#vinclancyhollywoodstories Part 5: COMIC CON STORIES: Growth hacking Conan, Dying, Eviction, and Dawson from Dawson’s Creek

Expectation: fit girls everywhere in cosplay outfits, ostentatious superhero outfits from guys, furries orgys.
Reality: Comic con is the story of American commerce.

Like SXSW, comic con is so big that everyone who attends will have a vastly different experience. Here’s mine:

I wanted to start by going to the heart of the action so began by visiting the main conference hall.

This thing is a damn aircraft hanger full of, well, shit.

If you were a collector of that shit it would not be shit, but as an aggregate, it’s pretty low quality stuff.

I expected more interactivity (hell, even some experiential marketing would’ve worked) but it was just stall, stall, stall, in every direction.

Every now and then there’d be a new game you could play, but it was always hidden behind a huge queue of people (and this was on the quietest day, Thursday, it would’ve been an all day moshpit by Saturday in there)

The most notable thing I see is adult comics in plain view. The insides of those comics (cartoons fucking every which way you can imagine) were a madness.

I thought “Someone’s gonna be mad about THIS on Twitter at some point.”

A friend of mine is “in” with the gaming clique and takes us to an “ official venue” — a fast food joint which today has a small section of people playing a new game, and a VR section.

An influencer is summoned to play the new game. I meet him briefly.
He has 10 million followers on YouTube, who watch him talking about games.

Even ten years ago, to get that many people to watch you regularly would mean you are on a major tv show, and, let’s be honest, you’d probably have to be somewhat good looking. This guy was in a buttoned-down shirt and seemed friendly.

Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will be famous is finally coming true.

Normal-looking people are becoming stars for the first time ever.

They are here alongside the movie stars selling autographs and milking comic con as a big cash injection or hype machine for their forthcoming projects (the other main floor at comic con was the panels of the stars and influencers, but the queues were hours for many of those so I avoided it, though I did want to meet the My Chemical Romance singer again)

So I’m queuing up to try the Virtual Reality game with headset.

The lady cleaning the headset between each person is annoyed that I’m on the phone (to my philosopher, of all people) while I’m queuing up to kill the time before I can play.

“Are you ready to play now? Get off your phone” she barks

I say goodbye and put the headset on.

Now I’m in Virtual Reality and leading a peacekeeping organization on a foreign planet.

My squad looks to me for guidance in the overall goal of stabilizing an entire galaxy.

It’s a huge responsibility for my first 30 seconds in VR, playing for the first time ever with a headset.

What I’m most interested in is the fact that my entire body has now disappeared with this thing on.

I look down expecting to see my crotch for some reason and I’m staring into the abyss, literally

So as it turns out I’m leading the peace convoy, but, sure enough, aliens are up to no good and I’m
blasting everything that moves.

The lady who found me rude is shouting into my ear “make a punching movement!”

A rock collapses and squashes an alien.

Onwards.

Now 3 alien starships are firing at us and I’m blasting missiles and bullets.

Everything bounces off their shields.

Eventually their bullets reach me in a volley, collapsing my unit.

The VR unit is yanked off my head.

I look at the lady in surprise

“You DIED” she yells at me

“Why?” I reply, pointlessly

“You were meant to shoot the base on the left” she sneers

I get the feeling she could’ve told me what to do if we had a better working relationship.

In my life after death, I head to a Viking funeral with a guy who was in a mid-level emo/rock band in the 2000’s.

We leave that and see that IMDB are throwing a party with legendary “Mallrats” director Kevin Smith.

We have to get into that shit.

*** Time for a guestlist growth hack! ***

I tell my friend to say his name is “something that begins with A” then when they look it up, see someone else’s name and report it back to me who was standing way back, then I say the second name. (One of the oldest tricks in the book, I got into the Twitter party at Web Summit ’14 pretending to be Adrian Grenier, of all people)

He took that idea and..completely ignored it. (Well, I thought it was good)

He told them he worked for Amazon, quoting the name of someone who had got his band’s music on.

