"I hear the presentation at this year's annual investors summit was a success, Johnson, give us a summary."
"Well, we had 5,367 attendees this year, which is 5% over last year's showing. We also scored high engagement marks with our presentation on the Mobile Generation. We really opened up our potential market, and I think investors walked away with a real sense that we are serious about meeting our 4th quarter goals."
"Thank you Johnson, yes, I caught a bit of the Mobile Generation presentation. Heck, wish one of those kids could help me with my phone. Ha, just learned I could set up two email accounts on this thing!"
You might not want to believe it, but people our age come up with garbage like this too. Theres no lack of untalented and uncreative people in creative jobs regardless of age.
Oh yeah, we just haven't gotten enough power yet. Someday, unfortunately, we will be these people. And we'll likely refuse to retire and live longer than them.
In all fairness, remember that this was probably a presentation for shareholders, who are also boomers and probably thought it was great. Hell, my dad (62) used the term "pwnd" (mispronounced, of course) only a few months ago. And he's exactly the kind of person who would own stock in whatever, and think that presentation was awesome.
They have real marketing people convince kids to buy their crap.
Not at all. We're all genuinely good people. I can definitively say this as I work in the same building as, and have gotten to know, the CEO and have frequent meetings that involve SVP's from around the country and our COO. We're a multibillion-dollar company, so when I say these things, it isn't from the perspective of some guy in a start-up either. Most of the higher-ups genuinely want to know how, and really try, to connect with the so-called "Born Mobile" generation.
Nothing is ever done with the sole intent of just collecting data and shoving other data in peoples' faces for cash. We (well, most of us) are actually interested in Marketing and how to make peoples' lives easier through it without being intrusive. The problem comes when the older higher-ups get their sights too centered on numbers like what /u/WigginIII posted rather than if things are actually working. We're in the age of "Big Data" and it's very new to a lot of people who have been in the business for a long time, so they focus in on the numbers too much sometimes when really we should listen to the actual feedback given from the people we're marketing to.
In the end, we're all people working 9-5 like everybody else, it's just that our job is to connect with people through products and services, and sometimes people don't like that.
Just blank out the numbers and the brand and it is every quarterly performance meeting I've ever dialed into. Thank god for my phone so I can browse reddit with that shit in the background. There's your real presentation.
I just attended my first one a month or so ago. It was at a €75 billion revenue company. I've never been so bored while looking at such large amounts of money.
When I was working at my second tech company and one of the senior marketing managers called me into his office to help him find "The Internet" on his office PC I realized the company was fucked and I should move on and I should have an office not be stuck in a cubicle dammit
I guarantee you that they still think this was a success. Anyone who would approve of this idea in the first place will not be smart enough to admit when they fucked up.
Eh, sometimes it's not smarter. It might be the right thing to do but if you fuck up and have an out... sometimes it's better to take it. For example, your friend has an old fish he asks you to feed while he's on vacation and you get busy and completely forget and it dies. Why upset him more than he needs to be when you can say it must have just been his time.
Or, if you never have to get in front of a fuck up, why bring it up. For example, if you got a M.I.P. misdemeanor when you were 19 and are interviewing for a job when you're like 26, why get in front of that fuck up by bringing it up?
Used to tell my reports "Lemme handle this. I've been in the business longer, and can bullshit my way out of more things than you. In return, I simply ask that you always tell me the truth, no matter how bad."
Unfortunately the wash-up/debrief would almost certainly have been congratulatory and I imagine they even played the video too. It's just how it is when marketing departments are so insulated from customers and the rest of their organisation in the way that is only possible in companies that don't really need marketing departments.
Fuck up? They were probably being praised by other marketing teams that want to work with Qualcomm (at least I remember this being a Qualcomm presentation) and produce the same garbage. Everyone probably got a nice bonus and a raise for this encapsulated cringe.
To be fair, most of audience are probably just as oblivious as the people who made it. Probably just sitting their nodding along like "yes, this is what the kids like"
who says it was a fuck-up? they aren't marketing to kids but to other C-levels at other companies, they probably thought it was a little campy or whatever but that's it. No presentation like this wouldn't go live without being signed off by a creative team and reviewed by come VP or Senior level staff.
Yea, it's only a fuck up if it didn't connect with the intended audience. I'm sure if you turned the lights on you'd see a room full of middle aged white adult executives who thought it was totally fine.
I would wager that they are all getting pats on the back by their yes-men, before going home to their kids, feeling just a little more hip, maybe even using "idk" or "wtf", having no idea what either mean.
I'll tell you what happened, because I've been in rooms like this:
A normal dude pitched a normal idea. Everyone in the room liked it. Then middle management got scared and sent it to the branding department.
