How Trump made his assassination attempt marketable, Don't trust CNN or Washington Post, & more

All right, so since this was a hot topic over the weekend, I think we can talk about how Trump made his assassination attempt a marketable moment. So it's obviously, look, it's not good when there's— when someone's trying to kill somebody. And, you know, I think it's good that, you know, he survived no matter what. I don't care which side you are on. Look, trying to kill someone else is not really the answer. It actually kind of ruins this This concept of democracy. Um, but I think what was interesting, so I don't know if Neil, if you watched the, the, the whole video, but I, I watched the whole video. Like there's obviously there's a lot of clips and things like that, but the whole video, like, you know, he's on the ground for a little bit and then he gets pulled up and then they're trying to pull him out. And then, so to back up a second, you know, someone shot at Trump during a rally and the bullet grazed his ear and then he fell to the ground and then Secret Service covered him.

Right.

And there's a whole lot of stuff about this, but he gets pulled up and then while they're trying to pull him off stage, he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then all of a sudden he kind of emerges from the body of like people, the bodies of people around him. And he's just like, he puts his fist up and he's like, fight. Right. And he says fight a couple times. And then there's, I forgot what the award is for top photographer of the year. Is it, it's not a Pulitzer, I don't think. But one of the guys, you see him moving around, like he runs over and then he captures the best shot. And this is probably a shot that will be one of the shots of the decade. And, you know, just in my mind, you know, I kind of tweeted this out. I'm just like, dude, I don't care if you love him or hate him, but for Trump to have that presence of mind during a moment when, you know, he just escaped death and he hadn't completely escaped death yet, there could have been other shooters around the area.

Yeah.

Is pretty— it kind of just shows who he is, right? And so he made that moment a marketable moment. He knew what he was doing. And it in fact became a marketable moment.

What's funny is, and I'm not laughing about the fact that he got shot, that sucks. I was laughing for a little bit. Because Eric said, for him to know, know and realize and stop and pause and be like, fight, fight, fight. If it was me in that situation, Dude, I would have just like curled up and ran away.

Yeah, I'm like, let's get out of here, let's get out of here.

And I was like, I'm gonna stay at my home for, uh, quite a few days. Like, I would not be going out and about.

And yeah, I mean, we know for sure now he's not a coward, right? Yeah. And, and I think, you know, it's also a marketable moment too because, um, not in that specific moment, but I was watching other videos where, um, this guy was going around like Laguna Beach interviewing people. And, uh, most of the people he went around walking, he's like, hey, so what do you think about the shooting, blah blah. And then I think it was like 100%, 90% of the people, something like that, were like, oh, it was staged. Right. But that, that keeps the conversation going and it keeps the conversation keeps spreading. And so, um, I thought that was interesting too.

Well, it depends where you go in different parts of the world and you ask their opinions. If I'm not mistaken, I'm in Laguna Beach right now.

Laguna's mostly Republican.

I thought it was Democratic. I thought Newport was mainly Republican. Oh, you could be right. Laguna's—

you're from that area. I'm not.

I could be wrong, but Laguna is an artsy community. Newport is more Republican.

I think you're right.

Corona del Mar would be more Republican from my understanding, but Laguna is really artsy community.

Yeah. So just so everyone knows, Neil's from around the Orange County area. So he would know better than I do. I'm up a little north. I'm from the Arcadia or Pasadena area.

Well, I could be wrong. I'll actually Google it right now.

I actually think you're right.

Uh, Republican or Democratic city? You could be right. Let's see what Google says. Uh, Laguna Beach, darker red areas is Newport. Uh, it doesn't actually give me the right answer on Google. Laguna map, split evenly. It's 50/50, at least according to this map on bestneighborhood.org.

That sounds very reputable. Um, so, okay, you know, I want to continue on one more thread for this one. So, you know, in the opening moments when this happened, the, the next couple hours, you saw a lot of people posting to Twitter about how you can't trust the mainstream media anymore. You can't trust CNN, or you can't trust Washington Post. And so one thing I want to show you, uh, Neil, I'm gonna share screen because we're— we are doing this remote today. So you can see this is a tweet from Sean Peery over here. He says, unbelievable, look at the headlines. And then the quote here is, a half-truth is the most cowardly of lies. Okay, so you see Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally. That's from CNN. And then Washington Post says Trump escorted away after loud noises at Pennsylvania rally. And then MSNBC, Secret Service, Donald Trump safe after popping sounds heard at rally, right?

Yeah.

And then New York Times, Trump rushed off stage after chaos at rally. So first, you know, look at these headlines. Initially I was like, dude, they're not telling the truth. This is like lying, right? And then I saw someone tweet something from one of the newsrooms. And then this is from one of the, probably one of the managing editors or chief editor, I should say. And this is a message sent to the entire newsroom saying, hey guys, like we don't know what this is right now. Like we have to, we can't call this an assassination attempt. Until the authorities call it an assassination attempt, right? And so my initial reaction— let me just ask you first, Neil, what was your initial reaction to these headlines?

