HYPE STRATEGY #5

One can get away with most anything by making people tap their toes, laugh, or shake their heads in disbelief.

—KEMBREW MCLEOD

Only moments after the god Hermes was born, he snuck away from his mother to do a prank. In this first day of his life, the Greek god stole a herd of cattle from his elder half brother Apollo and then set about inventing the lyre out of a tortoise shell. When Apollo found out about his baby bro’s antics, he was not pleased. The elder deity was getting ready to take some Olympic-scale revenge when Hermes proposed a deal. In exchange for Apollo’s forgiveness, Hermes would give him the lyre. Apollo couldn’t help but be amused by the little brat, took him up on his offer, and became the god of music. As for Hermes, he became the god of thieves and would even go on to nab a spot on Mount Olympus.

Hermes is an example of a mythological figure that anthropologists call the “trickster.” If you go back far enough, you’ll find one in practically every culture in the world.

The Nez Perce tribe from what is now northeastern Idaho had Coyote who created traps for the purpose of fooling and confusing his fellow animal spirits. He eventually gave the traps to humans so they could catch fish and game and feed themselves. The Yoruba of western Africa had Eshu, a god who stole palm nuts from the monkey spirits and invented art. The Chinese told stories of the Monkey King, whose quick tongue made sure a Buddhist monk on pilgrimage arrived safely to his sacred destination. And the Scandinavians had Loki, a source of perpetual trouble and new ideas for Thor, Odin, and the rest of that gloomy northern bunch.

As Christianity replaced paganism, church fathers suppressed these myths, shoehorning aspects of the trickster gods into the figure of Satan. In doing this, they missed the point. While the devil is a figure of pure evil, tricksters are embodiments of mischief. And mischief plays a vital role in every society. In the words of the mythologist Lewis Hyde, “The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral.”

It is easy for Olympians, kings and queens, and C-suite executives to look down on everyone else from their lofty positions and pass judgment on what is right and what is wrong. That’s because they’ve already made it. But it’s a different story when you’re first starting out or doing something truly new. Or if circumstance has kept you from the advantages your competitors have.

We all come to our careers from different starting points. Some of us emerge into the business world with all the advantages, connections, and resources we need. Most of us don’t. Using the tools of the trickster is often the only way for those of us who start off without advantages to catch up. Fortunately, if you choose to avail yourself of this brand of benevolent mischief, you can do so in a way that actually adds color to the lives of those around you.

“Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act,” Lewis Hyde wrote, “trickster will appear to suggest an amoral [as opposed to immoral] action, something right/wrong that will get life going again.”

So what does it mean to become a trickster in the business world? How can you apply these tricks ethically while still advancing your interests?

How can you make them work for you if you don’t come to it naturally?

As always, the answers to these questions can be found in the stories of those who have come before you.

INVERT NORMS

At the end of the nineteenth century, theater was the dominant form of live entertainment. Nowhere was that truer than in Paris. The French capital in 1897 had theaters of every size, in every part of the city. This made it tough for newcomers who wanted to enter the business, especially if they didn’t have a lot of financial backing.

This was what made the proprietors of the Grand Guignol so remarkable. Founded in 1897 on a tiny budget by Oscar Méténier, and expanded and enhanced by Max Maurey, the Grand Guignol theater became one of Paris’s must-visit destinations for the next 65 years.

The reason the Grand Guignol was able to thrive as so many of its competitors rose and fell around it: The two men behind its success were tricksters to the core.

When the tabloid journalist and marginal playwright Oscar Méténier decided he wanted to strike out on his own as an entrepreneur, he turned to the industry he knew best—the theater. However, past financial mismanagement limited his options when it came to finding a venue for his new venture. Not to be deterred, Méténier secured the only venue he could afford—an old church on a narrow back street.

Everything about Méténier’s venue should have caused its failure. The church was small and cramped—by some accounts, the smallest playhouse in Paris. There was little separation between the audience and stage. The baroque religiosity of the decor had the potential to turn off theatergoers who were looking for a carefree, and often decadent, night on the town.

