(I’m doing something a bit different in today’s letter. Enjoy this completely uncharitable—but not entirely inaccurate—narrative. -JS)
The company hires a Comms Director.
The Comms Director hires an agency.
The agency has meetings with the client company.
In these meetings, each side pretends to care about what the other has to say but secretly believes only they themselves know best.
The agency says, “Based on what you said in these meetings, you need some Content.”
The Comms Director says, “Okay, go do Content.”
The agency creates a Proposal for the Content.
The Comms Director likes the Proposal for the Content.
The agency quotes a fee for the Content project.
The Comms Director counteroffers the quarters he keeps in his car to feed parking meters.
The project begins.
The agency and the company have more meetings to come up with an Outline for the Content.
Meanwhile, the agency promotes a 23-year-old account coordinator who is “interested in writing” to the role of Content Specialist, and assigns the project to her.
The Content Specialist hires a Freelance Writer who oversold their experience in the client company’s industry.
The Content Specialist tells the Freelance Writer that the Content will be ghostwritten for the client company’s CEO.
The Freelance Writer asks to interview the client company’s CEO.
The Content Specialist Slacks the Account Executive (AE) to arrange the interview.
The AE has a meeting with the Account Director (AD) about arranging the interview.
Together, the AE, the AD, and a randomly selected agency vice president have a meeting with the Comms Director about arranging the interview.
The Comms Director emails the CEO to arrange the interview.
The CEO reads the email, ignores it, and immediately goes back to golfing, cheating on his spouse, murdering puppies, taking a selfie with Beyonce, and other CEO activities that are inflexibly set into the CEO’s schedule by his Chief of Staff.
The Freelance Writer emails the Content Specialist four paragraphs to ask if it’s okay for her to possibly maybe wonder if there are any updates on the scheduling of the interview that needs to be scheduled but if not that’s totally okay because people are busy and that’s fine.
After some repetition of the preceding six steps, the Comms Director has had enough and arranges for a mid-level Product Manager, instead of the CEO, to be the interviewee as a subject-matter expert (SME) – notifying the agency accordingly.
A randomly selected agency vice president sends a Zoom invite for the interview to the Content Specialist, the AE, the AD, another vice president, the client company’s Comms Director, the client company’s SME, and – by accident – the agency’s HR Director.
The morning of the interview, an hour before the call is to begin, the Content Specialist forwards the invite to the Freelance Writer.
The Freelance Writer sees the invite on her phone as she is walking across the parking lot outside her dentist’s office.
The Freelance Writer rushes into the dentist’s office and, after waiting in line for ten minutes behind a patient who was intent on discussing the details of her wedding with the receptionist, reschedules the replacement of her temporary crown for the dentist’s earliest next opening (in four months).
The Freelance Writer rushes home, prepares her workstation, and sits down at her desk just in time to log in to Zoom a minute before the interview call is to begin.
Zoom updates.
The Freelance Writer logs in to the meeting last of everyone, two minutes late; everyone else on the call is miffed.
The most senior of the two agency vice presidents on the call takes 15 minutes introducing everyone.
The AD takes eight minutes to tell the Comms Director and SME in detail all about the questions the Freelance Writer will ask, despite the fact that the AD has neither seen nor heard any indication of what those questions will be, has never corresponded with the Freelance Writer before, and does not entirely remember what the Content Proposal said.
The interview itself begins; everyone on the call except for the Freelance Writer, the SME, and the agency’s HR Director goes on mute.
The Freelance Writer spends forty minutes interviewing the SME; the interview goes reasonably well except for (1) being punctuated by the agency’s HR Director’s dog barking in the background and (2) the fact that everyone on the call other than the Freelance Writer and the SME are visibly irritated because the entire Zoom call was scheduled to last only 30 minutes.
The call ends; time passes.
Days later, after many meetings, the agency and the client company finally agree on an Outline for the Content; the Outline is seven pages long and addresses the entire history of the company’s industry – including some digression concerning the Napoleonic Wars, as well as six bulletpoints on why their lead competitor’s product is garbage.
A miscellaneous executive who somehow got a hold of the Outline says that the Outline also needs to address Latest Trend.
The Outline is overhauled and extended to include Latest Trend.
Once the Outline is finalized, the AE Slacks it to the Content Specialist.
The Content Specialist emails the Outline to the Freelance Writer four weeks after the Freelance Writer was hired, with the deliverable due in less than 48 hours.
The Freelance Writer, who has already written a draft of the deliverable, adds a sentence and a half to the deliverable that kinda sorta addresses one of the bulletpoints in the Outline, runs spell check, and emails the deliverable to the Content Specialist.
Two minutes after sending the email, the Freelance Writer discovers a typo in the deliverable.
The Content Specialist Slacks the deliverable to the AE.
The AE emails the deliverable to the AD.
The AD picks up his phone and snorts a line of cocaine off of it; he is on vacation.
The AD’s out-of-office auto-reply goes unnoticed by the AE.
Nearly two weeks later, the AD sees the AE’s email and replies “thx”; he does not read the deliverable.
A week after that, the Freelance Writer emails the Content Specialist six paragraphs saying that she is terribly sorry to be a bother but might it be okay, if it’s not too much trouble, for her to send an invoice at this point, assuming its neither too early nor too presumptuous to do so.
The Content Specialist forwards the email to Accounts Payable.
Accounts Payable ignores the email.
Meanwhile, on an unrelated internal call at the client company, the CEO asks, “Hey, whatever happened to that thing that was going to have my name on it?”