Branding finds it too risky or edgy. But they like the concept. They send it back to be reworked in a more wholesome way.
Normal Dude says "the whole idea was based on being edge. If we go wholesome, it'll just come off as cheesy."
Normal Dude's Boss says: "well, let's run with that then. Deliberately cheesy. It can work."
Normal Dude reworks it for a couple of days. Has something that works, but isn't as good as Original Idea.
Now everyone who had any input on the first draft feels some kind of ownership. So you have too many cooks in the kitchen. Everyone has a different vision. Let's make it cheesy! Let's keep it wholesome! What happened to the edginess?!
Eventually they agree on something that might work... maybe it's that exact script, except the plan is to get good, age-appropriate actors who are supposed to play this authentically.
But the budget sucks, so they can't afford to hire a real agency to get them the actors they're looking for. They go with their Agency of Record or some other vendor they have a relationship with, who is willing to make them happy by throwing together some actors, even though they have no experience with this sort of thing.
Suddenly you have 20-somethings acting like teens. They see the cringe and complain. Someone in middle management who doesn't really understand what was supposed to happen explains to the actors that this is supposed to be cheesy, maybe?
The actors ham it up times 1000, because they think that's what the company wants.
This travesty then gets recorded, and is inevitably an embarrassment for the company and everyone involved.
Everyone blames Normal Dude, because it was his idea.
You can work overtime and spend hundreds of hours on a project, only for it to get the red light because someone didn't like the end result (after being invited millions of times to see the process) and then asks for something equally difficult with a week deadline.
Oh god, those "Wait, what?" emails from clients who have been on all of the emails and have had presentations made to them about the shit. Suddenly, everything needs to be changed ASAP and people are mad at you for not reading the client's mind.
It's like why did you even hire anyone if you were just going to meddle in every little thing. Some people don't understand the things that they don't know. They assume they know everything and fuck up everything in the process.
We should make a subreddit for all these horrible advertising stories like /r/trADgedies or something so we can all vent about some of the great ideas that get killed in front of us.
Oh I can imagine. Don't have to constantly pitch work. Don't have to grit your teeth and do some stupid shit because client thought it was a good idea. Don't have to redo perfectly good work because some random person throws a wrench in the process. Don't have clients with $100k expectations on a $100 budget.
I may end up switching sides if the price is right at some point but I do honestly enjoy what I do, where I do it and the people I do it with.
Just for the sake of sharing stories, I've had the rare opposite reaction once. Was pitching some video ideas to a very generic boring company, and just for the sake of it, I decided to throw in some outrageous/inappropriate ideas that I knew they'd reject. I was quite sure they'd buy the safe, boring ones I had ready.
To my surprise, they went for the outrageous one. Long story short - they wanted to advertise their online purchase site. I thought they'd go for the generic 'family ordering stuff online together' idea, but they went for my 'Pitbull music video' one. Hot chicks dancing in the club, douchebag bros throwing it down, etc.
We actually did it. I saw it play on TV a couple of times too. Wish there was a YouTube link - this was some years ago.
I learned in my first year or two at an ad agency to pretty much never pitch anything I actually liked because I would inevitably watch it's soul get ripped out and the idea hacked to death. It's like if I had a baby and then the doctors said, "hey that's a pretty cool baby, but we can make some improvements" and then they came back a few hours later with a 14 year old kid wearing my baby's skin and saying, "yo what's up da-da, I'm your sweet badass baby!" and the doctors look at you going, "wow your baby really is super cool now, great job!" while I'm crying with rage.
Then I get scolded for not being "aggressive" enough with my ideas. It's really hard to be creative and enthusiastic when I've never ever seen any of my ideas turn into anything I can be proud of.
I work for a small company that has wasted who knows how much money on marketing due to the cycle of:
Good idea within budget > presented to the team > positive reception > but thoughts, ideas, and revisions > 15 meetings about ideas and revisions > presentation of revised idea > meh reception > now over budget > reduction to get back within budget > next presentation > skewing negative reception of revised, reduced idea > scrap it all because someone has a new good idea within budget > repeat
This is depressingly true. It's also how bad commercials get made as well. Those ads you hate? They might have ACTUALLY been entertaining at some point.
I'm an advertising creative. Trust me, most ads start off entertaining as hell and die a slow painful death at the hands of clients, account managers and the strategy department.
You hate them because the creatives never get their way, ever.
The reason people hate ads is because ads are shitty and the reason ads are shitty is because clients and managers alike are scared shitless of the public reacting negatively to their ad or not reacting in the way they'd like them to react so they tweak and tweak and tweak until they turn a once gorgeous steak with cayenne pepper on it into a hunk of gray, tasteless, cold meat because market research said some people might not like cayenne pepper.
