Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The Gnostic PR Approach: Prepare For Another Dan Brown Frothy Media Frenzy and Circus

YAWN. CALL ME AN AGNOSTIC GNOSTIC HERETIC.

I'M STILL PLANNING TO DO EVERYTHING possible to miss every second of the hyper-hyped unveiling next week of Dan Brown's new book The Lost Symbol.

That's the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, you know, the ambitious rei-fi thriller that attempts to rewrite the Gospel and over 2,000 years of church doctrine and history. Have to hand it to Brown, he really knows how to work a crowd to the cash register. I found the book---mystery formula writing at best----superficially exciting and figured out the culprit about half-way through. I found the premise beyond silly. Very new agey. It in no way shook my faith in Christ. Not even close.

Whatever he accomplished in his Da Vinci best seller, he and his handlers want to out-do themselves with this one. They've hired---are you ready for this---Special Ops Media---a promotion company to create special effects they hope will work the entire global reading population into a frenzy of buying, reading, believing, buying more, reading, believing.

And don't you just love their approach. I like to call it the Gnostic PR approach. By that I mean, a PR approach that hides the product which is allowed to be known only to a select few, until followers are so smitten and hungry for it, they submit to "secret rituals" of indoctrination, which in this case is to go buy the book by the truck loads and make Dan Brown and his handlers filthy rich.

Intellectual elites love esoteric, gnostic stuff. It totally appeals to their elitism. Whereas the Gospel and the Bible are open to anyone who takes the time to open and explore them, the gnostic approach only allows a select few to enter the font of all secret wisdom, otherwise hidden from the eveyday rift-raft. So to buy the book makes people feel like they're entering some secret chamber known only to the elite.

Hence, no one, not even a single person at Special Ops Media is allowed to look at, see, read or preview the book. That would destroy the mystique.

Only the great MSM wise eastern elite, Matt Lauer has been allowed to tap the secret tome thus far. Then, in typical gnostic PR form, Lauer will spend a week titillating the public on The Today Show---those few million who still watch Matt in the morning---with tidbits of secret knowledge known only to the select few---that would be him. It will also be a week-long celebration of the long awaited next Brown mythola. Now if that doesn't tempt you, I don't know what will.

But wait! If that's not enough, Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos has told customers on his company's web page that Amazon's cache of copies is being kept "under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure," and 70,000 copies have been pre-ordered. Whoa dude, that thar must be some special book....

Gnostic PR---universal secrets guarded with utmost security waiting for a few anointed elite---at its finest.

Sounds like another media manipulation event with you and me and our pocketbooks as the target. So hold onto your wallets. The gnostic PR circus is about to begin. You've been warned.

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