critiques of leveraged capitalism, solutions that required sacrifice—these were things that did not