Homer Simpson's Car Is a Good Template for a Bad Homepage

And alas, poor football phone, we hardly knew ye

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

Before we jump in today, if you happened to be thinking to yourself, “I’d sure love to spend an hour tomorrow listening to a webinar where Jared is on a panel talking about marketing stuff,” you’re in luck:

Me and those other two people who I don’t know (yet!) will be chatting, apparently, about the True ROI of Brand Positioning and Content: How to Persuade Executives to Invest More. We’ll all find out what that means tomorrow at 1pm Eastern.

You can sign up here.

Today we’ll be discussing:

• Sports Illustrated telephones

• The use of the subjunctive in subway advertising (or lack thereof)

• Homer Simpson’s car and bad homepages

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The Football Fone for My Fahthah

With the apparent death-or-near-death of Sports Illustrated this week, we’ve seen lots of eulogies for the publication and what it meant to those of us who were teenage boys in the 1980s (and other people! Not just teen boys!).

I wanted to give SI credit for 2 things that may get lost to history:

1. They were a pre-cursor to the Internet troll. Each year, 2 weeks after they published the swimsuit issue, they would publish letters to the editor where people complain about the swimsuit issue…like this example from 1987:
   

   No way am I going to provide those pictures for my two sons to see! Maybe they can see the same sort of pictures someplace else, but not in my living room.

   MAVIS HANSON

   Fargo, N. Dakota
   
   Poor Mavis Hanson. I bet Mavis is shocked that Mavis’ grandkids are carrying around phones that have access to every piece of pornography ever created.
   
   Anyway, they included those letters just to troll those people, and God bless them for it.
   

2. They offered the most amazing gift-with-purchase ever: the football flip phone. In the commercial below they explain how the football phone works (“it works like a regular phone.”) No shit!
   
   But if you were a teenage boy in that period, you really, really, really wanted that phone. Well, I mean I didn’t want one because I had what was indisputably the best phone:

   

   But for people who didn’t have that, the football flip phone was amazing. And somehow, when SI is long gone (like in 6 weeks), I bet most people will remember the flip phone more than they’ll remember the once-very-controversial annual swimsuit issue.

   
   I share the phone commercial below because the New Jersey Lacey Chabert girl at 40 seconds in has the most incredible New Jersey accent I’ve ever heard (“I’ll buy it for my fahthah, my bruthah, and my boyfrint.”)

Alas poor football phone, we hardly knew ye.

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I Wish the Grammar Were Correct

Hey - can you do me a quick favor? Just a quick one.

Would you mind if, just for a paragraph or so, I were a completely annoying grammar-police-style shithead? Would you be so kind? Thank you.

Hey Remote.com/jobs subway ad copywriter:

You know why nobody has ever wished their commute was longer?

Because they took grammar from my 6th grade English teacher Mrs. Molloy and learned that nobody would wish their commuter WERE longer.

Even a subway ad should use the subjunctive correctly.

(See? I told you it was annoying. Thanks for indulging me.)

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The Homer’s Car of Homepages

One of the rules I made for myself when I started this newsletter was that I would be relentlessly optimistic. Or somewhat optimistic. Specifically, I wouldn’t just crap all over stuff without trying to turn lemons into lemonade or whatever.

Which was difficult in the specific case of this homepage from Congree:

But I’m nothing if not a results-focused optimist, so I’ll say this: if your homepage doesn’t look like that, you’re doing great! Well, maybe not great. But better than that.

Here’s the thing - I think we can all sympathize with whoever created that, right? There’s no way that was in the first draft. The first draft was probably clear (except for when that German company forgot to translate “Editoren” in the graphic. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that I bet it was moderately clear.

And then maybe someone in sales said, “But if someone comes to our website and wants help with knowledge graphs (?) and authoring memory (??), how will they know that we offer it? And if it’s not on the site, we’ll lose the sale! We can’t lose the sale!”

So one of the someones in marketing went back and set up a meeting with the sales people and said, “Hi sales team, we’re working on some homepage updates, and we want to make sure that we’re including all of the messaging that’s important to your prospects. So let’s get together on Tuesday at 1300 (because it’s German, get it!) and we’ll brainstorm.”

Also they probably wrote “I’ll circle back” in there somewhere.

But that Tuesday was a bank holiday in Germany, so they rescheduled for Wednesday at 1430, except someone said, “can you include a Zoom link, because I’m working remotely on Wednesdays” and the marketing someone replied, “I think this really will work better if we’re all in the same room” and then 3 weeks went by.

THEN they had the meeting where sales laid out all of the things prospects say they want during all the discovery calls they’ve had over the past few months. And that’s a lengthy list. But marketing definitely wants to show they’re supporting the sales team (especially after they got that talking to about supporting the sales team), so they’re really hesitant to say they don’t want to include all of those things prospects say they want on the website.

But also they’re marketing, so they want to make the website look good, so they “break up the text with graphics.” And - what the hell - they can kill two birds with one stone by listing all the possible functionality that anyone could ever want and also every single software platform they sorta integrate with.

And they want to make sure it’s clear, so they write “Microsoft” under the logo of Microsoft, currently th tech company with the highest market cap on this big blue marble we call earth. But they do not clutter the graphic by telling you what company this is:

Not important! What’s important is that it’s there, because now marketing is supporting sales. So good job with that.

Ages ago I worked at a company where the CEO (Hi, Dan!) had an expression for the situation where everyone’s input was taken at face value and built into the design of something - he called it “Homer’s Car.”

If I had an intern I’d ask them to find a higher-res version of this image.

That expression came from a Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car that’s perfect for guys like him, and while every one of the things he asks for (a giant cup holder, a bubble so you can’t hear the kids, several horns that all play La Cucaracha), when combined they create something ridiculous.

Gobbledy typically finds its way into marketing not because marketers don’t know what they’re doing, but because they’re trying to appease a really big group of their co-workers. I’ve had moderate success (I’m probably being generous there), really trying to understand what my co-workers are actually looking to achieve and building something that achieves that, rather than just creating a Homer’s Car by jamming all the input together. But not always, and - now that I’m really reflecting on it - not often.

I was in a meeting yesterday where someone was saying how he basically spends all of his time just building rapport with members of other teams, because he knows that long term, it’s the only way he’ll be able to build the trust necessary to avoid building Homer’s Cars. Great marketing probably comes as much from great marketing as it does from great networking.

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Thanks for reading to the end. As always, I’m happy to chat about how we can work together to improve your messaging. Or about football phones. Or Homer Simpson. Here’s my Calendly link. Lots of people have spent 30 minutes chatting with me - you should, too.

And in case you were wondering, people hire me to run a workshop where we improve your messaging. We should talk about that, too.