Tag: Orson Welles

War Of The Worlds: Content Marketing Lesson 🗺️ (Old Time Radio)

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian talks about Orson Welles class War of Worlds that used to be played on the radio during Halloween.

Transcription

War of the world’s content marketing lesson.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I want to talk with you a little bit in celebration of Halloween.

Famous Halloween episode that gets played every year on live radio and you can always find a copy somewhere on YouTube or anywhere else online of Orson Welles, classic War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

I want to talk about the lesson that you can learn for your business. Okay, if you’re doing any form of content marketing whatsoever,

I’m going to recommend that you step back and really look hard at your strategy. Okay, because of how you build that out. And I want to get into what War of the Worlds has to do with that, I’ve always had an interest in old-time radio.

So all the stuff that was all the drama that was played out on radio before television came about. So we’re talking 30s 40s 50s. And so I have a really strong interest in this. But if we’re talking content marketing.

Content marketing is one of those things that requires a plan, it requires really distinct, planning out and looking from a distance and having a good idea about where you’re going with it and making sure that it actually gets there.

One of the books I wrote a book called, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

It’s all about this process from a kind of a wider view of kind of determining what you’re going to do with your content marketing, and why even though it doesn’t say content marketing in the title, but go grab yourself a copy, you can get a free one, if you want.

They’re available right now Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

Let’s talk about the war of the world, shall we?

Orson Welles was a natural at publicity.

He just understood this stuff. It’s amazing that he did not do more of it throughout his lifetime. I think he got shy because of a lack of funding for his movies and so forth. But in general, he understood it to some extent, especially when he was younger.

And he definitely understood it when it came to his radio show Mercury Theater on the air.

This wasn’t the only time he had done anything that was outrageous. He was trying outrageous stuff all the time, anything to get attention, anything to get a headline, he was always trying to get the press to pay attention, and to get and he knew that by doing that he would automatically get attention well, even if it’s initially considered negative.

Now there’s a whole lot of mythology around War of the Worlds and a whole lot of that is because Orson Welles created it from the very beginning.

He and throughout the years throughout his whole life went back, and when talking about it, he would throw in extra items that weren’t discussed earlier on. So it’s tough to tell what’s true and what’s untrue.

In later years, he would say that the police showed up and tried to get them to stop broadcasting. When I was a kid, they always talked about this huge, widespread panic across the entire country over this one episode.

And there are bits and pieces about that, in fact, I’m going to put a link in the description, which, depending on whether you’re listening or watching this, you can also find at BrianJPombo.com.

Under this, this blog post, but there’s a pretty cool video I just saw of some of the telephone operators that were there and got to hear some of the panics from families and so forth calling each other because back then everything had to go through a switchboard and it was manually switched out.

No, you see the older movies and TV shows where they had a physical operator, they’re pulling out one line to connect to another especially when you’re talking long distance a lot of that had to occur. So they said the switchboard just lit right up.

So there’s certainly something to it. It’s more of an argument over the degree of how widespread it actually was.

But they claim that because of a lot of the fighting between newspapers losing advertising dollars to radio, that the newspapers were trying actually make a bigger deal about it after the fact. Then when it actually happened.

And because of that Orson Welles got more attention.

This is before he had done any movies or anything of that sort. So this helped lead to him being this huge sought after figure because of all this chaos put around it now what actually occurred whether it actually happened or not?

What was the structure of the show that created this?

And this is a content marketing lesson.

The structure of the show was you had a dramatic show called Mercury Theatre on the Air. The whole idea is they would take classic stories, most of the time well-known classic stories, and put them into drama format, and play them out on the air over, you know, I believe it was an hour-long show at this point.

And so they did this on a regular basis, and he was always trying new things.

So on stage, he did, he did a famous thing that’s known as Buddha Macbeth, where he had the Shakespearean Macbeth done up as if it were in, I believe it was in the Caribbean or something. And the entire cast was African American.

I mean, he went, he went to crazy lengths to always twist things and put them out a little bit differently to get attention. And it worked. Throughout much of his early career, these things worked.

So one of the things that he did with this was he took it the HG Wells, no relation to Orson Welles, he took HG Wells, his book, The War of the Worlds well-known book had been out for quite a while.

