Using The Marketing Secrets Used To Make The Book & Movie "The Secret" Into A $300M Blockbuster with Dan Hollings

Welcome to another podcast episode at Real Fast Results! We
have a great show for you. I have back with us Mr. Dan
Hollings. As you've already heard, Dan is the mastermind behind
the movie and the book launch for The Secret. You remember that
movie? It basically put the whole idea of law of attraction on
the map. And it made virtual stars out of many of the experts and
speakers that were in that movie and book.


When I was talking to Dan, when we were doing another podcast
episode about this, I said, "Dan wouldn't it be great if
you could teach my folks how to use some of the strategies in
putting The Secret movie on the map--but use them in our day to
day business?" And I said could you do that, and Dan was
gracious enough to say, "Yes I can do that." So, welcome back Mr.
Dan Hollings.


 
Background on "The Secret"

The Secret was an absolute marketing phenomena. When the
client came to me, they had already tried to get it on TV.
They had also tried to get it in movie houses and
places of that nature. They were about to throw in the
towel. They approached me and I thought, interesting, I didn't
know what the movie was about, that's what's crazy, because they
didn't reveal much to me. However, I knew some of the
speakers that were in the movie. Honest to God, this was my
logic, "If this doesn't work, at least I'll meet Jack
Canfield!" I knew he was in the movie. He was the only
person that I knew and I figured, well, he might end up being a
good client. It was a crazy reason that I took it on.


At the time we thought it was going to be on television.
They told me they were going be on television in 60 different
countries. All on the same day or the same week, and I'm
thinking, "Wow! All I have to do is build a way to convert the
traffic from the television program into purchases of the movie
and the book."


Incidentally, the movie came out first, almost a year before the
book came out. So I came on board, and then I found out they
weren't going to be on TV. They left everything in my lap. I
really spent hours and hours putting this together.
However, I used a strategy which we'll talk about today;
which you probably never heard of.


This was way back before people did all of the product
launches that you hear about and the book launches that you hear
about. Back when the Secret came out, this was 2007, that wasn't
something many people did. This was one of the very first of the
mega-launches that required a lot of things.What we
are going to talk about today is a very unique strategy that
I used. You could take this and use it yourself in any product
services or books that you want to market.
20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them

There's a book. I'm going to recommend you get this book. The
book is called, 20 Master Plots: And How to Build
Them by Ronald Tobias. I don't know much about
him. If you are and auth0r, 20 Master Plots would
be a book you would buy in order to teach you how to develop
plots that could improve the writing of your books.


I did something with this book that was rather
unique. I read it through the eyes of a marketer. What
hit me was that you could take the same elements of these plots
and you could embed it into a marketing campaign and thereby get
some viral going. Really get it so that people were compelled, to
not only engage with what you were doing, but to share it. That's
what I did.
What the Book Is About

Here's what this book is about, and why it is an incredible book
for marketers. It was not written for marketers, by the
way. Basically, what Tobias has done is he went all the
way back to Shakespeare. All the way up to modern movies. He
figured out that if you really boil down all of the things that
make us as humans really interested in books and in movies or
plays. It really centers around a plot.


There are only 20 core types of plots. Every movie, every book
that you get interested in, it's probably one of these 20 plots.
What you can do, I recommend you read the whole book, but what I
did is I ended up picking one of these plots.  The one that
I picked was master plot number 7 which is called the Riddle.
I read that chapter over and over and over again, and
then I set up a marketing campaign based on that type of
plot.Now, with a riddle, and this isn't like these
little simple riddles, this is a riddle as a plot.


There are 3 phases of a riddle plot:
The first phase you set up the story. You set up the scenario
of the story. The protagonist and the antagonist etc. The second
phase is where you lay out the mystery. The third phase is where
you solve the riddle. How to Use the Plot Technique in Marketing

If you do this in a marketing campaign, you're going to tell the
first 2 phases of the plot to your visitors/audience.
Before they can get the solution to the riddle, the last
phase, they have to give you an email, or they have to purchase
the product. If you were to go back and look at
what I did with Secret: the landing page, all of the wording, the
information that was put out into press releases and shared
through emails through and a lot of databases.


