Show Intro: Marketing Mishaps

Speaker 1 0:00

This show is all about right , so socially acceptable is from fuck-ups to fame . It is all about marketing fuck-ups , and that's really why people listen to our show . They like to hear Will and I fuck up and talk to other people about when not necessarily a fuck-up , but when something's not gone well , because everybody picks themselves up about things that have gone well . So is there a particular fuck-up or two that you can think of in your job , that you've learned from and moments where you've gone ? Oh my God , that wasn't so much fun , but this is what happened .

Speaker 2 0:31

I can see in your eyes . You've got a few .

Speaker 3 0:33

I've got so many , I'm just trying to think which ones I could really safely talk about

Pay-Per-Click Catastrophe

Speaker 3 0:37

. My favorite , I mean . My first one was when I worked in . I was a marketing manager for a weird little place where I was told to work in a seller I wouldn't mention the brand , but it'll probably get edited out and you know they were an ethical investment company . But I was working in this guy's basically seller and I got fired basically because I typed in 50 pounds instead of 50p , basically for the pay-per click stuff . So that's why I don't do pay-per-click anymore .

Speaker 1 1:05

But the campaign was successful , right For £50 a click

Government Website Doctor Who Fiasco

Speaker 1 1:08

. I thought you were top of the profile .

Speaker 2 1:12

We've had somebody do it here with a few more zeros and leave an ad over the weekend . That was a difficult conversation .

Speaker 1 1:15

Ours was a Facebook meta campaign and you know you have lifetime budget or daily budget . She put the lifetime budget in the daily budget and this was on a Friday , came in on Monday and she walked over to my desk in tears saying I'm fucked up .

Speaker 2 1:30

Everyone does it , though it absolutely flew though the campaign and the client .

Speaker 1 1:33

The client was buzzing and said actually this campaign's gone so well , we don't mind , we'll pay for this . It was fine .

Speaker 3 1:40

Oh , so you're honest with the client . That's good A lot of companies kind of just slip under the radar somehow .

Speaker 1 1:45

But yeah , I've seen that happen to you often , so carry on then .

Speaker 3 1:48

But the one that I do like is I was working for a government office in Bristol and one of the things that I hadn't realized is that the training articles which weren't published were discoverable by search . And so suddenly we found that one guy who was a Doctor who fan had written loads of articles , demo articles , basically while we were doing some testing and training onto the website and we suddenly started like a newspaper sort of said hang on , we've just discovered that you know , according to this , the government office of Southwest , based in Bristol , are planning a moon base invasion and there's Daleks and other pieces . And the question is are you able to like , do you want to make a comment ? And we're like delete , delete , delete , quick delete delete and deny .

Speaker 1 2:29

How many articles of Doctor who are on this government website ?

Speaker 3 2:32

Weirdly enough , this guy is like one of those fan fiction authors .

Speaker 1 2:35

He's kind of quite a widely published guy , a Whovian , I believe they're called .

Speaker 3 2:37

Yes , I believe he is . Yeah , he's quite famous actually . So yeah , but when we sort of found all these articles out there and people were finding them and sharing them , of course it was like , oh you know , because we didn't get anyone to find them , basically , and they weren't supposed to be published , they were supposed to be just left in the system and they would kind of be deleted , and we just , yeah , so that was my fault .

Speaker 3 2:56

Project manager for a government office , kind of migration project no , to be honest , everyone found it hilarious and it kind of gave us a bit more infamy than we kind of wanted . But it wasn't necessarily a problem Publishing the wrong content .

Speaker 2 3:09

That reminds me of once we again I'm not going to mention any brands and this is in the many years ago .

Speaker 1 3:15

It's a good

Breaking the BBC Homepage

Speaker 1 3:16

job . We haven't got lawyers on this podcast .

Speaker 2 3:18

One of our clients an intern was doing some social updates accidentally left the Instagram account plugged into her account , went out on the piss all weekend on a series of bottomless brunches and , via stories , documented her experiences as she got drunker and drunker on the client's Instagram account . Luckily , we spotted it after a couple of posts .

Speaker 1 3:39

Got to remove it all . Not that many people saw it , so it was fine . Thankfully it owned up .

Speaker 2 3:44

I heard something about you breaking the entire BBC website . No just the homepage .

Speaker 1 3:49

Just the homepage on the BBC .

Speaker 2 3:51

No one reads that anyway , do they ?

Speaker 3 3:53

Actually millions of people do . But my job basically was personalisation , so I was working with them to try and encourage more and more people to personalise the homepage and this basically meant that we had a big box which said you know , if you put in your location , we'll give you the weather information for where you are , and all sorts of bits and pieces . And what then happened was the fact that this meant going a bit nerdy , but basically it broke the cdn and it was weird that we struggled to really kind of get the website back up . And the best part about it is the fact that when you break the break the bbc home page , which I don't recommend um , the background is a clown on fire . It's the test .

Speaker 3 4:34

Thing with this clown on fire . That's terrifying . It was really with this clown on fire .

Speaker 2 4:36

That's terrifying it was really it was brilliantly terrifying .

Speaker 3 4:38

It was this kind of test image thing that somebody had put somewhere , and the best part about it is , after we fixed the homepage , I'd basically documented the fact that the broken page , the 500 page , had broken links on it and this clown on fire and other bits and pieces , you know . After we fixed it , we then struggled to figure out exactly when the clown was .

Speaker 1 4:58

Yeah , yeah , you didn't know where the clown was .

Speaker 3 4:59

No , we didn't know where the burning clown was .

Speaker 2 5:01

Was it an evil clown ?

Speaker 3 5:02

that just no it's the test card image with the clown with the thing but behind her it's got fire .

Speaker 2 5:08

I'm not saying the clown from Stephen King's it .

Speaker 1 5:10

No , but do the BBC . When the BBC used to go off and I don't maybe people , listeners of a certain age , will remember this because our producer , the Generation Z , will have no clue what I'm talking about but when the BBC signal used to go off for the test signal , it used to be the play school that's exactly it .

Speaker 3 5:28

That's the one , wasn't it yeah ?

Speaker 1 5:29

and it used to make that noise and it would say we'll be back in a minute .

Speaker 2 5:33

Do you remember that Zach doesn't even know what a

The Mysterious Burning Clown Test Card

Speaker 2 5:35

television is , do you ? You just watch your phone the whole time , don't you ?

Speaker 1 5:38

He's too busy in TikTok .

Speaker 2 5:39

Yeah .

Speaker 3 5:40

So you never tracked it down , then you never tracked this . I honestly it wasn't my job . I know that sounds like a bit of a cop-out and I hate it when people say it isn't my job , but generally I basically part of my job was to help them replace the site search and who was using it , where they were using it , and it was one of those things that was so integrated into it . And bbc is a bit of a interesting thing . I mean , one of the things you can find is a web page on the bbc from the millennium , so basically the year 2000 wow and if you ever find that page I can share it afterwards .

Speaker 3 6:11

But basically , if you ever find that page , it's brilliant , it's . It's about 80 kilobytes in total . It looks like . It looks like it wasn't designed for a modern mobile phone .

Speaker 2 6:20

Let's just say that and um , did you get a call from the director general of the bbc wanting your head on a stick ?

Speaker 3 6:26

wasn't . It wasn't quite like . I'm sure someone else got told off for it , but you know it was fixed in the day .

Speaker 2 6:30

So you broke it and fucked off and left someone else to deal with it .

Speaker 3 6:33

I wouldn't say I broke it , it wasn't my it wasn't my fault that it broke , so it's fine .