Is Tai Lopez the Nickelback of the Marketing World?

Hey, it’s Christian Martin. You know what’s fascinating? The Gargantuan rise of Tai Lopez, a person who made a name for himself in the marketing and entrepreneur space almost instantly.

I can remember when his first few videos about reading a book a day came out thinking people are never going to follow this guy. In a couple of years later, I was very wrong. It’s hard now to find someone who doesn’t know who Tai is.

With so many business and marketing gurus out there, you’d think that it will be harder to do this? So how did he do it? Just like a lot of other business and marketing gurus, Tai has done the TEDx talk, he’s done television, he flaunts his wealth. 

He has millions of subscribers on youtube and he’s respected by all the other famous gurus like Gary Vee and Grant Cardone. If you don’t know, Tai is the guru that everyone loves to hate. His notoriety is actually very similar to another internet sensation that’s been around for more than a decade.

I’m talking about the massive hate towards Canadian rock bands Nickelback. Nickelback is so hated that in 2016 cop’s threaten to play Nickelback on the way to jail as a punishment if you got caught drinking and driving. So why the comparison? Well, Tai seems like he’s a nice guy, but he’s not perfect. He’s a mix of marketing genius and tactless public perception. 

But why is Tai Lopez so ridiculed online? I’m Christian Martin and in this video I’ll be doing a deep dive on how Tai Lopez has became a Nickelback of the marketing world. Let’s find out if the hate is nothing more than internet fun or if there’s legitimate criticisms about Tai that I’ve earned him this extreme comparison. In order to do that, we have to take it back. 

We have to take it way back to a time when #netflixandchill is still a thing, people sympathize with the Pizza Rat trying to feed his adopted turtle family, and when this dress was definitely black and blue.

In 2015, Tai Lopez came onto the scene by sharing his love of knowledge over lambos. This exposure came from and aggressively successful ad campaign that brought him instant fame and attention. 

During the ad’s full run, Tai received over 600 million views, according to him. He spent an estimate of about $16 to $30 million on Youtube ads alone. That’s crazy.

This is Nickelback-levels of what many call overexposure. Nickelback’s hit song, “How you remind me,” was named the number one most played song on us radio of the 2000s decade by Nielson soundscan and Billboard. 

It was played over 1.2 million times on US airways since its release in 2001 until the end of 2009 but the song has been played at least 270 million times on Spotify alone.

The song was named fourth on the billboard hot 100 songs of the decade, 10 years of the same song over and over again, and people are still listening to it.

Now with Tai Lopez, you couldn’t watch a single youtube video without being bombarded by him. In fact, even when you were watching a Tai Lopez youtube video, you were getting hit with the Lambo ad beforehand. He was buying up so much inventory, he was advertising in his own videos.

Like Nickelback, Tai outplayed himself. His ads got so big that it became annoying as hell. In the age of multichannel advertising, it’s tempting to corner your audience and bombard them constantly to build awareness. 

Do you remember the Minions? Of course you do because they were on your TV, they were on your phone, on movie promos, your bananas, on buses, or the millions of kids dressing up as minions for Halloween. They even got their own movie.

Eventually though people have had enough instead of building curiosity, excitement, and anticipation for his product Tai eventually became a nuisance, much like Nickelback. 

But with all this overexposure, maybe you’re thinking that what he’s selling is truly innovative and new and that’s why so many people are paying attention. Well, this is a strange part. Not really. Which brings me to my next point.

Un-originality.

I’m not a music expert, but in his article, “Why do people ain’t Nickelback so much?”, Stephen Thompson and music columnists for NPR wrote several possible reasons why Nickelback to so hated. 

Thompson believes that because Nickelback is the, “…Umpteenth generation copy of a copy of post grunge, dispensed with urgent Creed-esque self-importance…” That they built a reputation as being unoriginal and to formulaic. But just like their contemporaries, this isn’t uncommon. Bands like Staind, Puddle of Mudd, and Creed, had the same sound but Nickelback gets the most hate because they overstayed their welcome, especially when the post grunge genre was losing popularity. 

So how does Tai Lopez fit into this? Well, I think Gary Vaynerchuk said it best when he said it.

“Now. What’s interesting about readers like yourself? Contextualizing. Communicating it. Consuming it and regurgitating into new packages. That is, that’s the holy grail, You’re going to live by that…” (Garyvee)

Hi Little meds is in master regurgitator. He’s known for reading a book a day, which makes sense by how many people he quotes almost every interview you watch of Tai, he’s quoting other successful people.

There’s a great book called the self made billionaire effect. Like Elon Musk said, Warren buffet says, if you have over 130 Iq, you could told me he’s a Tavaris bought and Nietzsche. The philosopher said the same thing you’re saying. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winner. 

He said, you know, if you make less than 72 grand, there’s a good one called happiness hypothesis by Jonathan I that he didn’t want to be the richest man in the graveyard. I got that from Bill Gates. Bill Gates, Built Microsoft, the great philosopher, I think it was Aristotle or Socrates said, this is what Charlie Munger says, this guy named Dr. David Buss.

