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.

Pay-Per-Click Catastrophe

Speaker 3 0:33

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

Government Website Doctor Who Fiasco

Speaker 1 1:05

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

Breaking the BBC Homepage

Speaker 1 3:15

It's a good 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.

The Mysterious Burning Clown Test Card

Speaker 2 5:33

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