From: Ben Mack
To: "Mark Joyner",
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 23:09:11 -0420
Subject: Re: Thoughts on magic
Dear Mark,
Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your book. I am honored. But first, once again, you have created brilliance. In The Irresistible Offer you have simplified the essence of business, the offer and its acceptance. Wow! When I was a Senior Vice President at BBDO leading the strategy on Cingular, I wish I had thought of this simplicity, I would have been more effective.
I don’t think Business can be simplified further than you did in The Irresistible Offer: An offer and its acceptance. The simplicity of this insight will make many skeptical of its value. Those skeptics are wasting their time. Simplicity is a key to power because efficiency respects energy conservation. Waste leads to depletion. Mark, riddle me this, why do so many people enjoy wasting their time with skeptical thoughts? Can you answer me that?
You asked me about how I find thirsty audiences. I rely heavily on Google. I have Google alerts set for my name, my book’s title and proprietary words I use in my novel, Poker Without Cards. When I get one of these alerts, I know I have an advocate speaking to a forum that is likely to be populated with folks thirsty for my wares. Many times I make an appearance and field questions while I encourage them to share with others the benefits of reading my book.
Googling “Google tips” will retrieve a page of various applications within Google. I regularly search for folks linking to my pages. With this I find discussions that fell-through my alerts.
When I’m really hungry for thirsty minds, I go on amazon.con and bn.com and see what books people buying my book bought and then I use Google to find these thirsty minds and explain to them why my book has relevance to their interests. I have a very niche book, so I’m often scanning micro communities, either as myself or as an avatar. I never use my avatar identity unless a flame war breaks out. I’ve learned that all publicity is good. I was featured on CrapAuthors.com and that coverage panning my book sold 50 books and another 800 downloaded my book for free.
To drum up drama online I had two blogs running that were fighting with each other. Ben Mack was in a vicious fight with Howard Campbell, a fight that was launched by a podcast with me obviously playing both characters. When there’s drama folks write about it. When they write about my drama I join their conversations to extend the conversation. Over 300,000 have downloaded my book for free. I’m laying the groundwork for my next book which won’t be available for free. The title of my next book is simply: 23. Poker Without Cards and freeBookWorthReading.doc explain exactly how 23 will be marketed.
I’ve been helping Steve Kaplan market his bestselling book Bag The Elephant. I have never met Mr. Kaplan, never emailed with him, never spoken with him on the phone. I imagine he has never heard my name. I don’t really care about Kaplan. But, his book marketer was somebody I wanted to learn from so I offered to help him for free so I could learn what he does. I offer to help folks I want to learn from. The help I give is with no expectation of immediate return other than what I learn in the process of helping. Magically, they wind up lending a hand when something appropriate comes along.
I’ve had a modicum of success with ezinearticles.com. I write an essay and it is pulled as content for various sites. Then, I know that site is interested in my kind of content and I contact them directly. Most of the time I never hear anything back. This is to be expected. I have a rule of two queries and then I don’t contact them again for at least a month. I cover these details in a book entitled freeBookWorthReading.doc, a free book that is downloadable at my website www.PokerWithoutCards.com. Mark, your readers need to know that while I go into great detail explaining marketing, branding, idea dissemination and memetics, the beginning of freeBookWorthReading.doc work is unintelligible to most readers. Furthermore I use a traditional definition of memetics and not the Jay Levinson definition to which you refer in TIO. Readers who make their way through the homonym play and untraditional use of fonts will learn the exact tactics and strategies I have used. I know it is your rare reader that actually seeks to really work through your tactics so I’m sure this won’t matter.
Obviously, I’m not a best selling author, yet. But, I have a list of endorsements worthy of bragging and I explain exactly how I went about garnering these endorsements. Here are two that I’m proud of and I explain exactly how I get them. When was the last time you saw a book endorsed by Kurt Vonnegut? He just doesn’t endorse books as a rule because he doesn’t want to be barraged by requests. I explain exactly how I used Google Alerts and developed the relationship with Joe Petro III, a business partner of Kurt’s. By tracking Kurt, I was able to repeatedly have an excuse to drop Joe a note. Google News and Google Alerts facilitated the excuse for contact that built the relationship that allowed me to get the quote you read below:
“Ben Mack, Since you don't have the guts to be a homosexual, I'm glad that you are pissing off your parents by writing.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Cat’s Cradle/Slaughter House 5
Mark, I speculate that most of your readers will have no idea who this next guy is, but half my sales are probably due to the following quote. People consuming his words are my most thirsty audience. You studied with Robert Anton Wilson, so I know you respect his technology even if you don’t subscribe to all of his politics or mine. In freeBookWorthReading.doc I explain how I got this quote from a legend of mental gymnastics:
“Poker Without Cards is a consciousness thriller, combining natural philosophy with storytelling—the effect is like taking acid, only you never come down.”
