Missing the point completely

Missing the point completely

Today, I'll share a story about someone from marketing who was trying to make things happen and really stepped in it. It goes like this: a bunch of us engineer types are invited to a meeting with someone from marketing. We don't know the first thing about marketing in general, or even the particulars of it at this company. But they want to chat and hey, it's an excuse to not "work", so why not go see what they want?

We'll call this person A. A gets up there and it's pretty clear they're the sort of loose, goofy and hopefully funny... almost hippie type... you've heard about. It makes sense. You need to be creative for that job, and they're the creative type. So far, so good.

A proceeds to tell a story about this big "tent-pole" movie that was coming out. All of the nerds were going to want to see this latest movie in a series that went back a couple of decades. Plus, it'd successfully slopped over into non-nerd life, such that a bunch of regular people would also be excited about it coming out.

Marketing saw this coming and proceeded to reach out to the company that worked on the movies. They wanted to do a partnership where the company's product would change for the weekend of the movie's opening. Instead of having the usual little icons for whatever it is they did (dog walking, pizza delivery, you know the type of company), there'd be icons of characters and certain well-known and well-loved vehicles from the franchise zipping around.

All they had to was get it written and out the door in advance of the movie. The marketing folks sat down with the engineering peeps and laid it out. They were told right then and there "no can do". Even though they had all kinds of time in which to do this kind of "theming" of the app, they knew they couldn't do it. That's how bad it was at this company.

Anyway, A told us this story, and used it as a basis for asking if anyone could help solve the fundamental disconnect that kept the company from doing cool things. It was basically a "this is why we can't have nice things" story, but at the same time it was a cry for help. Since they were at the mercy of the software people who had to add the actual icons and toggles and features into the app (and backend stuff), they were stuck.

Towards the end, A told the audience a story about what happens if you have a product that might be good in theory but has terrible marketing. As part of this part of the talk, they put up a slide. You might've been wondering what the hell was with the image I put at the top of this post. Well, that's what was on the slide.

For people who are using text to speech or otherwise can't see the image, I'll describe it here: it's a bog-standard conference room with a projector screen, and the only thing on the screen is "clownpenis.fart" - like a URL, only not. There are also some white blocks where I cut out a few people who would otherwise be identifiable (including the speaker).

When I saw this, I didn't get it. My own reaction was along the lines of "heh" from my inner 12 year old and also "what?" and "I guess I'm missing the reference". Someone quickly informed me that it was a callback to a Saturday Night Live skit that aired around 2000. I had stopped watching SNL by then, and so that's why it was off my radar. Easy enough.

I had to go back and watch it - you can still find it online if you're interested. It's about an investment firm that is solid and has been around forever, but is only now (2000, remember) "getting online" - establishing a "web presence", if you will. They waited too long and so got the "last domain name available" - the aforementioned clownpenis.fart. This ran on national TV, albeit late on a Saturday night some 22 years ago. (And yes, that's the voice of Jerry from Rick and Morty.)

Basically, the presenter was trying to get people to connect the dots by using something funny that they had seen in the past. It didn't work. Oh, did it ever not work.

For the next month, all you could hear about in the company was that A did the wrong thing, and shouldn't have said that, and they should apologize, and what are we going to do about this sort of communications issue, and so on.

Personally, I filed it under "stupid", not "hostile", but that was me at that point in time. I had plenty of "buffer space" in my life.

What's kind of amazing is that nobody ever mentioned the "we can't have nice things because eng is fundamentally unable to do the simplest, stupidest adjustments to our 'chrome' which would surprise and delight our customers". That went COMPLETELY unnoticed and was largely forgotten.

The company continued to be unable to have nice things.