Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? How was your summer? Great? Humid? I’ll say this - it’s great to be back with new stuff. I mean, in fairness, I was back every week over the summer with a brand new intro paragraph or two. That’s more than Jimmy Kimmel did over the summer, so who’s the lazy-ass late night host now?
My original plan was to go over a bunch of the stories from the summer, but who the hell remembers what happened in July? Like if I said to you, “remember when you went to those July 4th fireworks? Well, hang on to your America 250 hat, because that was THIS July!” And you would be bowled over and shocked - shocked! - that time had gone by so quickly. And as we learned at the Michigan football game this past weekend1, perhaps time is a meaningless construct anyway.
Actually, let’s chat about one story from the summer…
One of the themes of Gobbledy is that if you work in marketing, you’re going to get fired. For those of you new here, that may sound kinda fatalistic or a like a bit of a downer, but I actually think it’s better to just embrace that and be pleasantly surprised when you - a marketing exec - don’t get fired. Congrats!
Just so we’re clear, while it is common that a marketing exec gets fired, it’s far less common for a CEO to get fired because of marketing decisions (let’s just put aside that it’s pretty uncommon for CEOs to get fired at all - roughly 2% of Fortune 500 CEOs are fired each year, while about 20% of those companies change their marketing leadership in that period)
But we saw two CEOs this summer who lost their jobs because of marketing decisions. Let’s take a look.
Cracker Barrel’s CEO announced she was stepping down (or “stepping down,” depending on what you think) back in July, after the world’s stupidest fake kerfuffle where a bot army on Twitter convinced the media that the CEO’s decision to change the restaurant’s logo somehow was a plot to destroy America (or something).
The CEO hung around for a year - which is roughly 1 year longer than I would have put up with that nonsense - before either leaving or being shown the door. Don’t worry, she can buy several barrels and many crackers because she was paid more than $4 million while she was not being hit in the ass by the door on the way out.
Lesson: Before you decide to change a logo, make sure your contract has a $4 million severance clause.
Speaking of being hit…
Last year I said we had the “stupidest marketing summer” we’ve ever had, as much of the marketing-related discussion was about Sydney Sweeney’s jeans and Cracker Barrel’s logo. I think that still holds up, but I did want to mention the, uh, hm - I already said “kerfuffle” - brouhaha! yes, brouhaha over a stupid ad that golf marketing firm Good Good Golf made with golf club maker Callaway to promote a new driver. If you have not seen the ad, here it is (obviously if you have seen the ad, it is still here):
(If you didn’t bother to watch - it’s a parody [apparently?] of the hit horror film Obsession - and in the ad a guy pushes and knocks over a woman who is about to use his new driver.)
Ad is shown online. Chaos ensues. Callaway fires Good Good Golf. Good Good Golf loses other clients. Good Good Golf CEO no longer has job.
Seems straightforward.
Except that after getting fired, the CEO of Good Good Golf posts this on Twitter:
(I’ll spare you the Googling - “30 for 39” is a typo. He meant “30 for 30,” referring to the ESPN documentary series.)
I have mentioned here in the past that I worked with someone years and years ago who had come from the advertising world, and he once told me, “nothing you ever see in an ad is accidental.” His point is that there are so many layers of approval necessary in advertising that anything that should not be approved would be caught.
I thought of that when I saw that Callaway was in the press making it sound like somehow they were victims in all this. I’m not even sure how that would work - it’s not like an ad agency makes an ad, doesn’t show it to anyone at the client, and then releases it into the world.
So this is interesting - the agency made the ad that everyone hated, but the client approved the ad. Which would suggest to me that they liked the ad. But nobody is mad at the client and everyone is mad at the agency.
Lesson 1: Although the head of marketing usually gets fired, a good preemptive move is to fire your agency.
Lesson 2: The agency CEO mentions that Callaway created a “coordinated media blitz” to point the finger at the agency. The lesson is, of course, to have a crisis communications agency create a coordinated media blitz strategy in advance that includes finger-pointing.
(For more on crisis communications, here’s one of our podcast episodes where I interviewed a crisis communications expert about the subject. Tl;dr: hiring a crisis communications firm after a crisis happens is less helpful than hiring them before the crisis happens.)