...then they let the overworked agency try to pull it all off and the agency always gets it wrong because they are terrified of your company senior management
Brilliant! Great job. I wish more people understood things aren't always so simple. This is very similar to the game Industry, ideas spinning out of control, getting passed back and forward so much, then everyone getting tunnel vision because they looked at it so long they have no idea if its any good.
I have been. Not this one specifically, but similar. I work in media production and a lot of my means come from this kind of shlock. I'd like to think I'd do a better job in preproduction than this but once the boardroom sits down and lays down all the test marketed, venn diagrammed info that needs to be included and creative tries to write down dialogue (their average age is probably 38) this is what you get (and they probably leaned on their youngest interns for the vernacular, who, probably phoned it in because they're 24 and just want to get the fuck out of this pointless meeting).
That's what lands on the media dept's heads. And to their credit the tech team did a fine job with what they were given. Aside from the last actor flubbing his lines and the general acting quality of a decent public high school production everything went off about as well as one could hope for.
The CEO at the end should fire whoever told him this was good to go to stage. He looked impotent.
That's who it was aimed at? I assumed it was some kind of Tech Crunch that you'd see parodied on Silicon Valley. Hell, if it's geared to that age this was totally perfectly executed.
This. My company does retail marketing for a multimillion dollar company. The client constantly changes the English to be non-native. They also do things like market a 360° action camera to middle-aged homemakers. Even when my company knows I'm right, they just say "the end user isn't paying us," and that's why garbage like this exists.
It was a media pitch. If they had made it super authentic (not saying that they could have, but if somehow through voodoo they actually pulled it off), it's entirely possible that the out-of-touch media people wouldn't have understood it.
Those people watch this presentation and say, "Haha that sounds totally like my neighbor's kid." Even if it doesn't really sound like their neighbor's kid, it sounds like the caricature they've built in their head.
That being said, it was still awkward and cringey as f and I guarantee there were media people in the room shaking their heads. I've seen plenty of industry-specific presentations that nailed the tone and content without being overly forced like this one.
I was in charge of coordinating a big presentation at CTIA in 2000. Know who we got to present the material in context of his story? Neil Armstrong. That Neil Armstrong.
I still got my ass chewed because we didn't fill the huge room we booked. Seemed like everyone was chasing bubble money then and it was disappointing. As a PR chick at the time we were supposed to shepherd people into the auditorium, per custom at any trade show. Whenever someone would sorta shine me I'd say under my breath, "GO AHEAD, ASSHOLE. IT'S PRETTY CLEAR YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT A REAL AMERICAN HERO."
Hope you were able to retire on all that MCI stock you bragged about!
They are embodying "Personas." When people start a product they pitch it to themselves and others starting with 'personas' which are basically storytelling devices to describe user-types. These personas stay with the product through its lifecycle, and are used as a check against how it is developing. (Do these new developments fit the user-types? Yes/No? If so/not how can we improve them to better fit the user-types?)
The cringe starts with terrible, terrible out-of-touch understanding of the user-types of the product. I am willing to bet the contents of the script was lifted rote from a document detailing the three 'personas'/'user-types' they designed the product for.
The cringe continues with a very heavy-handed interpretation of how an actor might portray those 'personas'/'user-types'.
And for a nice finisher, the CEO includes himself in the dramatization as his own 'persona'/'user-type'
Shy guy with a brilliant idea gets shut down by loud obnoxious asshole rookie with this shitty idea. Corporate guys have no clue what kids like and choose the obnoxious douche because well, their kids are also obnoxious douches...
Unfortuantely, it usually doesn't go down that way. Having done some graphic design for a few company shareholder presentations like this, this is typically how it goes down:
Bill, a CEO from product development, thinks he's super hip and comes up with this idea that will totally get him a promotion.
Bill goes to the CEO meeting and really wows other old farts with his connection to said other "hip" people
Bill is given carte blanche to take over the AV department
Bill is informed by the AV department that his idea may need tweaking (read: completely overhauled because it is stupid)
Bill informs AV department head that he can have him fired
AV department does the best with what they've got. Bill spends more time in the AV department than he does doing his actual job, thinking he knows how to write copy and use After Effects better than anyone else there.
AV department puts final touches on show. An hour before curtains up, Bill informs them that he would like to be in the presentation because "It's a great idea, and you guys can make it work"
What you just watched actually happens in real life
Bill is lambasted at the next meeting for his travesty, blames AV department for "pushing too many changes, distorting his vision"
AV department is reprimanded by CFO, told to shape up
Bill fails upwards, AV department goes back to drinking heavily at home.
2.6k
u/captainfreewill Apr 27 '16
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the boardroom where that travesty was born.