Robert Anton Wilson
The Illuminatus! Trilogy/TSOG/Prometheus Rising
Changing topics--in The Irresistible Offer you write “The magic of marketing has to do with your own enthusiasm, belief, and confidence affecting your results…I can say with reasonable certainty that what you expect will have a significant impact on your business.” These words are evocative. I’d like to write about what these words mean to me. I’d like to write about magic and marketing.
I think magic deserves serious consideration but I fear that this topic may be inflammatory.
On the one hand, magic can be seen as tool of theatrics, a toolset that I have built for myself over the years. I started performing at The Magic Castle at the age of 14. At 19 The Academy of Magical Arts gave me an award that made me the youngest recipient in the history of the award. I get theatrical magic. But, I cannot fully articulate the magical frame of mind. I can say this: when an audience feels safe, respected and cared for, their minds loosen and their defenses drop. Deception created purely for personal gain is a con, but immersive realities manifested for the benefit of the audience may feel magical.
Ad copy can be magical. Good copy respects the audience’s values and sensibilities. Great copy communicates your love for your audience and their passions. You’ve help teach me that if you don’t love them, they won’t love you back, and it’s really expensive to go find new customers.
Magic is the act of facilitating an immersive experience, perhaps best encapsulated by the word phantasmagorical. Something is phantasmagorical when an audience transcends their skepticism and accepts a world where the laws of nature don’t have such a firm grasp on reality. In advertising, copy can become phantasmagorical when it is stoking the passions of a diehard fan, helping them envision driving a golf ball 300 yards or bringing them into a moment of sports history that they can recollect with vivid details.
When copy is transformative, you have magic. The German philosopher Hegel said that an art object is a catalyst to an altered state of consciousness. Great ad copy takes us someplace else. Magical ad copy approaches the sublime.
On the other hand, magic can be a scary word. Last week, I was moderating a focus group among nurses and hospital employees of a children’s hospital and the word “magic” came up and a participant asked that we not use that word because it made her uncomfortable.
I suggest you be careful when you use the word magic or any of its synonyms. To many, the word magic evokes a threat of eternal damnation. To these people, a magician is a spiritual terrorist, striking out to infect the unsuspecting. There are more people who hold this to be true than I imagined as I grew up performing magic. Occasionally, some audience member would want to talk to me and get me to repent and save my soul. I can’t quantify how many of these folks there are, what the incidence is, but the October 11, 2005 USA Today reported that 53% of Americans believe “God created human beings in their present form exactly as described in the Bible”. If you figure half of these folks see the word magic as demonic, that’s approximately ¼ of all Americans. So the word magic should be used with discretion. Shakespeare reminds us: the better half of valor is discretion.
So why discuss magic? There is real power in magic. And as Lord Of The Rings taught us, the one who controls the magic controls the world. Besides, the danger of magic can be exploited for marketing, and so discussing magic can be profitable. Early 20th Century magicians regularly employed images of demons and spirits on their promotional posters.
Besides, magic is real. Faith is powerful. A doctor in one of the groups mentioned above asked me if I knew what was the best predictor of success for patients about to have a critical surgery. I said no. He said the greatest predictor of success is the doctor’s expectation of a good result. He said that mystifies doctors and that most won’t discuss the studies that show that attitude has a physical manifestation on outcome, but he assured me these studies were real and had been adequately replicated to verify the findings.
I hold that prayer works. I also hold that the focus and intention is what works, not the specific phrases. I don’t believe that some words are cosmic triggers. Hocus Pocus is just theatrical dressing.
Stigmatisms blight magical inquiry of the theatrical, let alone the spiritual. Inquiry into the unexplained is limited. Psi search publications are more often a joke than a contribution to science.
Early scholars of magic and perception were persecuted and killed. If I had used the word executed there, it would have depicted a government sanctioned killing. If I had used the word murder, there would be an illicit connotation. Word choice effects how we process information. I see word choice as a form of magic since it can affect how we see things.
Words are powerful. Word choice is crucial. Scientology’s flagship book Dianetics is littered with big words because L. Ron Hubbard wanted to intimidate his reader. Hubbard drew on techniques that a perceptual scientist Aleister Crowley was developing. If you intimidate your reader they are more likely to take you seriously. But the use of big words is off putting to most. Hubbard wanted those taking his words seriously to learn these words. He explains that this then gives his followers a reason for better understanding how the world really works. I agree with a lot of his premise, but the whole alien thing throws me. But Mark, maybe I just don’t see what he sees.
Being exclusionary is powerful. Those on the inner circle feel enchanted by their elite knowledge. Just look how profitable Pokemon was, a property built around big words that literally nobody knew until they defined their terms.
