Stephen King, Radio Plays, and Online Marketing

Posted on: 2005-11-09 10:17:03
Author: Douglas Titchmarsh

Stephen King, Radio Plays and Online Marketing

What do these 3 things have in common?It might seem a bit of a jump right now, butthere is a link between the writer StephenKing, Radio plays of the fifties and internet marketing....WordsLet me start from the beginning, I was reading"Danse Macabre" by Stephen King, a book inwhich he gives his take on horror fiction.In one section he is writing about the radioplays of the early 1950's, and how they grippedthe listener by not giving you all the details.

The plays would have a background sound of a plane and the voice actors would set the scenethey were in. The listener would build his ownimage of the plane and the problems the actorshad, building his own sense of fear, and placehimself there, that made it all the morescary, and built the drama for the listener.The main thing was, as radio is an aural onlymedium, the listener filled in the visual sidefor his or herself. The result was that they gota great thrill ride, just from words and sounds.

So that's Stephen King linked to the radioplays, so how do we get to internet marketing?

As I was reading about how successful the playswere on radio, because of the listeners imagination filling in the detail, I realisedhow we are trying to do the same as onlinemarketers.When we try to sell a product, we are using wordsto try to entice the website viewer into ourlittle world, just like the radio plays did.We have to get the potential customer on ourwebsite to fill in the blanks, and visualisehow our product will help him.

In the same way the best radio plays left outthe complete description of what was happeningand the listener filled in the blanks, we needto leave out some details, and let the viewerfill his own mind with the picture of howhis problem will look from his particularperspective and how he'll feel when it's solved by our product.

Our sales pages need to draw the customerinside our world, but fill in the blanksfrom his own one. We need to pique hisimagination just like those radio plays,and just like Stephen King does in his books,the most scary of which are the ones where thereader is left to make the monster real.In our case that monster is the perceived problem, and the hero, is you coming in the nick of time to fell the monster and save theday with your world beating product.