Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going?
Good to be back from vacation - I missed writing this.
So before we start, a couple of quick random notes:
First thing. If aliens come to earth right after the demise of humanity and ask to see one sentence from an article that suggests why our civilization fell apart, I would show them this sentence from an ESPN article about former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel’s first MMA fight:
If you don’t know what Kick is, imagine a platform that streams the worst garbage imaginable, and then make it 1 billion times worse. So someone from that has created a company that arranges boxing (and, I guess, MMA?) matches where celebrities (or “celebrities”) fight against “content creators.” This is a job. I would pay 1 trillion gobbledybucks (tm) to watch Adin Ross explain this job to his grandmother.
Second, if I were to take the head of marketing job at Claire’s, the tween-focused jewelry and - as we say in Yiddish - chuzzerai monger, I would hope that the article in the Wall Street Journal did not describe me thusly:
Let me just say this up front: please don’t ever refer to me as “the tween whisperer.”
Today we’ve got:
Food for getting fired
Saying nothing is more challenging than you’d think
A good ad
Newsletters are fun
Enjoy Your Tar-Tar Sauce
Allow me to take a little detour, if you will (oh, you will.).
I suppose I could stop reading literally every single story written about the, um, changes that are taking place at CBS News. But why would I do that?
Have you ever worked at a company where they brought in new senior leadership? Like maybe everything was going along OK, but the board (or the President of the United States…but probably the board) was agitating for change.
So they bring someone in and that person is a bull in a china shop and makes a whole bunch of changes, and everyone who’s left is constantly sitting around whispering about how the new person is a moron and the people they are bringing in are also incompetent.
Now imagine that every single day every news outlet was writing about this.
Anyway, that’s why I’m obsessed with whatever-the-hell is going on at CBS.
I noted a little while back that I loved this tidbit from a New Yorker profile of new CBS News head Bari Weiss:
“She had donned a CBS baseball cap for her first editorial meeting and ended the session by telling the room, “Let’s do the fucking news!”
Let’s do the fucking news, indeed!
Anyway, she went and did the fucking news and as part of doing the fucking news, she fired a couple of 60 Minutes correspondents and replaced the executive producer with someone who does not have television experience.
This did not make the remaining staff at the newsmagazine particularly happy, and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley shared his annoyance at a staff meeting, where he asked the new executive producer this question:
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”…
“I care so deeply about this institution,” Mr. Bilton said, to which Mr. Pelley interrupted: “Oh, please.”
Oh please (also) indeed.
So if you’re the executive producer of the highest rated news show in television history, and your star correspondent is - very, very publicly - crapping all over you, you have a couple of options:
You tell Mr. Pelley that he is acting unprofessionally. This will make you feel better, because you need to show him who’s the boss (though, as we learned, it’s Angela). The downside is that everyone will hate you ever more (if that’s even possible.)
You ignore it and mention the baked goods you’ve brought for the staff.
The answer is, actually, both!
First, one of your co-workers tells Mr. Pelley to “stop being rude.” Because, let’s be honest, it’s best that that come from someone else.
And second, you finish the meeting by wishing everyone well:
“I just want to thank everyone for graciously being so welcoming,” Mr. Bilton said. “I look forward to talking to you in a one-on-one setting as these meetings are scheduled. And enjoy the bagels.”
I have been saying “Enjoy the bagels” to myself for 3 days. Because when a staff meeting goes very, very awry, how else are you doing to end it? Tell your big star to shut the hell up and grow a pair and just accept that there’s a new sheriff in town? No, no you’re not. You want everyone to like you, and the best way to do that is by foisting baked goods upon them.
(Editor’s Note: I wrote that on Monday. On Tuesday, the new executive producer, as you may have read, fired Scott Pelley. This makes me love “enjoy the bagels” even more. And is the second best food-related corporate threat since Mr. Burns agreed to give his employees more tartar sauce):
Transforming the Exceptional
Have you ever had to write a script for a product video? I’ve been doing some of that lately. And what I’ve learned is that it’s more challenging than I would have imagined. Actually, now that I think about it, I never really imagined that at all. Not a single daydream in all my years included me sitting at my computer thinking about how to write a script for a product video. My apologies.
Anyway, it’s actually quite difficult to write a quick video explaining what a product does. You don’t want to include too much detail, but just enough to get someone to want to learn more. It’s a bit of a balance.
But, thanks to Gobbledy reader Tim K., who sent me the video below, I now realize that writing a script for a product video that thoroughly explains the product is actually the second most difficult script to write.