Magic theory is littered with big words like prestidigitation, a word intentionally made cryptic which means the act of quick fingers. Prestidigitation was coined by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a 16th-century classic that attempted to disprove the existence of witches by detailing the charges against women who supposedly practiced the black arts. Scot wanted to present a scientific account of what these women were doing and so he used Latin, the language of science. Presto means quick, digits means fingers, ation is the act there of—prestidigitation, now known as sleight of hand.
The psychology of perception has not long been openly studied. Science that challenged the cosmography (world view) of The Church was labeled as heretical, illegal, and often punishable by death. I reiterate: to this day, the idea of magic is offensive to many.
I respect the scientist Aleister Crowley I mentioned earlier. Crowley said, “We attribute to magick that which we don’t understand.” I fear I may be discomfiting you by my vocabulary. Marketing has a vocabulary. You learn the word “Touchstone” and presto, you communication differently. I see that as magic. An opportunity has appeared to you. A technology has become visible. Vocabulary works like that. Vocabulary is magical.
I see value in cherishing moments that feel magical. I champion copywriters who can enchant their reader. I hope that my contribution to your book can dispel some of the misgivings around the word magic.
I love magic. I’ve been drawn to magicians my whole life. But, I don’t limit the term magician to a person doing tricks on a proscenium stage. Mark, you are a magician. I see you pulling money out of the air far more realistically than the stage trick entitled A Miser’s Dream. I can perform A Miser’s Dream. I can’t make $50,000 in a couple months despite having attended two of your seminars, which you were gracious to include me and these seminars have altered my life for the better. Next year, I might be able to replicate one of your tricks, using original patter and new accessories. Thank you for the empowerment. I can replicate some of what you do because you show me what you are doing. Most magicians won’t do that as openly as you have chosen.
A magician is everybody that does something of value where I can’t see what their doing. They are using tools that I can’t see. Mastery is a telltale sign of a magical mind. However, obsessive compulsions can also lead to mastery while obsessive-compulsive thoughts rarely lead to tool invention. There is a loosening of associations that doesn’t happen with OC thinking. Your humor helps me focus while I relax into perceptions of reality where the insights garnered are new tools for my real world.
You are a science-based magician. You teach a science that facilitates magic. The heart of science is replication. I’m not speaking of viral replication or buzz marketing. I’m speaking about the scientific method, your ability to consistently replicate money making experiments: magical acts of making money out of nothing, or so it appears to the uninitiated. But you have skills and you teach the skills and you appear again and do the trick one more time. You remind me of a young Al Goshman who would repeatedly make a silver dollar appear under a salt-shaker. He would make the silver-dollar appear under a salt shaker 23 times in the course of a show. Goshman was a perceptionist, demonstrating that he could repeatedly misdirect his audience. But, you aren’t misdirecting folks. You are showing everybody how you do your tricks, how you pull money out of the air. Thank you.
Magic is not a thing or a physical act, but a state of mind that approaches the sublime but is more aptly referred to as phantasmagorical. Magic occurs at the intersection of a performer and an audience. There is intentionality to the perception. A stone that looks like an eagle is not magic, regardless of whether or not it is carved to represent the physical traits of an eagle. A sculpture maybe a catalyst to an altered state of mind, but I am reticent to call a sculpture magical. Some panoramas feel almost magical to me, but real magic is dynamic and ephemeral. Magic is the process of engineering an experience where reality emerges as it cannot be, and yet the audience is compelled to set aside their disbelief and flow with the experience as long as it lasts.
Creating theatrical magic entails tweaking our visual prejudices. We drop a coin, and it falls. We know this to be true; we’ve seen the force of gravity pull objects to Earth since before we had words to articulate the phenomena. What most non-perceptual psychologists DON’T recognize is the extent that our mind projects our expectations, our visual prejudices, onto our sight. If a magician creates the physical gesture of dropping a coin from one hand to another, yet palms the coin so it doesn’t actually fall into the second hand, most minds will see the coin fall. The term for this sight projection is sight retention. A normal mind will literally “see” the coin fall. This specific visual hallucination is called a projection, our mind projects its expectation of reality onto our sight. The magician makes note of the triggers that cause these visual breaks from reality and assembles a presentation that often includes a series of these triggers, often strung together through a narrative known as patter. The magician is an actor playing the role of a person with supernatural powers. [The previous two paragraphs were swiped from a chapter I wrote for Dave Zulborsky book This Is Not A Game, a book about using Alternate Reality Games as Internet marketing vehicles, explaining in exacting detail how ilovebees.com helped make Halo II the biggest launch of any video game ever released. BTW, the concept of a swipe file has been greatly appreciated by me and many of my readers with whom I shared this valuable notion.]
