Cover
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Author | Ryan Holiday |
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Cover artist | Erin Tyler |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Marketing, Journalism, The Internet |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Portfolio Hardcover |
Publication date
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July 19, 2012 |
Pages | 288 pages |
ISBN | |
OCLC | 008773 |
659.20285'67532—dc23 | |
LC Class | HF534.H7416 |
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator is the bestselling book by the marketer, public relations director, and media strategist Ryan Holiday. The book chronicles Holiday's time working as a media strategist for such clients as New York Times Bestselling authors Tucker Max and Robert Greene as well as American Apparel founder Dov Charney.
Holiday is the former Director of Marketing for American Apparel, where he created controversial campaigns that garnered widespread publicity. Holiday has also done publicity work for Tucker Max, including marketing for the movie version of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and a media stunt about Max's failed attempt to donate $500,000 to Planned Parenthood.
Trust Me, I'm Lying was billed as an exposé of the current online journalism system. The book is split into two parts: the first explains why blogs matter, how they drive the news, and how they can be manipulated, and the second shows what happens when this is done, how it backfires, and the consequences of the current media system.
As an example of his argument that blogs shape the news, Holiday outlines how the political blog Politico dedicated significant coverage to the campaign of Tim Pawlenty two years before the 2012 elections in order to generate pageviews for advertisers. Although Pawlenty did not yet have an official campaign, this kickstarted the media cycle which painted Pawlenty as a serious presidential candidate. As an example of the pageview-intensive blogosphere, Holiday uses the example of Jezebel writer Irin Carmon's attack on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show with misleading claims of "The Daily Show's Woman Problem." The book is also the source of a marketing and media concept now referred to as "trading up the chain", in which news is broken on small blogs and passed to successively larger and more influential media outlets.