Basically, we were revealing the first 2 phases of a plot. It
made it so darn compelling that you just had to put in your
email in order to find out what the answer was. Then you ended up
talking to people because you were perplexed, it was like, "Wait
a minute, let's see, this happened, could it be this, was it
that?" It's just like watching a mystery on television. People
started talking about this.


I found it fascinating because of a strange reason: I too
didn't know the answer to the riddle, because I hadn't seen the
movie. I was hanging out online, and it was amazing
that people were making blog posts and sharing all over the
place. Talking about, "Oh I think its aliens from another planet,
and oh no if he goes back and its the secret societies from years
ago." All these conspiracy theories were flying around on the web
back and forth. "What is the Secret?" "What is the Secret?" The
reason that conversation started was because of the way the
campaign had been laid out literally as a story.
Example - Modern Legend

I'd like to illustrate this for you. In the book they call this
invisible fiction. There's a type of fiction known as a
modern legend. It is a story that gets started and
shared from person to person to person over years. It's not like
anybody really ever sat down and mapped out the story. It's just
passed along and pretty soon people start to believe the story is
true. Even though it really isn't. There's a great example
that I want to share that will help you get the thrust of
why this works so well in marketing.


This is an example of a modern legend. This is a story which is
called the Choking Doberman, and this is a true story. It's been
around for years. You may have even heard it. It's a very
simple story told simply. I'm going to stop at the point where I
turned into a marketer and said, "Okay, give me your email
address and I'll tell you the rest of the story." You'll see that
you will want to give me your email address. I'm not
really going to ask.


A woman returned to her house after a morning of shopping and she
found her pet doberman pinscher choking and unable to breathe.
She rushed her dog to the vet, where she left it for emergency
treatment. When the woman got home, her phone was ringing and it
was the vet.


"Get out of your house now!" He shouted.


"What's the matter?" She asked.


"Just do it. Go to a neighbor's house, anything. I'll be right
there," Frightened by the tone of his voice, the woman did as she
was told and she went to her neighbor's house. In a few minutes,
4 police cars screeched to a halt in front of the house. The
police ran inside her house with their guns drawn. Horrified, the
woman went outside to see what was happening. The vet arrived and
then he explained...... If you'll enter in your email address
right now, I'll tell you rest of the story.


Can you see whats happened? I played out a mystery here. By the
way this is a real one. This is a story that has been shared
around the world. The book is called The Choking Doberman: And
Other Urban Legends. You can see that you want to hear the
end of the story right? Let me do that.


Again, I'll remind you, this is the kind of thing that we
did with the Secret. You just had to know what happened.
You put in your email address or you bought the movie


The rest of the story: A few minutes later, the
4 police cars screeched to a halt in front of the house. The
police ran inside her house with their guns drawn. Horrified, the
woman went outside to see what was happening. The vet arrived and
explained. When he looked inside the dog's throat, he found 2
human fingers. He figured the dog had surprised a burglar. Sure
enough, the police found a man in a deep state of shock hiding in
the closet and clutching a bloody hand.


Okay, it's a simple story, but that's what I did.
Orchestrating the campaign with the Secret, we took the
idea that there was this secret that had been passed down for
centuries and great people knew about
it. A little bit of it was fiction, believe
me. Yet, it had been passed down and passed down.Lo and behold,
here we are in the modern day world and this secret has been dug
up and we're about to reveal it again to the world. This secret
can make you happy, it can make you wealthy, it can make you
healthy, it can do all of these things. Give me your email. I
mean come on!