Projection is a powerful force. We not only see what we expect to see, but often our expectations create our reality. The doctor mentioned earlier was explaining this dynamic, that a doctor’s expectation of results had a higher correlation to a patient’s success than any other element tested. I would tell your readers what Grant Morrison recommended, Fake it till you make it. My Bennington College buddy Bill Scully of VermontFineDining.com said that our college buddy Tom Dunn, a genius artist who is now being recognized, said, Bill, we’re finally doing stuff that is big enough to fit our egos. I’ve known Bill and Tom for 13 years. We each knew we were good. We also were regularly the only ones working at 3AM. Expectation drives determination, hard work reinforces expectation. Grounded planning and stewardship of business plans helps. Scientifically testing your efforts and changing courses is worth the effort. Burning a colored candle is not likely to make money appear unless other preparations are in place, namely smart hard work.
If expectation of success is powerful, the willing suspension of disbelief is powerful. Theatre and magic generate a willing suspension of disbelief creating a magical frame of mind. Phantasmagoria is magic. A phantasmagoric effect generated a magical frame of mind.
Magic can be created from afar. A person who engineers a magical frame of mind, phantasmagoria, for an audience may or may not be a performer on a stage. If the person who engineered a magical experience is not the actor presenting the feats, they are the meme-wranglers of the experience. Clock makers of the 17th Century created automatons, mechanical men whose gears and riggings could be activated to perform the tricks of magicians. These clock makers were not magicians; they were the meme-wranglers of their metal figurines that could perform magic, even in the absence of their creators.
Creating magic requires the recognition of stages within stages, seeing micro-stages within macro-stages. The macro-stage is the physical place the audience encounters the magic. A magician may perform on a traditional proscenium stage, in a parlor, at a dinner table or on a street corner—whatever location the magician interacts with their audience becomes the macro-stage. The micro-stages emerge as the audience shifts their attention. David Copperfield regularly performs coin tricks in front of audiences in excess of 2,000. How? He manages the micro-stages, the focus of his audience. By focusing his own attention, with all his body, on a silver dollar, he can command the attention of 2,000 sets of eyes, whose minds enjoy the representation of a miracle as he makes the coin vanish. Copperfield directs the focus of his audience. Site retention won’t work unless the audience’s mind is engaged. The mind must not only see the cues that trigger the mental projections, but the mind must be so immersed in its focus that the mind accepts the magician’s cues as real. The creation of these cues, the intentional use of projection triggers, is the keystone to invoking illusion.
Misdirection is the magician’s ability to secretly do one thing by directing the audience’s attention on something else. Direction is the root of misdirection. Managing the micro-stages of an audiences focus is at the heart of misdirection—movement hides movement. How powerful is this technique? Harry Blackstone used to have an elephant walked on stage, up-stage-left, while he commanded attention down-stage-right. When Blackstone gestured up-stage-left, the audience was amazed to suddenly see an elephant. Rumor has it that this started as a bar bet where Harry wagered that he was so good at misdirection that he could walk an elephant on stage without any cover and the audience wouldn’t even see it.
Meme wranglers are magicians, playwrights, screenwriters and novelists among other artists who created dynamic performances for the theatre-of-the-mind. The Internet has borne a new species of marketing theatre, the weavers of magic who thread cyberspace into their tapestry are architects of a whole new set of possibilities and alternate realities.
Marketing has emerged as a legitimate face of perception study and the study of effectiveness, a socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. These techniques and discussions would have had us all murdered 200 years ago. The Puritans who founded America didn’t suffer well the presence of alternative perceptions and realities.
Mark, enough about magic. How am I doing? Is the type of material that might benefit your readers?
Touchstone…Here’s what I’m working on…Reading Poker Without Cards disengages your mind from The Matrix by explaining secrets of magic.
Ben Mack
www.PokerWithoutCards.com
Poker Without Cards, written by Ben Mack, a child protégé magician who grew up to be an advertising guru. Poker Without Cards debunks the popular ken, a consensus reality manufactured to cloud and enslave your mind.
By revealing principles of magic Ben illuminates many of the smoke and mirror tactics of politics. By explaining the scientific techniques of mass persuasion, Ben presents the argument that our worldview is much more engineered than publicly documented.
I am Ben Mack. I also regularly post online as Howard Campbell.
I hold that you cannot see social engineering without a modicum or proficiency at persuasion and direct response marketing techniques. If you see the world as I do, you are actively contributing to a transformation to increase our likelihood of survival as a species. If you are active and want articulation as to how media works, read my book. Otherwise, don’t waste your time. Keep up the good work.
If you don’t like to read, I have worked with Chris Zubryd to make a video showing how masters of persuasion see the world—Google The Pitch, Poker & The Public, a 37 minute video. The DVD has 3 hours of conversations with Jay Levinson, Mike Caro, Joel Bauer and Howard Bloom.
If you think I am paranoid, then Poker Without Cards may change your cosmography. When you see the world differently, you will take action. I suggest you avoid operating heavy machinery for several hours after consuming my long-winded memes.
Thank you Mark!