And he took it and he said, What if we made it modern-day, and we had it seen from the view of a radio broadcast since we’re doing radio broadcast, we’ll show it as a news broadcast, and stretch it out.

Now, the entire episode doesn’t come off that way. Toward the end, it goes into more of a narrative. And he says, there are multiple points in the episode where they say, Hey, thank you for being here for this dramatic presentation of war of the world.

I mean, they break out of character multiple times. But the main idea that made it stand out as they were pretending to be a news show, in the middle of their show, they have already introduced this is a show, this is what we’re doing.

And then they turned it into a news program that was breaking into a musical program. So it’s very brilliant, but Oh, big. It’s brilliant, and just simple.

And here’s the lesson, the lesson is if you can take your content, and deliver it in a slightly different way. And all it takes is copying a different format, and sticking it into your format.

For example, if you’re and I’m making this up off the top of my head, so we’ll see if it actually goes.

For example, if you were a business guru, and your main thing was showing people how to make money online, let’s say you were doing that internet marketing something of that sort and you decide, Okay, what if instead of doing the typical way, that that gets presented out there?

What if I did it, like a television talk show, like Oprah or something of that sort?

What if we did it like that? I’m just throwing it out there. This is right off the top of my head. I’m just saying, What if you mess with formats, and you’ve come up with a million different examples, messing with formats throws people off.

It makes people pay attention, because this is either a talk show, and I’m paying attention for that reason. And then I’m going to get a different message or you have a situation where I, I’m interested in this person, but they’re presenting things in a completely different way.

It does something to the psyche, it does something that triggers things in quite a very, in quite an interesting way. And this happens throughout marketing. This happens over and over and over again.

There’s this famous situation Gary Benz of Ingo was famous for coining the term magalog. And a magalog was basically a thing that looked like a magazine that got sent out, but it sold like a catalog.

So it was a magazine, but all the articles and everything in it was an advertisement. And so you have a magalog an infomercial with infomercials first came out, they were an informational TV show that was hiding to be a commercial. And so you had an infomercial. You have these types of twists all throughout.

Hopefully, that makes sense. I don’t have a whole lot of time. We’re going to cut it off tonight. You have a happy Halloween.

We’ll see it tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

The Shadow Knows…Content Marketing? 📻

Posted on by brianjpombo

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If you don’t know who The Shadow is please turn this video off, you’re unworthy. Thanks! 😀

Transcription

The Shadow knows…content marketing?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I have a lot of odd interests and one of the strange interests that I’ve brought up in the past is, I really enjoy things that I want. It’s tied to my interest in all things from the 1930s and 40s.

I’ve got a strange fascination with things, you can see the old-style radio back behind me.

I’ve always had an interest in this time period ends because listen to my grandparents growing up during that time. And one of the things I have a real interest in was old-time radio.

So before the days of television, they had movies, you could go and watch a movie. But if you wanted ongoing entertainment beyond just going to the movie theater, there was only the radio. You could grab a book, or you can listen to the radio and they would perform just like they perform today on television. And a lot of the same standards that we have on television with 30 minutes, 60-minute shows, that all started on the radio.

Even soap operas themselves started on the radio, situation comedies, you know, drama, especially police drama, all that started on the radio, and they would have these radio shows.

And we still have a whole lot of them still available, even though a lot of them were performed live. Many of them were recorded, many of them were lost through time.

One of the shows was a show called The Shadow, and some of you may be vaguely familiar with this because in the 90s, they came out with a movie with Alec Baldwin as The Shadow.

He was basically an old superhero, I’m not going to get into the depths of all the shadow lore, but he was always one of my favorite characters from these radio shows.

And if you watch old movies and stuff, he was so popular at the time, you watch old movies, you watch cartoons from the time they make reference to him. And so you’re going Brian, what’s this have to do with business?

What’s this have to do with content marketing, which is the area that I have a modern interest in right now. And something that I’ve worked on quite a bit. And been and working with companies right now and helping develop content marketing, because it’s a burgeoning field, within online within social media, within the law, all this video and stuff that we’re putting out on a regular basis.

That’s all content marketing, but content marketing didn’t start with the internet.

Content Marketing has always been around. And it’s one of my most favorite types of marketing because it takes creativity. And I enjoy things that take creativity. I like the idea behind it.