Two minutes later we’re ushered through, and after I take the below selfie we’re on a gigantic boat, four floors heaving with actors, PR agents, and pale-looking gamer kids (The sushi floor had a PC section where people could play “Call of Duty: World War Two” complete with army soldiers saluting you while you play).

The party is all actors on their way up or the way down, and their PR agents fussing over them.

I meet a PR agent from Dallas who I later see explaining something to a fresh-faced actor:

“And THAT’S how you end up on Amazon”

He nods, but I’m not sure he really understands

That’s the scary thing about being a creative person: You constantly put your career in the hands of other people
and prey they’re not completely incompetent, mad, star fuckers, cheating you out of money or any other L.A. cliche that actually has a fair chance of being true.

As we leave the film boat we find the boat next door is a “weed boat” with their pitch being “We’re Craigslist for weed”
I still have problems keeping a straight face when someone says they’re in “the Cannabis industry” I think of the shotters from my home town licking out a cheeky eighth to some skateboarders, not a multi-billion dollar legal state-backed enterprise as it’s fast becoming in the United States.

They are not allowed alcohol on their boat so it’s pretty dead and we head downtown to “Omnia”.

It’s normally pretty mainstream in Omnia clubs but tonight it’s full of introverted geeks so that’s…better?

“HODOR” from Game Of Thrones is DJ’ing and people are moshing about on the dance floor, but he just doesn’t get it.

If he didn’t drop a mashup of “The Legend Of Zelda” and Game Of Thrones theme, you could’ve been
watching any old deep house DJ in Vegas or L.A.

I’m speaking to a DJ who only plays Video Game music, who explains to me how Dj’ing at Comic Con works

“So me and Hodor were Dj’ing back-to-back last year- I played one song, he played the one after, and so on”
I would drop video game remixes and this geek crowd would go nuts as that’s what they like, then he would play some deep house and wonder why the crowd kept quietening down”

Hodor, if you’re reading this, you gotta know your audience.

After the club, we get accosted by the receptionist for bringing guests back to the afterparty in our suite.

She lets us through, but drama was to follow.

They de-activated our key fob, left a kind of “you are being evicted” notice for the host,
and left us wondering if at any point we’d be stranded out of our own hotel room.

The next day we also had about 200 hats shipped in to the hotel as well to carry on the Guerrilla marketing,
so I woke up to a production line of people making hats and chalkboards (The airbnb was barely legal,
now we were turning it into a place of work- absolute piss takers we are, I love it) + Two extra people living in
the apartment, in the middle of a possible eviction.

Now we had to have one person in the apartment at all times in case we were thrown out (we always gotta plan).

Armed with the hats, we head to the filming of the “Conan O’ Brien” show.

I didn’t get on Conan…but I did growth hack my friends brand in front of millions of people

My plan for Conan was simple

1. Meet him
2. Impress him
3. Be a last-minute addition to the show

;)

If you think that sounds ridiculous, it’s the exact strategy Jimmy Carr (at that point, a nobody in America…pretty
much still a small-timer now but) realized he was in the same room as Jay Leno, googled him, saw he was into classic
cars and blagged some knowledge, getting on Jay’s good side and immediately being booked on the show, to the surprise
of every other comedian on the circuit.

So how did I plan to do that?

My friend Jen and I got VIP tickets to the Conan show.

We were there to hype Chalkin social, the self-expression hat company (I just made that pitch up)

So we made it backstage!

Alas, not sign of Conan or the Game of Thrones actors at the time we got there (about an hour before showtime) that we could give the hats too (or charm them)

So now we’re in our seats thinking “Damn, well that’s that”

Then I had an idea

We had snuck two huge bags of the hats in with us (trick is to go around the security guards, oldest trick in the book)
and an idea hit me

We wrote “Team Coco” on the chalkboards attached on the hat, got down to the front two rows and inferred we were with the show and could people wear them for the show (and they could keep them afterwards if they did)

So we had the two front rows wearing them while they filmed Conan, one of the biggest shows in America, huge brand awareness for $0.