Ben
http://ImGoingToDoThis.com
To: "Mark Joyner"
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 23:09:11 -0420
Subject: Re: Thoughts on magic
Dear Mark,
Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your book. I am honored. But first, once again, you have created brilliance. In The Irresistible Offer you have simplified the essence of business, the offer and its acceptance. Wow! When I was a Senior Vice President at BBDO leading the strategy on Cingular, I wish I had thought of this simplicity, I would have been more effective.
I don’t think Business can be simplified further than you did in The Irresistible Offer: An offer and its acceptance. The simplicity of this insight will make many skeptical of its value. Those skeptics are wasting their time. Simplicity is a key to power because efficiency respects energy conservation. Waste leads to depletion. Mark, riddle me this, why do so many people enjoy wasting their time with skeptical thoughts? Can you answer me that?
You asked me about how I find thirsty audiences. I rely heavily on Google. I have Google alerts set for my name, my book’s title and proprietary words I use in my novel, Poker Without Cards. When I get one of these alerts, I know I have an advocate speaking to a forum that is likely to be populated with folks thirsty for my wares. Many times I make an appearance and field questions while I encourage them to share with others the benefits of reading my book.
Googling “Google tips” will retrieve a page of various applications within Google. I regularly search for folks linking to my pages. With this I find discussions that fell-through my alerts.
When I’m really hungry for thirsty minds, I go on amazon.con and bn.com and see what books people buying my book bought and then I use Google to find these thirsty minds and explain to them why my book has relevance to their interests. I have a very niche book, so I’m often scanning micro communities, either as myself or as an avatar. I never use my avatar identity unless a flame war breaks out. I’ve learned that all publicity is good. I was featured on CrapAuthors.com and that coverage panning my book sold 50 books and another 800 downloaded my book for free.
To drum up drama online I had two blogs running that were fighting with each other. Ben Mack was in a vicious fight with Howard Campbell, a fight that was launched by a podcast with me obviously playing both characters. When there’s drama folks write about it. When they write about my drama I join their conversations to extend the conversation. Over 300,000 have downloaded my book for free. I’m laying the groundwork for my next book which won’t be available for free. The title of my next book is simply: 23. Poker Without Cards and freeBookWorthReading.doc explain exactly how 23 will be marketed.
I’ve been helping Steve Kaplan market his bestselling book Bag The Elephant. I have never met Mr. Kaplan, never emailed with him, never spoken with him on the phone. I imagine he has never heard my name. I don’t really care about Kaplan. But, his book marketer was somebody I wanted to learn from so I offered to help him for free so I could learn what he does. I offer to help folks I want to learn from. The help I give is with no expectation of immediate return other than what I learn in the process of helping. Magically, they wind up lending a hand when something appropriate comes along.
I’ve had a modicum of success with ezinearticles.com. I write an essay and it is pulled as content for various sites. Then, I know that site is interested in my kind of content and I contact them directly. Most of the time I never hear anything back. This is to be expected. I have a rule of two queries and then I don’t contact them again for at least a month. I cover these details in a book entitled freeBookWorthReading.doc, a free book that is downloadable at my website www.PokerWithoutCards.com. Mark, your readers need to know that while I go into great detail explaining marketing, branding, idea dissemination and memetics, the beginning of freeBookWorthReading.doc work is unintelligible to most readers. Furthermore I use a traditional definition of memetics and not the Jay Levinson definition to which you refer in TIO. Readers who make their way through the homonym play and untraditional use of fonts will learn the exact tactics and strategies I have used. I know it is your rare reader that actually seeks to really work through your tactics so I’m sure this won’t matter.
Obviously, I’m not a best selling author, yet. But, I have a list of endorsements worthy of bragging and I explain exactly how I went about garnering these endorsements. Here are two that I’m proud of and I explain exactly how I get them. When was the last time you saw a book endorsed by Kurt Vonnegut? He just doesn’t endorse books as a rule because he doesn’t want to be barraged by requests. I explain exactly how I used Google Alerts and developed the relationship with Joe Petro III, a business partner of Kurt’s. By tracking Kurt, I was able to repeatedly have an excuse to drop Joe a note. Google News and Google Alerts facilitated the excuse for contact that built the relationship that allowed me to get the quote you read below:
“Ben Mack, Since you don't have the guts to be a homosexual, I'm glad that you are pissing off your parents by writing.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Cat’s Cradle/Slaughter House 5
Mark, I speculate that most of your readers will have no idea who this next guy is, but half my sales are probably due to the following quote. People consuming his words are my most thirsty audience. You studied with Robert Anton Wilson, so I know you respect his technology even if you don’t subscribe to all of his politics or mine. In freeBookWorthReading.doc I explain how I got this quote from a legend of mental gymnastics:
“Poker Without Cards is a consciousness thriller, combining natural philosophy with storytelling—the effect is like taking acid, only you never come down.”