So I’ll tell you how the shadow ties into this.

How the shadow came about is there was a company it’s the Street & Smith publishing company. And they had started publishing a magazine called, Popular. This was back in the early 1900s. Let’s see 1905 they had a real successful magazine, they branched out into all different types of magazines, and they had detective stories and Western stories. You know, most of the cases, these are fictional stories that are written that and they’d put these magazines out, I think on a monthly basis.

And they’d sell well all over the country and they make good money off and eventually, they sold internationally. So they had they in order to try and get more people to buy their magazines. They’d advertise their magazines in a million different places.

And one of the places they started advertising was on the radio.

Now how would you go about advertising a magazine of stories on the radio was a perfect fit. All they had to do was take one of the stories or a piece of one of the stories and dramatize it, have a bunch of actors play it out. They already had these actors hired at the radio stations.

You just had to go through the process and have them acted out and say hey, if you want to read this story and others like it, go pick up this magazine.

So they had a radio show. This was in the 30s they had a radio show called, Detective Story Hour.

And Detective Story Hour was an advertisement. It was an infomercial innocence for the detective story magazine. It’s very simple.

They’d have these stories. Well, they needed a narrator and so they had an ongoing narrator and what was the narrator’s name?

While they didn’t want to name them just anybody because that they couldn’t have any actor play it. So, they wanted something they kind of had control over.

So they created a character called, The Shadow.

It didn’t mean anything. It was just his name, his name was The Shadow.

Here’s what ended up happening though.

This show started getting popular, people started going to the magazine that the places where you get magazines, which most cases that’d be a newstand back then. You go they go to the newsstand and they say, hey, I want to get The Shadow magazine, where’s The Shadow?

Because he was the only thing that was consistent on the show. They couldn’t remember Detective Story. they remembered The Shadow, because he’s the guy that told the story.

So they got wind of this over the magazine, they said, Wow, people are already asking for it, let’s give them what they want.

They created a magazine called The Shadow, they created a character that was a little deeper than just a narrator on the show and they started having him going off and having adventures. So that got popular.

So you had a situation where they ended up making the radio show about the magazine that was created because of the radio show about the magazine, you see.

It’s really cool too and then it grew from there that show ended up becoming extremely popular, ran for years and years, never truly made the jump to television.

So many cool ideas and stuff are found out. And so many things have been taken from the shadow. If, if you look at his outfit here, it’s there’s been a whole lot of characters that have kind of copied this outfit, including a Disney cartoon, Darkwing Duck, if you I grew up watching those, it was based on the shadow so that there are little echoes throughout society from this one character that was created via content marketing, he was an advertising piece. That was his old purpose and he became one of the most popular magazines that this publishing company ever put out.

To this day is still a character that is licensed and controlled. In fact, they just came out, they just licensed a book with a Patterson, what’s his name? The writer…of course, it’s completely skipping my mind right now, who just who and he, in turn, had a ghostwriter put together a book. And it’s there’s a new book out there called The Shadow because it’s still as a valuable asset that produces money all these years later.

So you can use content marketing in a million different ways. Imagine now being able to have a back and forth conversation getting back and forth reaction to what you’re putting out there.

Because of social media, you can have direct communication with your end-user, and be able to improve whatever product or service you’re trying to provide.

It comes with really dedicating yourself to putting something out there on a regular basis, that tells a story that gives people communication that gives allows people to see you on a regular basis in a way that it especially in a way that other people in your industry are not doing perhaps even competition to you.

Here’s another idea.

In terms of competition, if you’re really scared of competition, if it’s really something that keeps you up at night, go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Even if you’re not scared of competition, you ought to read these 9 ways to Amazon-Proof your business.

It’s about making your business completely competition-proof. And it starts right here. It starts with just changing your own mindset and changing how your entire company deals with competitive forces.

You get a free copy of this book at AmazonProofBook.com. You see, here I am creating content that promotes my material promotes my publication and also promotes everything and the publication, in turn, promotes my company and the fact that I’m a business investor and so on so forth.

So hopefully that all makes sense to you. If not, stay tuned, we’ll have more content just like this in the future.

You have a great night. Get out there and let the magic happen.