So I made a reactionary headline that implied something truly evil is going on but is being kept secret by some vague industry somewhere. and then I made an excerpt that backed it up by using the correct language while actually describing my evening in front of the TV watching the Academy Awards and the mess we made of the stove with the soy milk.
Maybe you read the post. It is my most read post to date. It was titled "What the Soy Milk Producers do not want you to know". I thought the sub-head using the words "whistle blowing" was pretty funny, considering the article was about the tea kettle boiling over and shooting soy milk while it made the whistle noise.
My little experiment paid off. I normally get about 5 clicks through orblogs, but with this headline I tripled my normal count of click-thrus. Currently it shows 17 people were ready to condemn the soy milk cabal. And according to my logs, that one entry had almost 10 times the normal number of readers.
I think I understand now why the local news is always leading us on with these kinds of headlines. They make you tune in. "Find out what you have in your house that could kill you" is an actual "film at 11 moment" that I saw on the local Portland news promos about a year ago. It made me want to tune in to see what horrible killing apparatus might be lurking in my bedroom…
The beauty of that one is that almost everything in your house can kill you, but they were leading on to something specific. Your stairs could kill you if you fell down from the top. Or the windows could kill you if there was a sonic boom in your yard and the shards flew into your eyeballs. Or your porcelain sink could kill you if you ground it up with a mortar and pestle and then cooked it into your mashed potatoes. I guess in that case it could be the potatoes that are killing you too. Roller Skates, dog bowls, chairs, magazine racks, toy fire trucks, the dog, all things you can trip over in the dark when you get out of your deadly bed where the covers were trying to choke you and the pillows were trying to climb into your throat. All deadly. All household items. Don't even get me started on the pinking shears, the butcher knives, or the psychotic roommate who keeps hopping from one throw rug to the next all the while murmuring something about how they'll be landing soon to pick him up.
My point is that we are all too reactionary. A headline like "I'm ok today" doesn't grab any attention, but "Big bad nasty industry is shaving years from your life" does. Unless it's the tobacco industry, of course, then we ignore it. We all watch the news because of the bad stuff that happens, not because the news tells us someone paid off their mortgage or that Joe made it to work on time again today.
It's all about Marketing. "Your neighbor kisses the bank goodbye" and "One man's perfect record may end soon" are both more eyeball grabbing than the generic stories listed above.
So next time you get 300 spams in a day, all trying to sell you something while remaining untraceable and without blame (how do they do that?), remember, it's all part of the reactionary marketing culture we live in. Welcome to 2005.
One Comment
This kind of marketing has been going on for a while. But in my opinion, it's recently been combined to be both 'reactionary' and 'sensationalist'. After a while, people become blaise about it (not sure about that spelling).
I'm reminded of an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"….
Buffy: So, what's the problem this week.
Giles: It's the end of the world! The Apocolypse!
Buffy: *sigh*… Another one?
No wonder that "whatever" is used so much.