Robert Anton Wilson
The Illuminatus! Trilogy/TSOG/Prometheus Rising
Changing topics--in The Irresistible Offer you write “The magic of marketing has to do with your own enthusiasm, belief, and confidence affecting your results…I can say with reasonable certainty that what you expect will have a significant impact on your business.” These words are evocative. I’d like to write about what these words mean to me. I’d like to write about magic and marketing.
I think magic deserves serious consideration but I fear that this topic may be inflammatory.
On the one hand, magic can be seen as tool of theatrics, a toolset that I have built for myself over the years. I started performing at The Magic Castle at the age of 14. At 19 The Academy of Magical Arts gave me an award that made me the youngest recipient in the history of the award. I get theatrical magic. But, I cannot fully articulate the magical frame of mind. I can say this: when an audience feels safe, respected and cared for, their minds loosen and their defenses drop. Deception created purely for personal gain is a con, but immersive realities manifested for the benefit of the audience may feel magical.
Ad copy can be magical. Good copy respects the audience’s values and sensibilities. Great copy communicates your love for your audience and their passions. You’ve help teach me that if you don’t love them, they won’t love you back, and it’s really expensive to go find new customers.
Magic is the act of facilitating an immersive experience, perhaps best encapsulated by the word phantasmagorical. Something is phantasmagorical when an audience transcends their skepticism and accepts a world where the laws of nature don’t have such a firm grasp on reality. In advertising, copy can become phantasmagorical when it is stoking the passions of a diehard fan, helping them envision driving a golf ball 300 yards or bringing them into a moment of sports history that they can recollect with vivid details.
When copy is transformative, you have magic. The German philosopher Hegel said that an art object is a catalyst to an altered state of consciousness. Great ad copy takes us someplace else. Magical ad copy approaches the sublime.
On the other hand, magic can be a scary word. Last week, I was moderating a focus group among nurses and hospital employees of a children’s hospital and the word “magic” came up and a participant asked that we not use that word because it made her uncomfortable.
I suggest you be careful when you use the word magic or any of its synonyms. To many, the word magic evokes a threat of eternal damnation. To these people, a magician is a spiritual terrorist, striking out to infect the unsuspecting. There are more people who hold this to be true than I imagined as I grew up performing magic. Occasionally, some audience member would want to talk to me and get me to repent and save my soul. I can’t quantify how many of these folks there are, what the incidence is, but the October 11, 2005 USA Today reported that 53% of Americans believe “God created human beings in their present form exactly as described in the Bible”. If you figure half of these folks see the word magic as demonic, that’s approximately ¼ of all Americans. So the word magic should be used with discretion. Shakespeare reminds us: the better half of valor is discretion.
So why discuss magic? There is real power in magic. And as Lord Of The Rings taught us, the one who controls the magic controls the world. Besides, the danger of magic can be exploited for marketing, and so discussing magic can be profitable. Early 20th Century magicians regularly employed images of demons and spirits on their promotional posters.
Besides, magic is real. Faith is powerful. A doctor in one of the groups mentioned above asked me if I knew what was the best predictor of success for patients about to have a critical surgery. I said no. He said the greatest predictor of success is the doctor’s expectation of a good result. He said that mystifies doctors and that most won’t discuss the studies that show that attitude has a physical manifestation on outcome, but he assured me these studies were real and had been adequately replicated to verify the findings.
I hold that prayer works. I also hold that the focus and intention is what works, not the specific phrases. I don’t believe that some words are cosmic triggers. Hocus Pocus is just theatrical dressing.
Stigmatisms blight magical inquiry of the theatrical, let alone the spiritual. Inquiry into the unexplained is limited. Psi search publications are more often a joke than a contribution to science.
Early scholars of magic and perception were persecuted and killed. If I had used the word executed there, it would have depicted a government sanctioned killing. If I had used the word murder, there would be an illicit connotation. Word choice effects how we process information. I see word choice as a form of magic since it can affect how we see things.
Words are powerful. Word choice is crucial. Scientology’s flagship book Dianetics is littered with big words because L. Ron Hubbard wanted to intimidate his reader. Hubbard drew on techniques that a perceptual scientist Aleister Crowley was developing. If you intimidate your reader they are more likely to take you seriously. But the use of big words is off putting to most. Hubbard wanted those taking his words seriously to learn these words. He explains that this then gives his followers a reason for better understanding how the world really works. I agree with a lot of his premise, but the whole alien thing throws me. But Mark, maybe I just don’t see what he sees.
Being exclusionary is powerful. Those on the inner circle feel enchanted by their elite knowledge. Just look how profitable Pokemon was, a property built around big words that literally nobody knew until they defined their terms.
