First...I'm aware of the pathetic, hapless portrait I'm painting of myself here. I really wish this blog phenomenon had taken hold in 1998. Then you would be treated to essays on my various endeavors to become the new star of American talk radio, or the concrete and successful maneuvers I was making to be a kingpin of the burgeoning jam band scene. Those were great, exciting times. Unfortunately, though, you've joined this story as my career see-saw is in down mode. But perhaps you can also be there to experience the thrill of the upswing, should one occur.
In the meantime, here's Part Two of a three-part series of things that have gone on lately, another that begs for your wise analysis.
Meet the Fitzsimmons Wireless Marketing Department
We were having a skip level meeting, a meeting where we phone drones chat directly to the top brass of the call center. Number Two said if we wanted to do anything at Fitzsimmons just let her know. I figured she meant if we wanted to go from one phone job to another that paid $.25 more an hour we should talk. I said I was interested in moving into marketing or P.R. She said she was sure you had to have a journalism background for P.R. I then realized that, despite my tendency to blab my career highlights, these people knew very little about me.
A month or two later she waved me to the side and said she had found a contact in the marketing department for me. I was to chat with this contact by phone, and then I would be given a half-day off as this contact ushered me around the marketing deparment to meet some of the players. In the meantime Number Two had passed along a folder I had presented her with samples of various efforts I had made (commercial demos, Voyager jam band magazines, AJC stories) and passed them to this contact. Holy shit! Was I starting to get somewhere? Did I feel the earth moving?
I eagerly waited for the days to pass so these meetings could happen. I talked to the contact and she said she thought my writing was great and that some other people there seemed to know who String Cheese Incident and moe. were. Oh, God, maybe the clouds were parting!
I was quite keyed up about this, and so were my parents and even my supervisor. But the contact cautioned that this was just a chance to see what went on in marketing, not a formal job interview, so I worked on lessening my expectations.
So the big day came and I went over to the big, shiny headquarters building on I-285 with a folder stuffed with more copies of my past works, spare resumes, etc.
The people were pleasant, but apparently a marketing department is not a think tank for futurists as I envisioned. For instance the first guy I chatted with, I mentioned I had thought it could boost sales of our mobile TV offerings if we got some guy with a following like HBO's Larry David to compose some special, say, five or 10 minute vignettes that we would air exclusively on our network. On one hand I wanted to show the kinds of things going through my head as I phone-droned to convince them I had a working cerebellum, and also I was trying to fill our alloted 30 minutes of chit-chat. However...contacting Larry David about writing things like that...it didn't feel like these guys were tapped into that kind of thinking, even though we do offer HBO-branded content. In fact most anything I mentioned about something creative was met with the reply, "That's done at the agency."
I would also ask each person what position opened up most frequently in their department, where a guy like me might start, and what would a person in that role do? Each time I got the answer everyone's gotten since 1996, "Check the web page." This was supposed to be my big debutante moment! I don't want to hear "check the web page!" Oh, well.
Basically the marketing department says, "Hmm...how about if we sold two phones for the price of one?" Then they contact the AGENCY, where all the actual wording, visuals, modelling, printing, filming, recording goes on while the marketing department sits on its ass for a few weeks. Then the AGENCY sends the campaign back, the marketing department disperses it without critique ("We try not to direct them too much," one advised me), and that's it.
Another guy was in charge of branding, a concept I've often heard of and was excited to chat about. I mentioned how I love that the Cracker Barrel creates a total experience around the food, right down to the names of the menu items. It's not just "sausage and eggs," it's "Old Timer's Breakfast," or "Uncle Herschel's Favorite." You get the vibe Uncle Herschel is back there by a cook stove cookin' up a mess of biscuits just for you. And so, were we aiming at selling a particular self-image or visual style to Fitzsimmons subscribers ("What kind of man reads Playboy?")? Frankly, I got a vibe this sort of observation had never ran through this guy's mind. (To my amazement many people don't seem to realize theme restaurants have a theme for a reason, and think you're a crackpot if you do. "Lifestyle marketing," I think it's called).
My contact was showing me a new box that had been designed for our phones and I asked her if she had made the rough draft herself. "AGENCY," she said, "that was done at the AGENCY." Of course. Then she mentioned how a lot of people aren't even aware of all the features our products have. I said Rachel Ray had started doing cooking seminars in a grocery store because as a rep for a gourmet food company she thought it would take away people's fears of cooking at home and they would buy more groceries. So what if we did in-store seminars to show people how all our features worked? Then they wouldn't fear something like multimedia messaging and would use the feature more, therefore we make more money. "We would be doing that if it worked," she said. I don't know why, but she seemed to bristle just a bit that I had even floated an idea like that. (AND I STILL THINK IT'S A GREAT IDEA!)
Anyhow...I sent thank-you notes to everyone involved afterward as I always do, and still hope something will come of it after the first of the year when our merger is complete and the hiring freeze is off. Overall, though...that was a little more boring than I had envisioned.
Where does a guy like me fit in?
Just a thought.
But what does anyone think of this marketing tour I did? Does it sound like this could turn into anything? Wha?
Corporations do not necessarily encourage individualism. They contract that out.