But, again, Méténier was a trickster. As such, he used every potentially off-putting element of his new theater to create an atmosphere of delicious disorientation, curiosity, and intrigue. Audience members sat in pews and in boxes that resembled confessional booths under Gothic vaulted ceilings with cherub gargoyles grinning down at them. Once people took their seats, they experienced an evening of plays unlike any others being performed in Paris—or anywhere else, for that matter.

The Grand Guignol featured plays drawn from the crime and depravity Méténier had witnessed during his time as a tabloid reporter. Few of the actual plays he or his successors produced there are remembered, and for good reason. As plays, they were not very good. Yet word spread quickly about this tiny venue on a tiny street.

Although France had already gone through its secular revolutions, the Catholic Church was still deeply embedded in the psyche of its citizens. By placing tales of sin in the context of a house of God, with all its accompanying accoutrements, Oscar Méténier created a fin de siècle version of a viral phenomenon.

Eventually Méténier sold the Grand Guignol to engineer-turned-entrepreneur Max Maurey. Even more commercially minded than his predecessor, Maurey ramped up the depravity. Under Maurey, an early proponent of special effects, the stage of the Grand Guignol featured blood spurting out of stab wounds, severed limbs, burning flesh, and decapitations.

Audiences were not prepared for what they saw, and it became common for members of the audience to faint during performances. Maurey took advantage of this. He made sure there was a doctor in attendance at every show. He leaked to the press a possibly apocryphal incident where a woman in the audience passed out, and her husband called for a doctor. Unfortunately, in this case, the doctor was not able to help because he too had fainted.

The Grand Guignol used a church—a symbol of goodness and cleanliness and piety—and transformed it into a venue for displays of humanity’s basest impulses. It took the medium of Shakespeare and turned it into a gratuitous slaughterhouse. It took the healing arts and used them for a publicity stunt.

People often think that to stand out they need to do something entirely new. They feel that shock value for its own sake will get them the attention they crave. But often this approach backfires. Instead, it is by inverting norms that already exist that you create the appearance and sensation of novelty while still giving audiences the language and framework they need to allow themselves to let you in.

This was an approach Andrew Loog Oldham built his career on.

In 1964, the 19-year-old music manager didn’t know what to do. While his band, the Rolling Stones, was getting a bit of traction, they seemed unable to break out as real stars. A big part of the problem was the Beatles. The Stones were good, but there didn’t seem to be any room left for them.

The members of the Rolling Stones were middle-class boys with diverse backgrounds and tastes. Among the band’s numbers was an alumnus of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious business school, as well as a stately jazz drummer and a girl-shy guitarist with big ears. Lucky for everyone who loves rock music, Oldham had an idea that changed everything.

He gathered the bandmates and told them from then on they would play the role of “bad boys.” Instead of trying to compete with the charming Beatles, who even grandmothers could tolerate, they would be rude, surly, and, by extension, dangerous whenever they interacted with the public.

Oldham was a trickster by inclination and necessity. He was raised by a single mother with no connections or money, and he was too young to be taken seriously by anyone who counted in the music business. Andrew Loog Oldham fashioned himself into a trickster because it was the only way for him to get from where he was to where he wanted to be.

The young manager took the standard image of the pop star prevalent at the time and turned it inside out. Where the Beatles—and the hordes of groups that followed in their wake—wore suits and ties, he encouraged the Stones to wear their grubby street clothes. Where the Beatles were polite to the television variety show hosts who invited them on, the Stones slouched and mumbled. Whereas the Beatles charmed the press, the Stones spit out rude answers to their questions.

In the words of Rolling Stone magazine reporter James Miller, “Oldham seduced the media, provoking them into saturation coverage of outrageous behavior (much of it either exaggerated or simply untrue).”

Even if you work in a more traditional industry than that of Méténier, Maurey, or Oldham, you can learn a lot from these tricksters.