Magic theory is littered with big words like prestidigitation, a word intentionally made cryptic which means the act of quick fingers. Prestidigitation was coined by Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a 16th-century classic that attempted to disprove the existence of witches by detailing the charges against women who supposedly practiced the black arts. Scot wanted to present a scientific account of what these women were doing and so he used Latin, the language of science. Presto means quick, digits means fingers, ation is the act there of—prestidigitation, now known as sleight of hand.
The psychology of perception has not long been openly studied. Science that challenged the cosmography (world view) of The Church was labeled as heretical, illegal, and often punishable by death. I reiterate: to this day, the idea of magic is offensive to many.
I respect the scientist Aleister Crowley I mentioned earlier. Crowley said, “We attribute to magick that which we don’t understand.” I fear I may be discomfiting you by my vocabulary. Marketing has a vocabulary. You learn the word “Touchstone” and presto, you communication differently. I see that as magic. An opportunity has appeared to you. A technology has become visible. Vocabulary works like that. Vocabulary is magical.
I see value in cherishing moments that feel magical. I champion copywriters who can enchant their reader. I hope that my contribution to your book can dispel some of the misgivings around the word magic.
I love magic. I’ve been drawn to magicians my whole life. But, I don’t limit the term magician to a person doing tricks on a proscenium stage. Mark, you are a magician. I see you pulling money out of the air far more realistically than the stage trick entitled A Miser’s Dream. I can perform A Miser’s Dream. I can’t make $50,000 in a couple months despite having attended two of your seminars, which you were gracious to include me and these seminars have altered my life for the better. Next year, I might be able to replicate one of your tricks, using original patter and new accessories. Thank you for the empowerment. I can replicate some of what you do because you show me what you are doing. Most magicians won’t do that as openly as you have chosen.
A magician is everybody that does something of value where I can’t see what their doing. They are using tools that I can’t see. Mastery is a telltale sign of a magical mind. However, obsessive compulsions can also lead to mastery while obsessive-compulsive thoughts rarely lead to tool invention. There is a loosening of associations that doesn’t happen with OC thinking. Your humor helps me focus while I relax into perceptions of reality where the insights garnered are new tools for my real world.
You are a science-based magician. You teach a science that facilitates magic. The heart of science is replication. I’m not speaking of viral replication or buzz marketing. I’m speaking about the scientific method, your ability to consistently replicate money making experiments: magical acts of making money out of nothing, or so it appears to the uninitiated. But you have skills and you teach the skills and you appear again and do the trick one more time. You remind me of a young Al Goshman who would repeatedly make a silver dollar appear under a salt-shaker. He would make the silver-dollar appear under a salt shaker 23 times in the course of a show. Goshman was a perceptionist, demonstrating that he could repeatedly misdirect his audience. But, you aren’t misdirecting folks. You are showing everybody how you do your tricks, how you pull money out of the air. Thank you.
Magic is not a thing or a physical act, but a state of mind that approaches the sublime but is more aptly referred to as phantasmagorical. Magic occurs at the intersection of a performer and an audience. There is intentionality to the perception. A stone that looks like an eagle is not magic, regardless of whether or not it is carved to represent the physical traits of an eagle. A sculpture maybe a catalyst to an altered state of mind, but I am reticent to call a sculpture magical. Some panoramas feel almost magical to me, but real magic is dynamic and ephemeral. Magic is the process of engineering an experience where reality emerges as it cannot be, and yet the audience is compelled to set aside their disbelief and flow with the experience as long as it lasts.
Creating theatrical magic entails tweaking our visual prejudices. We drop a coin, and it falls. We know this to be true; we’ve seen the force of gravity pull objects to Earth since before we had words to articulate the phenomena. What most non-perceptual psychologists DON’T recognize is the extent that our mind projects our expectations, our visual prejudices, onto our sight. If a magician creates the physical gesture of dropping a coin from one hand to another, yet palms the coin so it doesn’t actually fall into the second hand, most minds will see the coin fall. The term for this sight projection is sight retention. A normal mind will literally “see” the coin fall. This specific visual hallucination is called a projection, our mind projects its expectation of reality onto our sight. The magician makes note of the triggers that cause these visual breaks from reality and assembles a presentation that often includes a series of these triggers, often strung together through a narrative known as patter. The magician is an actor playing the role of a person with supernatural powers. [The previous two paragraphs were swiped from a chapter I wrote for Dave Zulborsky book This Is Not A Game, a book about using Alternate Reality Games as Internet marketing vehicles, explaining in exacting detail how ilovebees.com helped make Halo II the biggest launch of any video game ever released. BTW, the concept of a swipe file has been greatly appreciated by me and many of my readers with whom I shared this valuable notion.]