Uber One (One Less Percent Than Before…)
Here’s a piece of writing advice for anyone who has to craft an email to send to your customers explaining that you are about to make a change that will negatively impact them:
The first paragraph should say something about how “we care deeply about providing an incredible customer experience for all our customers” and then in the next paragraph you say how you are going to screw those incredible customers.
This email from Uber One explaining that they are reducing the amount of credit you’ll get when you use the product is a masterclass:
They are evolving the offer “based on what members value most,” which they do by reducing the value of what members value most. Excellent work right there.
But then they do something I have not seen in this type of email, and I am jealous of how incredible it is.
Note that in the email they say that rides will start earning 5% Uber One credits instead of 6%. They bold the 5% and not the 6%. They are making you think that you are actually getting an increase of some sort. It is amazing! “Start earning 5%”!!!!!
I can’t believe I’ve never done this. Bold the old benefit and not-bold the reduced benefit, and then everyone thinks they’re getting something.
I love evil brilliance.
(Thanks to reader Tahnee P. for sharing this email…)
A Surefire Way to Hire the Right Person
Have you tried to hire anyone lately? Did you notice that it’s gotten very difficult to hire someone? Throughout my career people either complain that there are no qualified candidates or that they are getting inundated with hundreds (thousands?) of resumes and applications from unqualified people using AI to write their resumes and cover letters and submit the applications.
And then you use AI to review those and hope that the AI tool you’re using can find the needle(s) in that haystack. And then you think, “maybe I really should read through these applications because what if AI misses something.” And then, “hm, I should code an AI tool to read through all of those. No, wait. Ack! Ack!!! Ack!.” Damn you, AI. Damn you to hell!. I also forgot to mention that in this example you are Cathy from the comic Cathy.
Sorry, I’m back. Anyway, it’s gotten challenging to hire people because you get a lot of garbage applications.
So companies have to get creative about hiring.
Y’know who also has a problem like this? Universities. They have spots in their freshmen (er, first-year) dorms, and they need people to lie in those extra-long single beds. But they also are faced with an ever-increasing number of kids applying for those spots. And those applications are also powered by AI, driving their numbers up even further (and also - for a host of reasons - making it difficult to actually figure out who is the right fit).
Colleges decided they need to determine who actually wants to go to that school (rather than making it one of 20 schools the kid is applying to.). To do that they have Early Decision - the student agrees that if they get in via Early Decision application, that they will actually go there.
OK fine. That’s one approach. But companies can’t really do that - they can’t say, “we’re going to interview you, but if we decide we want to hire you, you have to come work at our stupid-ass AI company where everyone except you is 23.” I mean, I guess they could do that?
And if you’re reading that thinking, “of course they can’t do that. That’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard.” Well then, doesn’t it make it even more gross to do it to a bunch of 17 year olds?
I digress.
Companies need a way - like early decision - to figure out who really (really!) wants to work there.
And obviously the best way to do that is to tell potential applicants that if they get a tattoo of your logo, you will interview them.
Oh, sorry. That sounds ridiculous?
Yep.
AI something something startup LemonLime hosted a networking event that included having a tattoo artist there (?). The CEO “got carried away” and offered to interview anyone who got a tattoo. 7 people (???) did it. Then he apologized, including this pretty fantastic bit: “I should have realized the power dynamic created by connecting tattoos to hiring.”
Yeah, the dynamic is - there are too many applicants and somehow you gotta cull the herd, and getting a tattoo of the logo is one way to do that, and for all the marketers out there who have had to go through a 4-month hiring process that included half-day sessions where you present a 30-60-90-120-150-173-208-311 Day Plan, perhaps getting a tattoo seems like a better option.
Thanks for reading to the end, it’s the best part. If you’ve come back from summer vacation and realized that your company has a messaging problem, I’d be happy to chat about that. Here’s my Calendly link.
For those of you outside the US, my alma mater was involved in a football game where they were granted an extra second of time on the clock at the end of the game after it was very clear that time had expired and that led to us winning a game that we had no business winning, and the explanation for why the game wasn’t over when there was no time on the clock was somehow the stupidest part of all of this. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen this situation before - even the team’s fans are basically saying, “it doesn’t even matter that we won the game, we played so badly and the ending was so ridiculous.” Anyway, congrats to the Western Michigan Broncos for losing 13-12. Kinda reminds me of the “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” headline from the Harvard Crimson after they came back from 29-13 with less than a minute left to play in 1968.
This is your chance to start replying only to comments from people who get a tattoo of your logo...