Are there certain standards and assumptions in your industry or scene that everyone accepts as the way things are without questioning them? If so, write down every value, design element, system, way of thinking, belief, and any other piece that makes this entity what it is. Next, for each of these elements, think of its total opposite. Write those down as well.

For instance, take a virtually unquestioned maxim like “Hard work is essential to success.” Is it possible there’s an alternative to that worldview, such as “Successful people figure out how to work less hard and then convince unsuccessful people to work hard on their behalf”? (If you haven’t figured it out by now, it was this exercise that led me to the public position I took that caused the fight with Gary Vaynerchuk that caused my career to take off.)

Ask yourself how you can embody these opposite elements in your packaging, your demeanor, and your public stance. It is there that you may find your winning pose.

MANUFACTURE MOMENTUM

When Macy’s approached Marc Ecko and offered to give his hip-hop–influenced clothing line a try in one of its stores, he was both elated and terrified. He was elated because, well, it was Macy’s. He was terrified because this single rack in a single store was his one and only chance to prove himself.

Ecko Unlimited knew there was a distinct possibility that customers would pass the rack by without buying a thing. He also knew that this would kill any momentum he had already built for his brand. He couldn’t let that happen.

So what did he do? He contacted members of his street teams—kids he paid to plaster clubs and lampposts with the Ecko logo in various forms. Then he handed them some cash and told them, on the down low, to go into Macy’s and buy his stuff.

The rack soon sold out. Macy’s expanded its order. With a bigger blueprint in the store, non–street team members started purchasing Ecko clothing. In turn, Macy’s expanded its order.

It was the beginning of an empire.

In remarking on his strategy years later, Marc Ecko said, “What’s the takeaway here: Should you cheat to win? Yes and no. Long term, no, it’d be unscalable, unethical, and inauthentic to cook your books or buy your own inventory. That’s bullshitting the world and bullshitting yourself. But when you’re launching a business, and you believe in the fundamentals, think of it like a date; you want to make a good first impression.”

Albert-László Barabási is a professor of network science who specializes in studying the effects of complex networks on performance. In 2018, he published a book called The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, which was the culmination of a multiyear study in which he and his research team analyzed the common factors that a diverse range of successful people and projects share. What they found was that—more than quality or performance—success begets success: The factor that contributes the most to success is whether the person or project has already had success.

Fortunately, there are countless ways to manufacture momentum. Locate a small core of influential people who would be receptive to your product and provide them with all kinds of incentives to spread the word. Give them your product for free. Pump them up and make them feel like trendsetters. Hold a launch event, call on every friend you have to pack the room, and make sure people you know are on hand with some sort of camera or recording device to capture the crowds. When you spread the word—and the images—online, leave out the fact that this was a onetime occurrence. A few simple phrases—“another,” “again,” “our fans”—can create the perception that crowds like this one are the norm rather than the exception.

MAKE NEWS

The tricksters of myth had a knack for commanding attention from all the other gods that was disproportionate to the amount of actual power they had. For example, in Norse mythology, Loki was physically weaker than many of the other warlike deities of Asgard. Yet when he caused the death of Baldr the Bright—a being beloved by all the other gods for his beauty—by fooling the blind god Hodr into piercing Baldr with toxic mistletoe, the incident became the all-consuming obsession of all the gods. In other words, Loki generated news and caused it to spread.

It is a pattern many modern-day tricksters have followed.

Abbie Hoffman was a counterculture, antiwar protestor of the sixties variety who cofounded a new youth cultural movement he called the Yippies, which he positioned as the logical evolution from hippiedom. He organized a gathering in Washington, DC, where a crowd of self-proclaimed freaks attempted to levitate the Pentagon with their minds. He jumped up on stage during The Who’s set at Woodstock, only to receive a kick in the backside from guitarist Pete Townshend.

Each of these stunts garnered Hoffman and his movement massive amounts of press. Each of these stunts inspired imitators. Each of these stunts seemed like real news. And each of these stunts was concocted from the heads of Hoffman and his collaborators.

In describing his approach, Hoffman said, “If you don’t like the news, why not go out and make your own?”