If you want to read a book that will blow your minds, his, uh, his textbook called evolutionary psychology by Dr. David Buss. It have to look at the eminent dead. Like you have to use books born stoic and die. Epicurean discipline brings freedom. There’s more freedom from disciplining. Yeah,

no, that’s not to say that other gurus don’t do this, but is a glaring habit the Tai does almost every time he speaks. He’s constantly name dropping over and over. This is also a criticism of his course, ‘The 67 Steps to getting anything you want.’ 

There are dozens of reviews that described the courses as practical, but it pulls heavily from self help books like the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and the Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg). This goes and on.

“That’s because all this information is really available already anyway. It’s, you know, he’s basically rehashed every self help book ever written. 

You then combining it all together and we’re taken out the good points of what he read in those books and converting it into a 67 steps, you know, like uh, “

these are classic self help books that anybody can pick up and read. But Tai was able to take the best points from these books and he repackaged it to make it his own just like what Nickelback did. Now, I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. People consume content differently and Tai Lopez is making these classic books accessible in video form. 

The way that Nickelback to me at the post-grunge sound more entertaining for the masses. Now Tai is great leveraging existing ideas and he found the opportunity to modernize the classics for new audience, which is pretty cool. Why do you think Hollywood produces so many remakes? People like all things communicated in a new way. At this point, Nickleback and Tai Lopez has achieved an amazing online status that not a lot of successful people are able to obtain.

It’s the living meme status.

Now love ’em or hate ’em, you’ve made it when you become a living meme, it’s the whole theme for Internet meme culture. Your legacy lives on as a living mean with your face reaching the far corners of the Internet. 

Just look at Kevin Hart for example, before he made a big as an international superstar, he was already successfully selling out shows in standup specials, but his Internet meme sky rocketed his popularity and demand. So what does it say about Tai Lopez and Nickelback? They’re still extremely successful, even after all the hate and the ridicule and the backlash on the Internet and in real life, they have made a name for themselves and it shows. 

Tai Lopez is respected in the entrepreneur guru community and he’s even well liked by celebrities. He’s earned the admiration of millions and he’s built his fortune by hustling hard and working very smart …and us for Nickelback. I’ll just let Deadpool explain:

“50 million albums worldwide. 11th best selling musical act of all time. Billboards most successful rock group in the last decade, six grammy nominations, 12 Juno awards– those count. Six billboard music awards. Two American music awards, One people’s choice award, Canadian, and a partridge in F%$@king pear tree.”

Here’s the thing, you have to realize, haters can be a very good thing. You’re doing something right when people out there recognize you and they shit on your success. If you ever want to be successful, you’re gonna have haters, but haters can actually give you an advantage. As Kat Williams says, “if you’ve got 14 haters now, you’ve got to get 16 before the summer.”

In order to be loved, you have to be hated. Chances are if nobody hates you, then you don’t have a strong fan base either. It has been said that the opposite of love is not an hate, but indifference and being in different is the worst reaction that you can get as a marketer. No haters can be motivation to prove people wrong. They can drive you to work harder, produce more, and get better results for your clients and with enough doubters. 

You can frame yourself as the underdog and nobody wants to come after the underdog with the amount of hate there is out there for Nickelback and Tai Lopez, there’s a strong fan base of supporters who are rooting for them. Now haters also give you an opportunity to show humanity and grace, Tai Lopez in Nickelback take criticism on the chin and they can laugh it off.

“I would rather stab myself in the taint and here another Nickelback song. That’s funny. That’s how we make Nickelback songs.”

“You get into this kid said, oh, what ties doing won’t work for everybody? Well, Harvard works, but it won’t work for the vast majority of us. What about everyone else who gets left behind? We just leaving you behind because you can’t get an Ivy League school? No. I’m not perfect, but I’m trying to do something about it. It’s a free country, reddit. This guy can say what he wants. He’s entitled to his opinion, but don’t mean he’s right.

Tai actually has an amazing ability to be unreactive to haters and it makes us like him all the more. They both understand that no, they’re not going to win everyone over. That maybe, the critics just don’t understand the journey they had to take to succeed and get where they are now. So yes, Tai Lopez is the Nickelback of the marketing world, but good for him. 

As marketers, it’s important to look at something like Tai Lopez, both for the things we don’t like about him but also as a case study for success because he has done a lot of things right. There is something to be learned from somebody who has 600 million views on one ad. 

That’s crazy. That’s more than a Superbowl ad. Now people might be turned off by Tai Lopez’s tactics because he flaunts private jets, lambos, and Instagram models. He perpetuates the image that wealth and materialism are the only indicators of success.

But if you watched his videos and trust me, and I’ve watched a lot Tai is actually quite assuming he has a great underlying message about success and learning to earn more and he genuinely wants to help people live a better life. 

Even if he does it using pretty women twirling their hair to keep you watching. That’s all for this week, but I have to tell you it was a lot of fun dropping all this KNOWLEDGE. What are your thoughts on Tai Lopez? 

Leave a comment down below because I’d love to discuss this more. I want to know, do you think Tai Lopez is the Nickelback of the marketing world. 

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