The Worst Corporate Video I've Ever Seen (So Far)

And Away luggage makes a really funny ad but some really gobbledy PR

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? We’ve got a lot to get to today:

• The worst corporate video I’ve ever seen.

• A fascinatingly confusing press release

• An amazing ad followed by terrible PR

Here we gooooo….

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This Headline Is Not a Negotiation

I’m going to let you in on a little Gobbledy secret:

I usually put my favorite story 3rd in the newsletter. It kinda rewards the 7 of you who read the first 2 stories.

Don’t get me wrong - the other 2 stories are definitely in my top 3 stories for the week.

But this week, I couldn’t risk most of you not seeing the best story…

I throw a lot of hyperbole around - “this is the BEST website” and “this is the WORST messaging” and “Michigan is the BEST college football team because we won the national championship last week.” That stuff.

So I do risk a bit of a Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf situation when I tell you this:

THIS is the worst corporate video I’ve ever seen, which - at the same time - makes it the BEST corporate video I’ve ever seen.

Please go watch it. What? You don’t want to go watch it? Hm. What if I told you:

• It’s a video produced by content-garbage-pile-creator and WebMD owner Internet Brands urging people to get back to the office and stop working from home.

• It includes the CEO saying, “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point…we’re informing of how we need to work together going forward.”

• It’s so important that people get back to the office that a number of the executives in the video telling people to go back to the office are very clearly on a virtual background that - I’m just assuming here - suggests they are not currently in the office.

• When someone says that they need to go back to the office to “crush the competition” there is a clip of a hand crushing a can of Dr. Pepper. Just to make sure you understood what they meant by “crush.”

• Throughout the video, the song Iko Iko (which I know from the Grateful Dead, tho this version is not by the Grateful Dead) is playing, which is a kinda festive little ditty considering the message being delivered. Though we find out that the real reason it’s playing is because the last 20 seconds of the video features clips of Internet Brands employees dancing to the song.

• If you don’t watch any other part of this thing, please watch the people dancing. There’s a couple of people who really, really let it swing. And there’s a couple of people who have obviously lost a bet of some sort.

• They feature clips of the office to show people what they’re missing at the office, and based on these clips what they’re missing is the copying machine, cubicles and an office coffee maker.

• Also they’re missing those people dancing.

• The most terrifying line in the video is, “your manager will be in touch shortly with how [return to office] will be implemented and tracked.” (italics mine)

• But I swear to you - you have to watch it to see the variety of ways that the poor people they’ve dragged into this video have dealt with being asked/forced to do it. A couple of them are naturals. A couple of them have never read a teleprompter before. And one of them - you’ll see - definitely quit right after saying the line about tracking people coming to the office.

I’ve done the best I can. Please. It’s so good.

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CES Pool

One thing I look forward to each January is a steady flow of gobbledy-laden press releases from companies that exhibit at CES in Las Vegas.

If you’ve ever had to write one of these “we’re releasing a new product” press releases that you know will never get picked up anywhere, it generally goes like this:

Step 1: You write a press release announcing that your company is releasing a new product.

Step 2: Someone says to you, “Hey, can you run that press release by the Product team to make sure it really captures the key points of the product. Also can you run it by sales. And client success. And can you run it by that board member who thinks they know everything about marketing?”

Step 3: You take everyone’s feedback and you include it verbatim in the press release.

Which has to be the only explanation for this incredible first paragraph from this release featuring the title, “Media.Monks Launches AI Solution Monks.Flow at CES 2024”:

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- S4Capital's operating brand Media.Monks, a digital-first, data-led, advertising and marketing services company, has launched Monks.Flow, an AI-centric professional managed service. Launched at CES 2024, Monks.Flow will streamline how humans and machines interoperate. Monks.Flow offers intelligent solutions for marketing activities packed with pre-tested pipelines that automate processes and connect talent trained in AI, the latest AI tools, enterprise software, and microservices into efficient, automated workflows.

Feel free to use the Comments section to explain to me what’s going on there.

(Thanks to Gobbledy reader Lynn T. for that one…)

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Underwear on a Piece of Luggage Is Quite Humorous

I can understand why maybe there’s a little tension between marketers on the B2B side of the world and marketers who work for companies that sell to consumers.

B2B marketers spend a lot of their time tracking the number of nametags they have scanned at a conference booth and then torturing their sales team to actually call those people, and then trying to track whether anyone who had their nametag scanned at that conference ultimately bought something from the company, and then using that information to calculate whether the conference generated a positive ROI, all while half their company is telling them that events are a waste of time and the other half insisting that all deals can be sourced back to an event, and no matter what you do nobody will be happy.

While I was on the B2C side of things, I had conversations with the marketing people where they said things like:

“I can’t come to the meeting next week because I’m going to be in New Zealand for a photo shoot.”

and

“Those pictures you asked for are going to be a little late because we’re going shopping in Tokyo.”

(Actual things.)

My point is that marketing to consumers is oftentimes more fun than writing half-assed whitepapers and complaining about why nobody will read them.

For example, if you run marketing at a company that sells underwear, your marketing might consist of pictures of someone who, for some rason, is lying on top of a building with their pants pulled down and also wearing underwear:

That’s Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame, in a Calvin Klein ad. I’ve been doing marketing for a while, and I’m not sure I can tell you why that sells a lot of underwear. But it does.

(I also can’t tell you what is suggested is happening, just happened, or is about to happen, in that photo).

That wasn’t my point.

I’m showing you that, because I wanted to also show you a spoof of the ad that Away luggage ran on social media a day or two after those CK ads were released:

Y’know what? That’s pretty goddamned funny. Bravo to the Away social media team for that.

But then I saw this story about how the Away team pulled off that ad, and it was filled with a delightful amount of gobbledy, which actually made me sad since they really should’ve just said, “That shit was hilarious!”

Alas, no.

“Our team’s bias for action is what made this so successful,” Alice Chen, Away’s director of social media and community, told Ad Age. “What started out as a funny ‘what-if’ during a creative meeting turned into a ‘let’s go’ Slack. We like to move fast and try new things here at Away.”

Ugh, bias for action. Let’s go Slack.

“Partaking in a cultural conversation where our audience is involved is paramount to Away’s social media strategy, and the content felt ownable and entertaining, so we knew we had to act,” Chen said.

Content felt ownable. Oy.

“Everything we do at Away is rooted in the idea of having a two-way conversation with our community,” she said. “Our platforms are a way for us to express our brand identity, showcase our personality and have fun. There is a really delicate balance between planning content in advance and leaving room to read and react to a trend or cultural moment. Anything we do needs to have a purpose and feel ownable—not just add to the chatter.” 

Ownable again????

PR can feel like something completely separate from your brand messaging - but it’s not. Away showed how they’re aware of trends, yet irreverent enough to poke fun at them. And then threw that all away with some paramount ownable parktaking.

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P.S.:

I will pay extra for Mr. Mucus not to serve me coffee.

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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 luggage. Or Mr. Mucus. Here’s my Calendly link. Lots of people have spent 30 minutes chatting with me - you should, too.