Strategies of Capture in the 'Attention Economy'
Me: “While you were marketing for dating coaches, what was your workflow like?”
J: “I did market mostly services, meaning bootcamps. So the flow was, simply; the product is a set three-day delivery, and you have 12 or 24 guys in a room; we also had Superconferences where there are more seats for just the theory [the seminar], and then at night they would only take out 24 guys or less for a higher fee. So that was a set product. So there was a set curriculum, and the same thing would pretty much happen on every bootcamp. And so, my job was to transform that [product, the experience of the bootcamp or superconference] into news, and write a newsletter to the existing number of fans that we already had entered into our email marketing list; and to send [email] blasts and say ‘hey, we’re coming to Vegas’, ‘we’re coming to Chicago’, ‘we’re coming to Miami’.”
Me: “You’re the messenger, the trumpet-bearer…”
J: “I was the messenger, yeah. So that was my flow. And my job was to make the phone ring and get people to say ‘hey, I’m interested, what do I do to get on the bootcamp?’ So one thing I did was, just before the first episode of the show [VH1 ‘pickup artist’] would air—the event would happen in Miami—and it was completely overrun, because I wrote [in the email newsletter] something like ‘this will be the last time you will see him [Mystery] in-field while nobody knows who he is. Starting next month, everybody will know him from VH1, and so it’s gonna change everything completely, and he will be a celebrity, people will recognize him. But if you want to learn in the old way—where he’s just a dude with a crazy hat entering a bar, with no celebrity buzz—well then you’ve gotta come here. So we had like 100 people who wanted to see that, before the show [aired]. And the room was completely over-filled, and we couldn’t even get everybody out in the field [for in-field practice]. It was crazy—we had last-minute people [signing up], like ‘here’s my money, five thousand dollars!’ And then once-in-awhile we had people with a lot of money, who would pay like $10,000 per day for personal coaching. So it was just him [Mystery] and the client went out together, alone, with no other students; during the day he would teach—it was something like, Mystery would show up late around 12 [noon], and would tell him the exact same routines, and tell him stories of his life—and very often the student was disappointed, and was like ‘I’ve learned nothing that I couldn’t already see on the video’. The crazy thing is that people were willing to pay that kind of money; and they still are [willing], they would be, if they would market it [the products] like that.”
Me: “So you wrote content for these newsletters and emails?”
J: “Yeah, like 20 lines, 30 lines—it was more like marketing newsletters. I mean, we included some tips, but we found that the fewer tips we included, and the more just cranked up the cheesy clichés—the drama, things like ‘oh, the show is coming, and there’s only so many seats, and Miami will be the last [live event]’, things like that, that’s really what sells [a sense of urgency, a sense of need]—not so much [the tips]… Many marketers give too many tips. And with tips, people read the tips, but then they don’t buy [the product].”
Me: “So it seems to me like writing these messages on the marketing side is in a sense like using the dating skills on the men who would be customers.”
J: “Yeah, exactly. It [the pickup skills] is really a lesson in marketing, that’s all. Exactly.”
Me: “Just about economics, these programs were priced more highly when they were smaller groups, and priced lower when it was a big thing like a superconference…”
J: “Well no, the number of seats stayed sort of at the same price. But they just widened the access by renting a bigger room for the theory part [the seminar], and that [entry price] was discounted. So we just added a lower tier for people who just wanted to see it, but they didn’t want to go out or to pay that extra money. So the going-out [in-field] level cost like $5,000, and maybe the conference was only $2,000, something like that. It’s not that we made everybody pay less—we just added more seats in the back where people could sit and watch, and then they could go out alone or create groups without coaches.”
Me: “Were there any products that you wanted to develop, from the marketing side—things that you wanted to package or create—that didn’t end up happening?”
J: “No, not really. I wasn’t so much on the product side, I was more on the service side, selling bootcamps. What happened on the product side was, they would just film bootcamps, and that’s it—cut them together, and that would be a three DVD set, or a five DVD set. And you could sell that to people who couldn’t make it to the bootcamp. So a few months later [after the bootcamp] the DVD set would come out, and it would be [marketed as] ‘The Best Of…’, and it would be a complete home study system, a course, basically.”
Me: “And did you interact with the customers, say, in terms of doing research on what things they wanted, or what things they didn’t want…”
J: “I mean, I was their first phone-sales guy, so absolutely.”