I don’t do too much guerrilla marketing these days (the spiritual father of growth hacking) but it feels so GOOD to make the system work for you rather than you for it

The hats made it onto the show in front of the exact audience who would love them, and was a major win

So though I didn’t get to tell some of my best stories, I helped my friends company, and she has promised we’ll
meet Conan here in LA sometime soon

:-)

There’s always a way to get your product out there

You just need balls of steel

;)

After Conan the big event is Vice’s party celebrating the launch of “What would Diplo do?” a bizarre sitcom
loosely based on Diplo’s.

Two things you can expect at a Vice party:
1. Free bar
2. Brilliant music

I turn around to see James Van Der Beek (Dawson from Dawson’s Creek) dancing behind me.

His dancing don’t look all that good.

In fact, no better than mine (and I’m not just saying that)

Then I see he is being filmed and he could be “acting” that he can’t dance well, as he is kinda geeky
in his portrayal of Diplo, which I guess is the point.

Dawson dances off back to the 90’s and I head to Omnia again to the Nylon party.

You never can tell who has money in America — Nylon is an online magazine full of written content not unlike
Planet Ivy was in 2012.

It doesn’t even look like the complete shit you get on Lad Bible or Elite Daily, clickbait
mayhem. (Hence why I’m amazed they have money, that clickbait stuff makes serious money when you get it right)

Nylon somehow have Will.I.am, Warren G, and Mase doing live P.A.’s at the party. Expensive af.

I remember seeing a poor flyer guy outside the convention center earlier that day trying to hand out flyers advertising “The Black Eyed Peas Comic” — As you may well imagine, the comic book fans were NOT interested in this.

The night goes on foreverrrrr and I remember standing in a pizza joint in a rough part of town at 3am in my jewels and a young thug telling me “I like your style man — Don’t let anyone play you out — anyone starts some shit with you you call me I’ll back you up” and I’m kinda thankful but I wanna leave as I’m long way away from giving talks at tech conferences now.

The next morning I head back to my hotel, where I find a girl asleep on the couch with her hand between her legs and an eyepatch on.

She is moaning “MmmmMmmmMmmmMmmm” and I’m suddenly awkward British guy like I’m not meant to see this, and I really wanted to cook something up in the kitchen so I don’t wanna leave.

Then her guy appears from the balcony and she lifts the eyepatch and carries on the MmmmMmmm-ing out loud.

Her hand was on her pants, not IN her pants, I see.

“I popped a Valium” she purrs

Ah, yiss. The other great American pleasure.

Everyone wakes up, we pack the remaining hats into the car, and it’s time to go home.

It’s a beautifully bright sunny day as we drive back through California.

I get dropped off.

We hug goodbye.

I reflect on the weekend in my apartment.

We are living an everlasting adolescence, while at the same time holding down these monolithic careers with
stock options, massive or celebrity clients, then go to these awesome parties and people want to make out with us.

We can half-complain about overwhelm and anxiety, but really, life is kinda fucking awesome right now.

We’ve came a long way since being the weird kids in our respective high schools and suburbs.

When you look back at all of your classmates on Facebook, virtually everyone has settled down.

We’re still having mad weekenders on a whim- I decided to go to Comic Con a week before we left,
and got free lifts there and back, accommodation, and ticket to the event (My friends are fucking awesome)

We live very blessed lives.

And we’re just getting started

:-)

VC

P.S. If you’re wondering why it has taken me so long to get this out, it’s the same reason you like my stuff — I rewrote this four times from scratch over the past three weeks until I got it into the above format I liked.

You should post stuff every day, but take your time over the important things

xx