Projection is a powerful force. We not only see what we expect to see, but often our expectations create our reality. The doctor mentioned earlier was explaining this dynamic, that a doctor’s expectation of results had a higher correlation to a patient’s success than any other element tested. I would tell your readers what Grant Morrison recommended, Fake it till you make it. My Bennington College buddy Bill Scully of VermontFineDining.com said that our college buddy Tom Dunn, a genius artist who is now being recognized, said, Bill, we’re finally doing stuff that is big enough to fit our egos. I’ve known Bill and Tom for 13 years. We each knew we were good. We also were regularly the only ones working at 3AM. Expectation drives determination, hard work reinforces expectation. Grounded planning and stewardship of business plans helps. Scientifically testing your efforts and changing courses is worth the effort. Burning a colored candle is not likely to make money appear unless other preparations are in place, namely smart hard work.
If expectation of success is powerful, the willing suspension of disbelief is powerful. Theatre and magic generate a willing suspension of disbelief creating a magical frame of mind. Phantasmagoria is magic. A phantasmagoric effect generated a magical frame of mind.
Magic can be created from afar. A person who engineers a magical frame of mind, phantasmagoria, for an audience may or may not be a performer on a stage. If the person who engineered a magical experience is not the actor presenting the feats, they are the meme-wranglers of the experience. Clock makers of the 17th Century created automatons, mechanical men whose gears and riggings could be activated to perform the tricks of magicians. These clock makers were not magicians; they were the meme-wranglers of their metal figurines that could perform magic, even in the absence of their creators.
Creating magic requires the recognition of stages within stages, seeing micro-stages within macro-stages. The macro-stage is the physical place the audience encounters the magic. A magician may perform on a traditional proscenium stage, in a parlor, at a dinner table or on a street corner—whatever location the magician interacts with their audience becomes the macro-stage. The micro-stages emerge as the audience shifts their attention. David Copperfield regularly performs coin tricks in front of audiences in excess of 2,000. How? He manages the micro-stages, the focus of his audience. By focusing his own attention, with all his body, on a silver dollar, he can command the attention of 2,000 sets of eyes, whose minds enjoy the representation of a miracle as he makes the coin vanish. Copperfield directs the focus of his audience. Site retention won’t work unless the audience’s mind is engaged. The mind must not only see the cues that trigger the mental projections, but the mind must be so immersed in its focus that the mind accepts the magician’s cues as real. The creation of these cues, the intentional use of projection triggers, is the keystone to invoking illusion.
Misdirection is the magician’s ability to secretly do one thing by directing the audience’s attention on something else. Direction is the root of misdirection. Managing the micro-stages of an audiences focus is at the heart of misdirection—movement hides movement. How powerful is this technique? Harry Blackstone used to have an elephant walked on stage, up-stage-left, while he commanded attention down-stage-right. When Blackstone gestured up-stage-left, the audience was amazed to suddenly see an elephant. Rumor has it that this started as a bar bet where Harry wagered that he was so good at misdirection that he could walk an elephant on stage without any cover and the audience wouldn’t even see it.
Meme wranglers are magicians, playwrights, screenwriters and novelists among other artists who created dynamic performances for the theatre-of-the-mind. The Internet has borne a new species of marketing theatre, the weavers of magic who thread cyberspace into their tapestry are architects of a whole new set of possibilities and alternate realities.
Marketing has emerged as a legitimate face of perception study and the study of effectiveness, a socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. These techniques and discussions would have had us all murdered 200 years ago. The Puritans who founded America didn’t suffer well the presence of alternative perceptions and realities.
Mark, enough about magic. How am I doing? Is the type of material that might benefit your readers?
Touchstone…Here’s what I’m working on…Reading Poker Without Cards disengages your mind from The Matrix by explaining secrets of magic.
Ben Mack
www.PokerWithoutCards.com
Poker Without Cards, written by Ben Mack, a child protégé magician who grew up to be an advertising guru. Poker Without Cards debunks the popular ken, a consensus reality manufactured to cloud and enslave your mind.
By revealing principles of magic Ben illuminates many of the smoke and mirror tactics of politics. By explaining the scientific techniques of mass persuasion, Ben presents the argument that our worldview is much more engineered than publicly documented.
I am Ben Mack. I also regularly post online as Howard Campbell.
I hold that you cannot see social engineering without a modicum or proficiency at persuasion and direct response marketing techniques. If you see the world as I do, you are actively contributing to a transformation to increase our likelihood of survival as a species. If you are active and want articulation as to how media works, read my book. Otherwise, don’t waste your time. Keep up the good work.
If you don’t like to read, I have worked with Chris Zubryd to make a video showing how masters of persuasion see the world—Google The Pitch, Poker & The Public, a 37 minute video. The DVD has 3 hours of conversations with Jay Levinson, Mike Caro, Joel Bauer and Howard Bloom.
If you think I am paranoid, then Poker Without Cards may change your cosmography. When you see the world differently, you will take action. I suggest you avoid operating heavy machinery for several hours after consuming my long-winded memes.
Thank you Mark!
Ben
http://ImGoingToDoThis.com
posted by Ben Mack at 8:13 AM
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