So my initial reaction, because I've worked with quite a few news publications and like we've done the marketing for CNN, like in places like Brazil and all over the world, and ESPN, and the list goes on and on— they're not supposed to say something unless they know it's a Fact, right? I'm not saying they always follow that. I'm not talking about one specific journalistic site or another. But if you look at the headlines and you look at a lot of the stuff that was on X, I use X, I like X. But sometimes I think on a lot of these platforms, you know, like I've taken a political test after the assassination attempt. I'm actually literally right in the middle.

But you but you're you can't be right. You have to be like slightly on the left or slightly on the right, right? Like I I took it. I'm like. Very slightly on the right, but in the middle.

Well, the one I took, it showed me I'm pretty much in the middle.

Well, just send it to me afterwards. I'm keen to see what I get.

It wasn't slightly on the right. It wasn't slightly on the left. It was literally dead center in the middle.

I'll send you the one I took before, but send it to me after.

I'll take the one as well that you took. But, um, you know, and a buddy of mine had me take it. I was like, all right, cool. So when you look at some of these sites, I do think they skew. Just matter of fact, like I do think reporters and journalists will put in their own viewpoints. But if you look at the timeframe on when they publish the articles, dude, people on social media, like on sites like X, were bashing these sites saying you can't trust them. When in reality, all that was happening is this news came out and they were writing articles literally within minutes of it happening and they couldn't confirm 100% on what happened. So their headlines were more generic, but the moment it came out and it was confirmed that it was assassination, their headlines were all updated and the articles were updated very quickly, right? This wasn't something that was taking them an hour to update or anything like that. Once they had the confirmation, they were in there just adjusting and putting in the notes that this article is being updated in real time, etc., depending on the site that you're reading. But I think people are really quick to judge. Depending on the site. Like, I could be wrong on this, but I think X skews more Republican. I think places like LinkedIn skew more Democratic. And what you see is people just jumping on one or the other and they're just saying, oh look, these guys are lying, or oh look, these people are skewed on both sides, right? And I'm not saying these sites don't skew one bit or the other. That would be false to actually say because I do think some sites skew more left and some sites skew more right. And the majority of the sites that I know skew more left than right. But it doesn't mean that these reporters are lying and you can't necessarily trust mainstream media.

Yep. So what I was trying to get out of Neil's answer is I wanted to get his reaction on it. And that is the reaction I have after sitting on it for a day or so. Um, they have to— it— so a lot of people are like, when, when that message was shared, that, that, uh, you know, editor-in-chief shared that message saying, hey guys, we can only report on the truth, truth, we can only report on the facts, and we can't say anything until the authorities say this was in fact an assassination attempt. And people are like, oh my God, this is evil, this is lying. And at that moment I was like, wait, like, is that actually evil? Is that lying? And in my mind I'm like, no, it's, it's not, because it's like First of all, they have to cover their own asses too as the media, right? It's actually really bad if they make these claims because they can't walk it back afterwards, right? They look really bad for making a bold claim or a false claim. So it's better for them to kind of err on the side of like, hey, you know, those were— there's chaos, there were popping noises, right? Those things are facts. And then over time, once they collected the facts, it did change over into assassination attempt, right? So I think, you know, in this scenario, I think the mainstream media, they did their job correctly. But I will also say, I mean, to Neil's point, like, you know, you can say trust or no trust, like, you know, each mainstream media outlet, they have their incentives, they have their donors, they have their, you know, they have their people that lean a certain way and they will write that way because it's really influenced by that person at the top.

I totally agree. I think, you know, some of these, majority of these publications, one way or another versus being neutral. But in this case, you know, the sad reality of it is a lot of people use their social followings to misrepresent what the media actually is.

Yep, totally. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about About the group, she said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketing school dot io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

Did you see the BlackRock ad that got pulled?

No. So I saw you put that in. I don't— give some detail. Feel free to share here. I'll share screen here because you, you, you, you, it's hard for you on iPad.

Yeah, share screen.

So here, let me share screen.

BlackRock pulled a commercial that included the Trump shooter. So back in 2022, The high school shooter went on a TV or went on a commercial that BlackRock ended up filming, and it was at the Bethel Park High School. And there was unpaid students that briefly appeared in the background, including Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was the shooter. And BlackRock really quickly pulled the ad from being used anymore. And remember, this is 2002. You know, when a lot of companies film ads, it's not like they can predict that, hey, this person's going to be a shooter or anything like that. BlackRock had no intention of, you know, wanting to harm anyone or endorsing someone who would harm anyone. But it was funny because I started seeing hate on BlackRock for the ad, and I'm like, look, it sucks that this happened to President Trump.

Yeah.

And it sucks that BlackRock got a little bit of bad press from it.

Former President Trump, as of now.

That's correct. Former President Trump. Sorry. I'm used to calling people like even President Barack Obama or President Bush, et cetera. But when you look at it, it's just like BlackRock didn't know this. They pulled the ad. They did the right thing. They shouldn't have gotten crap for this. You know what I mean? It's not like they were intentionally trying to harm anyone or anything like that. It's like saying, hey, I shot a commercial with someone 15 years ago. 15 years later, they had a mental disorder. They did something crazy, but back then they were healthy. And I'm not saying BlackRock vetted them or anything like that when they originally shot the commercial. And then, oh, you now should be held liable for something you filmed 15 years ago when the person was kind and all this and didn't have any mental disorders. And by no means I'm saying the shooter 2 years ago was healthy. I'm just giving you a random scenario that I'm making up. But in general, you know, so like corporations shouldn't get heat from that. It just doesn't make sense to get a lot of crap for something that you can't control and that you didn't intentionally do maliciously.