The most difficult script to write is a script that has a bunch of words in it but says nothing at all…
Behold this video introducing Solstice, the result of a merger of two companies:
I know most of you won’t watch that, but here’s the script. It is truly remarkable in its ability to say literally nothing:
Solstice Advanced Materials is born from a unifying purpose: to propel our customers forward to set the pace of progress. Building on over a century of breakthroughs, and the collective wisdom of Honeywell and AlliedSignal, realized together with precision and an unwavering drive to transform the essential into the exceptional. Advancing science for smarter outcomes. Solstice Advanced Materials.
You think YOU can pull “transform the essential into the exceptional” out of your (or anyone else’s) ass? No, I don’t think you can.
I read a lot of gobbledy so I can share it with you all, but even I am impressed by the screenwriter’s ability to spin a cotton candy-like ball of nothing out of all those words. Bravo.
(Fun fact: AlliedSignal, which is apparently one of the companies that became Solstice, which, as we now know, is transforming the essential into the exceptional, was based in my hometown and was the name of my Little League team when I was 9. We won our division - in an incredible game against Burger King, as you likely remember - a feat I would later describe as transforming the essential into the exceptional. In its own way.)
A Really Good Ad
I guess I could write about how Canadian airline Air Transat created a campaign that used price anchoring to show how their airfares are actually quite reasonable. But sometimes I can just enjoy an ad for what it is. Air Transat ran a whole bunch of these ads across Canada. Really, really clever.
(Thanks to reader Matt M. for that. Matt M. probably also has the box score someplace for the AlliedSignal 1981 Little League victory.)
Super Nice Marketing
Companies will sometimes hire me to help them with their content, which makes me happy/proud, and the thing that every one of those companies says to me is, “we like the way you write, and we’d like to bring that voice into our marketing.”
And then I will write content for them that has the DNA of this very newsletter, and then I will get drafts back that strip all of that out of it, and someone will say, “what if we just say that we transform the essential into the exceptional?”
And we will have a conversation where I will attempt to convince the client that one way you can stand out in a crowded tech market is through your writing style. Here is the current Kalshi odds about how this conversation will turn out:
Even so, I am 10000% sure that it is much easier to stand out in a crowded market - not just in tech - by writing things people want to read about you than it is to create a product that is so much better than the competition that that differentiation on its own will drive people to buy your product.
And yet.
Anyway, I’m telling you this because there is a restaurant in my neighborhood called Super Nice Pizza that has been sending out a newsletter that is absolutely incredible, and couples it with a social media presence that shares the same voice, and I am slightly obsessed with the whole approach because why wouldn’t you try to stand out a bit in a crowded market by writing content that people - gasp! - actually want to read.
Here’s an Instagram post:
Oh my God I’m so freaking jealous.
The newsletter they sent this week referred back to a subject line from the previous newsletter that - it turns out - made no sense. Here’s what they wrote:
You are a generous and magnanimous person, full of grace and courage and kindness. I know this about you. It might seem like I couldn’t possibly know this about you, but the internet is full of information and I’ve googled you and that is what I found out. None of the bad things, all of the good things. Because that’s what the internet is good at remembering.
I am not good at remembering. Like how I sent you an email with a strange “buzzard god” subject but literally no explanation within. I forgot.
But now I’ve remembered and you are full of grace, ready to welcome an explanation at long last. Thank you for being you.
(You can read this week’s newsletter here).
This is a pizza restaurant. I open every newsletter - yes, I learn about their cocktail specials or whatever. But I want to hear what Dan (the guy who owns the place) is thinking about. And if I want to know what he’s thinking about, of course I’ll go there for dinner sometimes.
And yes, this absolutely applies to your software product. People will want to know more about your product if you are writing content that they want to read. Yes, that’s obvious. But apparently also it’s not.
(Thanks to reader/not-infrequent commenter Gary S. for sending me the Instagram post.)
As always, thanks for reading to the end. It’s the best part.
I’ve enjoyed speaking with all of you who have taken the time to click my Calendly link and set up time to chat. It’s been fun. If you want to say hello, or talk through a problem you’re working on, I’m here.
P.S. While we’re talking about 60 Minutes, here’s my favorite piece: Morley Safer’s travelogue of Belize, well before anyone had heard of it. As Safer starts the piece, “the good news from Belize is that there is no news in Belize.”
Your newsletter is a frigging delight.
You would think Dan was responding to me, but for the record, he was not.