A few weeks ago, I read an interesting science paper titled, “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List.” It was written in 2014 by two computer science researchers out of New York University.
The paper only runs for 10 pages, and it only repeats one sentence, over and over, 862 times, in the title, in the subheads, in the body content, in the flow chart and the graph:
“Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List”
The back story is that the two researchers who wrote this paper, David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler, were getting constant pitches form predatory publishers.
These are pay-to-play, fake journals that are constantly spamming most academics with offers to get their papers reviewed and published for a fee.
(If you’re a marketer with a website, then it’s something like those spam-folder cold emails to get an app for your site or to “make you rank high on search engines on relevant keywords, please revert us.”)
Anyways, the point is this:
Many academics have the same annoying experience as Mazieres and Kohler, of getting spammed by predatory publishers.
But only Mazieres and Kohler did something about it.
And what exactly did they do?
They didn’t lobby Congress for aid and protection… they didn’t go on Facebook groups and complain about how annoying these predatory publishers are… they didn’t shake their heads and wring their hands while wasting time around the water cooler.
Instead, they turned their annoyance into a joke — and a marketing opportunity.
They wrote up this fake paper, and started sending it to every predatory publisher who contacted them.
Soon enough, the paper went viral. And it keeps going viral, every few years after the initial outbreak.
I don’t know the numbers, but I suspect this fake paper (which has since been actually published in a predatory, pay-to-play journal) has been downloaded and read tens of thousands of times to date. That’s tens of thousands of times more than 99% of academic journals ever get read.
And get this:
Right under the authors’ names at the top of the paper, there’s the URL for Mail Avenger, a project the two authors were working on to combat email spam. Again, thanks to their viral fake paper, this project probably had a thousand times the exposure it would have had otherwise.
Are you starting to see the benefit of this? I think it’s obvious. So here’s my recipe for how to stop whining and start marketing:
1. Identify something you feel like whining about (even better if a large part of your audience feels the same)
2. Stop yourself from whining, and instead…
3. Turn your stifled whine into a show, a spectacle, a joke that others might appreciate as well
And if you’re fresh out of good ideas for shows, spectacles, and jokes, then do mimicry. It’s always funny.
If you need a second example of mimicry, beyond the “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List” science paper, then Google “Ross Manly copywriter.” And then read the dazzling sales page that appears in front of you.
But let me stop this serious stuff, and let me get light-hearted:
I have a mailing list. Specifically, a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get on it, so you can then whine and demand that I take you off my fucking mailing list, then click here, fill out the form that appears, and you will hear from me later today.