As the owner of a marketing agency, I get a lot of emails and calls from people who are looking to get attention for their businesses, products, and ideas. Most of these people are smart, and many of them are very accomplished. Yet when I ask them why journalists would want to feature them in their newspapers, magazines, TV shows, blogs, or podcasts, they usually launch into a description of all the wonderful features of their product, maybe with a little bit of history about their company thrown in.

It is important to keep in mind that journalists are not in the business of providing free advertising for products and services, regardless of how well made and useful they might be. Journalists are in the business of delivering news—or at least something that resembles news. If you want exposure for your stuff and for yourself, you need to follow Hoffman’s advice.

Instead of taking out an ad for whatever you’re selling, create and promote a holiday that celebrates its product category.

Rather than going from door to door to raise money for a charity, take inspiration from the ALS ice bucket challenge, which raised $115 million to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or Lou Gehrig’s disease) by calling on people to post videos on social media of their friends and family dumping buckets of ice on their heads.

If you’re an activist, follow the example of Pussy Riot.

In 2011, a group of Russian women who had become fed up with the accelerating authoritarianism and takeover of the media by President–Prime Minister–President Vladimir Putin created a gang of tricksters called Pussy Riot with the aim of combating the propagandist hype of their country’s leader with street activist hype of their own. Not only did this group lack financial resources; it was largely barred from mass media outlets.

So the members of Pussy Riot asked themselves this question: “Where can we go to get in front of lots and lots of people with a message they won’t be able to ignore, in a way that they won’t be able to resist telling others?”

The answer they came up with: public transportation hubs.

Pussy Riot debuted its assault against the Russian status quo with a tour of Moscow’s most heavily trafficked subway stations. The women donned trademark neon-bright face masks, plugged amplifiers into whatever source of electricity was closest by, and ripped into a cacophonous blast of sound and aggression.

In her book Read&Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova described how the group ensured that news of these performances spread: “In the middle of a song, I would rip open a pillow and feathers would rain down on the subway station. . . . I would pull a large firecracker filled with multicolored confetti from my panties . . . and set it off. A layer of colored foil and paper covered stunned passengers who pressed the ‘record’ button on their phones and pointed them at us.”

Pussy Riot created news and devised a mechanism for spreading that news that was embedded in their actual “product.”

You may have no intention or desire to dress up, fight the power, or engage in public spectacle, but there is still a lot you can learn from this band of tricksters.

Begin by conducting an honest assessment. Are there people using your product in a way other than it was originally intended? Is there some sort of spectacle or event or dispute associated with what you produce? Is there a point of view that challenges the status quo that also has a tie to what you’re selling? Is there a group of people who are inclined to use technology to capture what you do and share it with a wide audience? This is all the clay that the trickster digs up and molds to his or her own ends.

Once you figure this out, find the version of a public transit hub that’s most applicable to you and your situation. In the digital age, this does not have to be a physical location. A well-trafficked subreddit? A particularly active YouTube comments section? A certain Quora answer section? Whatever it is, spend time there and display your own version of confetti pulled from underwear.

If you do this well, there will come a time when your tricks have gotten you to where you need to go and when you’ll have to transition into a more prestigious role—to work your way into the circle of the Olympians. The question is, How do you know when that time has arrived?

MOVING BEYOND TRICKS

It was 2 a.m. and recent college dropout Ryan Holiday was defacing a billboard. The catch: The billboard was bought and paid for by Holiday and his client.

Holiday had recently dropped out of college to intern for Robert Greene—the Machiavellian master who authored such books as The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction—and then parlayed that experience into a web of connections with up-and-comers and the already-arrived like Tim Ferriss, James Altucher, and Tucker Max. It was on behalf of the last of these that Holiday would enact a campaign of tricksterism that would set off a firestorm.

The movie version of Tucker Max’s controversial bestselling book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was about to come out, and Max had asked Holiday to help drum up attention for it. Despite the book’s sales, Max and Holiday didn’t have the kind of resources at their disposal that a large organization might. With the money they did have, Holiday and Max rented a small handful of billboards advertising the movie and then set about destroying them.

Holiday affixed on the billboard a message that made it clear that Tucker Max was a disgusting, woman-hating pig. The implication was that this message was placed there by a feminist who was so angry at Max and what he stood for that she was driven to vandalism.

Of course, the actual perpetrator made sure to take a picture of the newly defaced billboard. When he got home, he sent email under a bogus email account with a fake name to a handful of news and gossip blogs. Along with the attached photo, he wrote: “I saw these on my way home last night. It was on 3rd and Crescent Heights, I think. Good to know Los Angeles hates Tucker Max too.”

News of the vandalism spread, and soon real feminists were defacing other Tucker Max billboards in emulation of their nonexistent hero. Outrage skyrocketed. Woke college students picked up their picket signs to call for mass boycotts of the film. Major media outlets picked up on the furor, and pundits debated the merits of both sides.

Ticket sales soared.

These sorts of antics were Ryan Holiday’s stock-in-trade for the early years of this precocious wunderkind’s career. Barely out of his late teens, he secured a position as head of marketing for the clothing brand American Apparel. On its behalf, he used a tiny budget to secure porn star Sasha Grey for an ad where she wore nothing but socks (a naked girl for a clothing ad, get it?). He manufactured stories, pitched them to blogs, and got major media outlets to cover these stories as truth. He distributed antireligious messages on Christian websites and sexist messages on feminist websites—his only belief about any of the messages he spread having to do with whether they got covered or not.

Holiday’s tactics were incredibly successful. They catapulted American Apparel into prominence (until the company eventually collapsed under a strange brew of paranoia, bad behavior, and poor decision-making by founder Dov Charney), and they made him one of the most coveted and emulated promoters around.

Holiday had other ambitions, though. Despite the crass humor and mischief of his tactics, his heroes were classical philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. He saw himself as a writer and a thinker and wanted to create great books that the public took seriously. Presumably he understood that his reputation as a trickster was not compatible with his achieving his larger goals.

It was with typical savvy that Ryan Holiday bridged the gap.

In 2012, Holiday published a book called Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. The book was billed as an exposé of the underhanded tricks that he had used to game the media and the gullible public. As evidenced by the fact that the alt-right eventually used this book (by Holiday’s own admission) to move itself from the freakish fringe to the center of the cultural conversation, it makes no attempt to hide what some might call sinister and dishonest tactics from those who might use them for ill.

Holiday’s real genius move was that he made it clear that buyers of the book will get their hands on these kinds of secrets, while he simultaneously used the book to begin to distance himself from the trickster image that would get in the way of the next phase of his career.

For example, a blurb on the back of Trust Me, I’m Lying reads: “Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write all the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.”

Brilliant.

The effectiveness of Holiday’s distancing tactic is evident in what happened next. Among a number of other subsequent sober-minded books he put out, he released The Obstacle Is the Way, a reinterpretation of Stoic philosophy for the modern era. The audiobook version became incredibly popular among coaches and professional athletes, leading to his starting a web-based publication/business called The Daily Stoic, dedicated to promulgating the ideas of this philosophy of self-denial and moral fortitude.

Today Ryan Holiday’s public image as a speaker and consultant, as well as that as a writer, is one of stern certainty. He speaks in unqualified terms about what his readers and followers should do to live upright lives in our decadent age. And people eat it up. He’s bigger than ever.

His trickster past has been all but forgotten.

Being a trickster is extremely effective in the early stages of your career—or in the early stages of a new project or launch or initiative—especially when you’re low on resources and obvious opportunities. For certain people in a limited range of fields—celebrity managers, shock jocks, and the like—being a lifelong trickster makes sense. For the rest of us, remaining a trickster can often become as much of a shackle as it once was a gate opener—particularly when you’re at that point when you want to move from the fringes to the centers of power.

The best hype artists know when to make this shift. They sense when to discredit their own past as an overt mischief maker and to embody an altogether new persona.

Putting It into Practice