Magic Got RJ Lynch From Wisconsin to New York's Top Agencies

Don’t believe in magic? RJ Lynch just might change your mind. The social media pro, most recently at Crispin, has wielded magic since childhood, doing everything from sleight-of-hand to summoning the ghost of Harry Houdini. No, really. While working as PR director at The Houdini Museum in New York, Lynch convened a seance on an auspicious night. “Houdini always said he would return from the grave on Halloween, which is the day he died,” he said. The attendees gathered in one of the museum’s rooms and Lynch turned off the lights, calling for Houdini to show them a sign. Nothing happened—until he turned the lights back on at 1:26 p.m., the time Houdini died. “A white butterfly showed up in the middle of the room—on the fifth floor of a building in Midtown,” he recalled. “It came and landed on my finger, then flew around the room and stayed on a picture of Houdini. It was the most magical thing I’ve ever experienced.” It also helped that the feat was witnessed by a New York Times reporter. “That's how I got my first article in the Times,” Lynch said. “And that was really the springboard for my career in PR.” Raised in Wisconsin—the same state where Houdini grew up—he got into magic as a child after watching the Disney Channel movie Now You See It…, which included magicians performing tricks during commercial breaks. He parlayed his skills into a camp counselor gig, where more seasoned magicians taught him how to go from performing tricks to crafting illusions. Back home, he performed everywhere from homeless shelters to the YMCA, and eventually helped start a magic camp in Shanghai, China. Magic paid his way through college, where he researched the history of Black magicians and ended up publishing an op-ed about it in the Oshkosh Northwestern, a daily paper in Wisconsin. “‘I think I have a knack for finding an angle,’” he remembers thinking. “I truly wasn’t the best student. But I was good at communication, rhetoric, writing. That’s what I had.” That led to doing PR for his friends, cold-calling to get them on TV shows and into local newspapers. He arrived in New York in 2019 and talked his way into the Houdini Museum gig, which led to interest from a production company about a series on Black magicians. Covid had just shut down the museum, so Lynch went to Los Angeles and shot the pilot. To boost his profile, he began making content when TikTok was just beginning to get popular. He didn’t focus on magic though. “I used it to experiment with the algorithm because I never had been really on social media like that, and it ended up really popping off,” he said. The show ultimately didn’t sell, but Lynch had amassed 300,000 followers—and still needed a job. So as part of a content creator application at VaynerMedia, he turned a brief—“sell this toothbrush to us”—into a viral video about how the job market was so tough that people would post anything to get others to buy a toothbrush. “That video got a million views and people liked it—except the agency,” he said. “People at [Vayner] were like, ‘They hate that you did this.’” But it led to a gig at Hunter, then as an associate director of social media at Crispin. While he looks for his next career move, Lynch is planning to get back into performing magic. Catch him on Instagram at @rjthemagican. “For me, magic and PR are one and the same,” he said. “A lot of the magic I did was to prove myself as a PR, marketing, creative person. And it truly, every step of the way has been hand-in-hand.”

Off the Clock

Magic Got RJ Lynch From Wisconsin to New York's Top Agencies

"For me, magic and PR are one and the same."

Eva Kis

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