Me: “What sorts of questions would you ask them? You’re trying to screen them, but of course you’re not screening them too closely…”
J: “Actually, I automated that part. We invented this backstage area, where we would give away some of Mystery’s secrets for free, but you had to apply to be invited into the backstage area. So to be considered for it, you have to write a little paragraph about why you belong in the backstage area, and why you should be there. So people wrote all these little paragraphs; nobody had time to read them, or whatever. We just ended up with this group [of clients] who, a day later, they would get the welcome script [invitation]. And they now felt that they were part of the fold, that they were a little bit closer to Mystery. There was a special newsletter for them, and there would be special invitations. First of all, the bootcamps were only available to members of that ‘backstage’ area. But anyone who had a head could become members of that backstage area. And then the second part was that we would do a promotion, like ‘for one day only’, and we would include an extra hour, or always some little bit of extra service that you could throw in—or a free copy of this or that book, or some things of higher value—maybe a bonus session with Mystery, something like that. To give people the push that ‘ok, today is the day that I want to sign up’…”
Me: “It’s like a little game, and they feel rewarded…”
J: “Yeah, yeah. Exactly."
Me: “I’m interested in this topic of the marketing itself being like a seduction, or vice versa. Can you give me some examples of those screening questions you would ask guys?”
J: “No, I mean, like I said that part was already automated. The marketing was so good that at the point when they called us, they already felt selected, and we just had to say yes—to tell them that they’ve met the deadline, and that we still have a seat for them. [An example of what pickup artists call ‘qualification’, i.e. marketing is like seduction insofar as you make the client feel chosen for a unique and rare experience.] I didn’t play any… I’m horrible at phone selling, at playing such games. And so I avoided all of this by moving it onto the online, step-by-step seduction. […] I had experience with only one particular marketing system. But later [after me], they got on board guys who had more experience with professional call centers. They actually did have, then, people who did a whole dog and pony show on the phone, and had a phone script… So it was more of a boiler-room type operation, which is not something that I’m super talented at. I’m more talented at setting up an online funnel upward, that goes from step 1, 2, 3, 4—I’m not a sales guy that started selling vacuums, you know. And then they build an organization for sales that is all phone-based; but mine is all internet-based. So I do what they do, but I do it with web-pages, and videos, and interactive news email blasts.”
Me: “Information architecture, is that a term you would use?”
J: “Well, it’s a bit of a nerd term. Information architecture means the guys in an enterprise that basically design—‘ok, here’s a server, and we have so many workstations, and then we put all the images on that server, and the word documents go on that server…’ That’s information architecture, it’s technical jargon. You could say, I don’t know, ‘marketing systems builder’, or building marketing systems—automated sales funnels. The technical term is ‘sales funnel’. The client finds you somehow, and we send them an email blast, we send them a Facebook thing…”
Me: “You’re trying to tap into their desire to transcend this limitation that they feel…”
J: “Yes, absolutely. You’ve gotta pick them up exactly where they are—they probably read The Game. And you know, Neil made the biggest gift to him [Mystery] by writing this book. To this day, it’s probably the sole source of Mystery’s income. To this day, it is the number one thing that people come with and say, ‘well I read about him in The Game, and I want to meet him personally.’ And so that increased sales. And so I knew exactly where they’re at—they’ve read this, they’re somewhere in Oklahoma or wherever, and with starry eyes, and they read this and think ‘oh Hollywood, look at all these adventures that these people have, and how crazy they are, and I want a little bit of that too. And that [emotional place] is exactly where you pick them up, and you say, you know, ‘now you can touch the hem [of Mystery’s cloak]’. We literally used that word—‘you can touch the hem’.”
Me: “Like the saint’s relics…”
J: “Yeah yeah—‘you may touch the hem’… So it was as much personality marketing as it was tapping into the technical design of it [dating skills]—and that was the technical aspects of how to get laid, or whatever. So in other words, my job was just to connect these two—to get this pent up energy from these hundreds of thousands of people who bought The Game; and you had him [Mystery] here; and I just need to sort of connect these two—it’s like connecting two pipes that just wanna exchange. It’s like, here there’s a water reservoir [Mystery], and down here there’s thirsty people, and you just need to build that little pipe, and this crazy potential would be a lot. So it was kind of easy. You [clients] already know what you want, and [now] you get to touch the hem. So we would throw some tips in there, and some bits, just to keep that desire alive—[that desire of] ‘oh, I want to know more about the secrets’—but it was fairly easy to just do personality marketing.”
In the following image, I reproduce the contents of a client-screening questionnaire which was provided to me by a prominent dating coach.
Text text text.
