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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.