Well, I mean, it does to us, but I think it makes sense to the more general population because most people don't like to take responsibility and they like to blame someone.

Yes. And BlackRock literally put out statements apologizing and everything like that and pulled it right away.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP So Neil Patel Digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode.

Funny enough, on the note of the election, I have 2 questions for you. And actually I think I have both of them in the sheet. The first one is, did you see any customers telling you to stop running social ads and reallocate budget during that timeframe?

No. We did.

We saw quite a few.

So what percent would you say?

I don't know what percent. We probably got notifications within 24 hours for Collet and monthly media spend on social. Wasn't a large percentage, maybe like $5, $10? Maybe like $6-ish million a month.

Okay.

Saying reallocate this budget. They didn't say stop the budget. They just want to reallocate. And it wasn't that these corporations were political in any ways. It was more so they were worried that— and their ads had nothing to do with politics. They were more so worried that their ads wouldn't be seen and heard of because all they were— because these social networks were jumping in traffic. The amount of traffic that these platforms were getting.

Yeah.

Elon posted a little bit about his traffic increase. He had all-time high days. The question was, are these people actually interested in any of the ads? Now, these corporations were very sensitive to what happened. They were very sad. They didn't care about politics. They felt that no one should get assassinated or someone No one should be shot at. But it's more so if you're spending money, you know, these marketers are accountable to ROI. If you have your ads just appearing on these social sites where everyone's going for political news, are you just burning a lot of cash and getting no ROI?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of other threads we can touch on here. And, you know, this will be like, this episode will be our political episode, so to speak. But, you know, one thing I would say is I really appreciated how real-time everything on X is. It's just, you really have to think for yourself in these cases.

Yeah.

And that's the good thing about X. You have to think for yourself. And the benefit of that is, yes, you get everything in real time, but the trade-off is you have to think for yourself. Otherwise you start to experience groupthink. I just remember, like, I don't know about you, Neil, but growing up, my parents used to always watch the news. They used to be like, shh, like it was like the biggest thing ever. But now we understand that, hey, it's not like how it was before and you kind of have to figure things out for yourself. So I think the key takeaway for everyone here is I don't care which side you're on, You have to think for yourself and you have to go find information for yourself and then come to your own conclusions.

I totally agree with that. The other question I had for you is, and the corporate angle we saw, we did see during the time of, you know, these social networks running all these political campaigns, some people did see a decrease in return on investment from those social networks during, Call it a 2-day period. And then things started going back to normal from a return on ad spend. And then the second thing is, is organic social. Were you actually posting stuff non-politically related on these sites? Like, were you holding off your best content and waiting for some of the news, not necessarily to die down, but things to get a little bit back to normal?

Yeah, I didn't really post much. I think anything I posted was just related to that moment. And then, Yeah, I kind of held off.

Yeah, we started holding off too. I started looking at some of the people who are posting as normal and some of their stats, and you could see they weren't getting the engagement that they normally were. But the political stuff was getting crazy engagement. And the way these platforms work is they look at content on the overall network and what's getting the most engagement, that's what they bring to light. So we started holding off on our posting as well once we started seeing that. And I think that was a smart move. And just generally speaking, I'm not talking about assassination attempts, but when there's big events globally or regionally and your focus, you know, your business is focused regionally, either one, you may want to consider holding off posting some of your best stuff because it's going to get drowned out.

And on the flip side of that, Neil, I think Saturday, had we just said, hey, let's pick up the microphone and record and let it out that day, because we're recording this on Wednesday, so this is like a couple days after this happened on Saturday, right? So Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, went 5 days, right? So had we done that at the time, we, because some of our YouTube videos right now, our YouTube channel's still growing with Marketing School. I think this probably would've gotten for us, like it would've been like a record. So.

It would've been a record. Eric and I tend not to trend jack. We tend not to like just leech off of, and I'm not trying to say anything negative, but we try not to like piggyback off of political stuff. Eric and I aren't politicians. I don't know much about politics. I try not to get involved on the left or the right. And I tell people they should vote and do what's best for them and their country. And I'll do the same. And, you know, I don't think I should try to persuade people to move one direction or another.

Yeah. And by the way, some people don't like it when we talk about politics on this podcast, but we're talking about this, trying to talk about it in the context of business and marketing. But like we both said, I mean, we're both basically in the middle. So, you know, pending Neil's new test that he'll send me. I'm keen to see where I fall there. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Also go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's the community that Neil and I have to help agency owners grow faster. And, you know, one more caveat I would add, don't join the group unless you're at 6 figures or above. We're seeing that as a trend. It's not really a group for people that are under 6 figures. So that is it for today. We'll see you later and goodbye. Bye.