That's it. It was that simple; combined with some marketing
skills and some databases and some things of that nature. This
was a zero-cost campaign. They did not spend any money on
this campaign of any significance. They didn't have any.
Yet, we were able to catapult that into one of the most
successful launches of all time.
Steve Jobs...The iPhone...The Secret

My clients were not particularly interested in selling
their product on Amazon. I was trying to figure every
channel that I could to get this movie out into the marketplace.
Again, it was a movie in the beginning. I had struck a tentative
deal with Amazon. I presented it back to my client and they just
flat-out said no. I'm thinking, "Wow! This is not good!" The year
before, the number 1 selling movie on Amazon was a similar kind
of movie.


Amazon got real interested because this was a similar kind of
movie. Amazon had the database of people who had bought that big
hit movie. They were willing to mail that list and do a whole
bunch of things. My client thought that it would cannibalize
sales, because they were selling only directly off the website,
the website I had built. They were about 40 million dollars at
that point, and I was saying hey, "Amazon has all the customers.
They're willing to do this."  When the client said no, I
didn't like that. I was in to get a percentage of proceeds,
so I was really eager to get this thing out.


Then, very fortuitously, a good friend of mine, who was also a
client of mine, called me up one day and said, "Dan, I heard you
were the guy marketing the Secret." I said, "Yep, it's me." He
said, "I have a distributorship and I can buy these movies
wholesale from the movie maker. They're kind of expensive, but I
can buy them in lots of 10 thousand."


I'm thinking, "Maybe I should do it." Lights went off in my head
and I said, "You know what? You and I are going to put this on
Amazon." My client didn't want to put it on Amazon, but this was
a distributor who had the right to do so. He and I worked
together. We put the product on Amazon, and herein lies what
Daniel was talking about. This thing took off like
crazy on Amazon.


When Steve Jobs got up to demonstrate the iPhone, for the very
first time. It was history in the making. We think about
shopping on our phone right now like it's an everyday thing. More
people shop on their phone then on their computer.


Back then, no one ever shopped at Amazon on their phone. This was
a brand new idea. Steve Jobs gets up on the stage and says,
"Hey, lets go to Amazon." He's going to demonstrate how finally
for the first time, you can use your smartphone to buy things
online. He heads over to Amazon, he holds up the phone, he didn't
say anything but The Secret was number three on his
phone on Amazon at that point in time.


I'm sitting there, my jaw is dropping, I grab a screenshot of it
and everything. It was me and a distributor that did that. It
wasn't my client that did it. We were just kind of selling it out
of our basement, literally. It was crazy.
Recap - Plots

I think with almost any product you can embed it within a plot of
some type. I didn't do this earlier, so let me do it now. Let me
tickle your fancy a little bit.


Types of plots:


the Quest

the Adventure

the Pursuit

the Rescue

the Escape

the Revenge

the Riddle (which is the one I used)

the Rivalry

the Underdog

Temptation

Metamorphosis

Transformation

Maturation

Love

Forbidden Love

Sacrifice

Discovery

Wretched Excess



I'd love to do one under Wretched Excess. That's most of the 20
plots. I've actually used other type plots with other campaigns
that I've done. But, it's the Secret that actually did the best.


20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them is a good read. If
you're an author, you're going to get double benefit. If you're a
marketer it can help you with that. Give it a read and read it
through the eyes of a marketer. If there are ways you can embed
plots into your marketing campaign, that will affect the way you
stage things. What you say in your emails, what you say in your
webpage, etc.


It's always the idea of revealing a certain amount and
then requiring that the visitor take action. Either
to purchase or to opt in, come to an event or something in order
to find out the last phase of the plot. Remember, there's always
3 phases of the plot; it's just which kind of plot you are going
to use.
Daniel's Real Fast Result Tips: Plot Marketing

Cherry-pick the plot that best fits what your market is and
what your product and service is.

Pluck out the specific elements and use it in your
auto-responders, on your web-pages, etc.

This and leaves out the tension by having your prospects
take the actions you want them to take.

Resources

Book - The Secret


DVD - The Secret


By Ronald Tobias - 20 Master Plots: And How
to Build Them


The Choking Doberman: And Other Urban Legends