Outrageous Marketing

Welcome to my Outrageous Marketing book summary!

“But will people laugh? they will if the joke is funny and the butt of the joke has it coming. But they won’t if the target is undeserving. They’ll feel icky.” Outrageous Marketing, p. 80

Or more succinctly, “The only rule for satire: don’t punch down; always punch up. That’s the line.” (p. 80)

One-Sentence-Summary: Not to be confused by the title, this is an autobiography of the founder of satire news publication The Onion, Scott Dikkers, focusing on his time leading that company for nearly three decades.

I’m currently reading Outrageous Marketing by Scott Dikkers. Current page: 134

booboo real-time book rating: ★★★★☆ (percentage of books with this rating: 34%)

Favorite The Onion merchandise: a sweater that reads “I love wearing branded clothes’

I think two great decisions made by Scott Dickers probably had the most direct impact on the success of The Onion. First, his genius move to have articles pitched by anyone other than the creator, thus eliminating a lot of the human bias associated with the decision-making process. Second, by not attributing any writer to their work, The Onion was one organism rather than the sum of all its parts.

This blog will contain both my summary and review of the book Outrageous Marketing.

Chapter 14, ‘Press Releases, Schmess Releases’ is a must read documenting instance when “real” news publications, domestic and abroad, reprinted articles from The Onion with one saying with a correction the following issues, ‘Apparently, there are newspapers in America that print lies!’ (p. 122) I laughed many times. Also documented is there experience sending out press releases, a lot of them, with zero success. My business sent out a single press release, also with no success, until I killed the project. Press releases don’t work unless you’e done something so magical or bizarre that, well, you wouldn’t need press release anyways.

As I read the book, you will find my in-progress Outrageous Marketing review and book summary notes below.

You are reading my book review and summary by Scott Dikkers. Be sure to check out my digital bookshelf for 100+ book summaries.

Did you know I’m an author? I wrote four books on real estate investing, travel, and language learning.

Thanks for visiting and thanks to Scott Dikkers for writing Outrageous Marketing!

Date Started: Friday, September 6, 2024

Date Finished: Monday, Septebmer 9, 2024