At 10 minutes before 12 noon today, I hurried down my street and turned to the Rambla del Poblenou.
It’s Sunday today, and people were out and about, strolling down the sycamore-lined street.
As I neared the main intersection in front of the Aliança de Poblenou building, which is the very heart of the neighborhood, the strolling crowds grew more dense and then jammed to a stop.
I stood around for a couple minutes, waiting expectantly.
Then at noon exactly, I saw a group of about two dozen men get in a circle, facing the center of the intersection. All were wearing the same uniform — blue shirts, white pants, black sashes tied tightly around their waists, yellow and red bandanas around their wrists.
The men formed two rows. The ones in the outer row were pushing the ones in the inner row towards the center of the circle. The ones in the inner row were holding up their hands into a kind of team salute.
And them, four other men started climbing up — first up the backs of the outer row men, then over the inner row men.
The new climbers scrambled onto the shoulders of the inner row and then stood up, their arms on each other’s shoulders for balance.
Meanwhile, one more set of four was already clambering up the backs of the people on the first storey… up onto the shoulders of the men in the second storey… and then standing up to form a third storey.
This repeated until the team had formed a human tower, six storeys high, with men at the bottom, young women occupying the middle storeys, and kids wearing helmets at the top.
It’s a Catalan tradition, the castell. Since this weekend is the Festa Major de Poblenou, the yearly celebration of the neighborhood, it was a good time to perform the castell.
Today’s performance reminded me of two things:
First, I thought of Harry Houdini, dangling upside down from the building of the town’s main newspaper at 12 noon and writhing to escape a straightjacket… and second, I thought of Claude Hopkins, dreaming up the world’s biggest cake on the fifth floor of a newly opened department store in Chicago.
In a word:
I thought of spectacle, which happens to be one of the more valuable marketing skills you can have.
So how do you create spectacle?
Some of it is operational. Again, today’s castell happened on Sunday at 12 noon, on a central intersection, and was well advertised. A spectacle is no spectacle unless there are people around to see it.
But once you take care of the operational stuff, you still have the “content” of the spectacle.
How do you do that? How do you create something spectacular in content?
I will only point out the obvious from today:
Imagine two storeys of human beings… maybe three.
Ho-hum.
But six? And kids up top, 30 feet in the air, looking mildly terrified as the whole thing sways and shivers under the human tonnage?
If you think about that a bit, you will be able to extract a reliable, evergreen way to create the intrigue necessary for the content of a spectacle, which will work even if you’re not Catalan and don’t have a team of castellers to form a human tower.
But on to my offer:
If you want me to spell out this way to create intrigue, you can find it inside Round 3 of my Copy Riddles program. And you can find many more such ways.
Because Rounds 3-6 of Copy Riddles are actually all about creating intrigue.
It takes that many rounds, because this is a big part of what marketing and copywriting is. Most things are not spectacular on their own. It’s the marketer’s or copywriter’s job to take mundane elements, combine them in predictable ways, and create something sexy and new and intriguing.
If you go through Copy Riddles, you will start to exercise your own spectacle-conjuring faculties.
Plus, you will see how some of the best copywriters in the world dun it, and learn a thing or six from them.
For more info on Copy Riddles: