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Comment by shrubby | Hacker News Reader

Bill Hicks had a good advice to the marketing guys: "kill yourself" so I you're onto something here!

I know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.

There's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'. There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting.

If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.

Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.

The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.

I didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.

Most marketing these days is that kind of pernicious Mad Men style feelings-based marketing.

If ads were informational, like “here is a new product you might like from the makers of this other product you already use,” that would be different.

You are doing a bait and switch now comparing all ads to bait and switch.

He didn't take out ads or anything. He lived his life the way he wanted to and spoke his mind. That's not 'marketing'.

If you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.

I respect the hell out of Bill Hicks but the dude absolutely sat around thinking about marketing and getting his name out there. You have to if you want to be a working comic. Hell it’s not like he didn’t have an agent.

he's a comedian; his entire job is standing up in front of people and saying shit and having a message. thats... the point.

it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.

I promised you every single individual business could say the same thing. No product has any value if people don't know about it.

> having a message

I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job

Then I don’t think you really understand comedy to be honest.

That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you.

Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.

Yes, people who have worked with Paul Feig are not comedians, that's possibly where you're having contextual issues.

I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?

Comedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception.

Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.

And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.

All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.

That's performing, not marketing.

The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.

Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.

He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!

Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)

He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.

I think marketing is fine until it turns into lies. Reaching people to sell them your product should not be an issue. That, with misrepresentation and misleading claims is an issue.

I think manipulating people is a broader surface area to describe the problem. Most people think marketing is about just showing a product, but it's not. Marketing is about psychologically manipulating people and creating subconscious associations within peoples' minds using deeply researched strategies and techniques. See stuff like the Elaboration Likelihood Model. [1]

The next time you're watching a commercial from some company renowned for marketing success (Apple, Coke, etc) pay attention to how much time in the ad the product is in any way mentioned, and how much is... 'other stuff.' That other stuff is the point of the ad, the actual product is largely irrelevant. The world would be vastly better without large scale marketing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model

What about invasion of public and private spaces? Sidewalks in my neighborhood are plastered with dozens of political signs. It’s garish and in some cases hinders traffic visibility. Radio stations near me have started using the album art/song title metadata to display ads on the screen in my car in the middle of a song. Nearly every website tracks you, your phone provider tracks you, stores track you and then they roll up all of this “anonymous” information to target specific ads.

The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.

"Men of America smoke Chesterfields" Is that a lie?

no true Scotch would fall for that

I would agree with you if we were just talking about the abstract idea of marketing. But like everything else, the devil is in the details.

The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market.

With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete.

If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.

Really? How much did Tesla spend on marketing?

Fair enough, I suppose.

While Tesla has (in some years) avoided traditional marketing, the ceo is known for spending ridiculous amounts of money on publicity stunts like having a submarine shipped to a cave and buying Twitter to boost public perception of his companies.

I think this is the exception that proves the rule.

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