The Comms Director emails the AD asking for the deliverable.
The AD emails the AE asking her why she hasn’t sent the deliverable yet, using multiple question marks.
The AE cries for 12 seconds, then finds the original email chain and reforwards it with the attachment to the AD.
The AD replies “thx” and then, still without reading it, forwards it to the Comms Director.
The Comms Director forwards it to the company’s in-house Content Marketing Manager, asking “Thoughts?”
The Content Marketing Manager, who is just hearing about the Content project for the first time, redlines the bejeezus out of the deliverable.
The Content Marketing Manager forwards the edited deliverable to the company’s SEO Consultant.
Using a carefully curated list, the SEO Consultant inserts several irrelevant keyword phrases (many of which mention major clients and partner organizations by name) into the document with backlinks to an assortment of company webpages that haven’t been updated since before the pandemic.
The SEO Consultant sends the updated deliverable to the Content Marketing Manager.
The Content Marketing Manager forwards the edited deliverable to the Comms Director while cc-ing the CMO.
In a reply-all email, the CMO points out that the deliverable doesn’t mention the company’s newest product (which, unbeknownst to the CMO, the company is on the verge of discontinuing pending the next round of layoffs).
The Content Marketing Manager adds two non sequitur paragraphs to the deliverable discussing the new product; the new paragraphs consist entirely of wording pulled directly out of sales collateral.
The Content Marketing Manager forwards the updated deliverable to the CMO and the Comms Director.
The CMO replies-all “thx”, cc-ing the SVP of Product.
The SVP of Product emails the group to say that the product information included in the deliverable is inaccurate; he does not identify what the inaccuracies are.
The Content Marketing Manager emails links to the sales collateral that the product information was pulled from verbatim and asks what needs to be changed.
The SVP of Product instructs the Content Marketing Manager to set a Zoom call with the product’s Senior Engineer to go through and correct the inaccuracies in the deliverable and the sales collateral; the Senior Engineer has a mostly full calendar and is in a time zone that is ten hours apart from the Content Marketing Manager’s time zone.
Later that day, the Freelance Writer emails an invoice to the Content Specialist, writing several apologetic paragraphs about not being able to delay the invoice anymore because of some necessary dental work resulting from an infection from a temporary crown left on too long, but if it’s not okay to invoice just yet then it’s okay but if the invoice could be paid within the next 30 days that would be great but just give a heads up if that’s going to be a problem because it’s okay really but if the agency could pay it sooner rather than later that would be really appreciated if that’s okay.
The Content Specialist forwards the email to Accounts Payable.
Accounts Payable ignores the email.
Three days later, the Content Marketing Manager wakes up at 3:00am to get ready for her Zoom call with the Senior Engineer.
On the call, the Senior Engineer tells the Content Marketing Manager that the product details in the deliverable and the sales collateral are correct.
The Content Marketing Manager thanks the Senior Engineer, ends the call, and goes back to bed for two hours before she has to get her kids up for school.
Later that day, the Senior Engineer emails the Content Marketing Manager and the SVP of Product with his own edits to the deliverable; the edits are stylistic only and grammatically incorrect.
The SVP of Product replies all “thx”.
The Content Marketing Manager spends 20 minutes rewording all the edits to make them grammatically correct again, then sends the document to the CMO and the Comms Director (she has removed the SVP of Product from the email chain).
The CMO opens the document and runs spell check.
After spell check comes back clean, the CMO replies all, “Looks good!”
Around the same time, the Freelance Writer emails the Content Specialist to check on the status of the invoice just to make sure it was received and to ask if the agency requires any more information or if there is a PO number that needs to be included on the invoice or anything like that and again if the invoice could be paid within the month that would be great but if there are any problems to please reach out.
The Content Specialist forwards the email to Accounts Payable.
Accounts Payable ignores the email.
Meanwhile, the Comms Director opens the document to review the deliverable for the first time.
The Comms Director rephrases several sentences to include more present participles like “groundbreaking” and “democratizing”.
The Comms Director emails the document to the CEO for approval.
The Chief of Staff, who has access to the CEO’s inbox, reviews the document and makes some edits for “tone”, including replacing every instance of the word “use” with either “utilize” or “leverage”.
The Chief of Staff texts the CEO to tell him to take a look at the document for final approval.
The CEO reads the document.
The CEO texts the Chief of Staff “wtf is this shit”.
The Chief of Staff sends a Zoom invite on the CEO’s behalf to the Comms Director, the CMO, the SVP of Product, various agency vice presidents, the AE, the AD, the Content Specialist, and the agency’s HR Director.
Everyone invited to the Zoom call attends, making overenthusiastic small talk while they wait for the CEO.
The CEO shows up seven minutes late to the Zoom call; he then spends the entire rest of the call yelling at everyone and demanding to know what process failures led to such an ineffective, jumbled, opaque, confusing pile of garbage.
The SVP of Product blames the CMO.
The CMO blames the Comms Director.
The Comms Director blames the agency.
The agency blames the bottlenecks on the client’s end.
Nobody takes responsibility.
The CEO steams, “Well, SOMEBODY wrote it...!”
The Content Specialist sends a Zoom invite to the Freelance Writer.
On the Zoom call, the Content Specialist tells the Freelance Writer that the client felt that the document wasn’t in the CEO’s voice.
The Freelance Writer reminds the Content Specialist that she asked to interview the CEO but was told to interview the company’s Product Manager instead.
The Content Specialist says that the agency needs the Freelance Writer to try again, this time executing an entirely new interview with a different SME on a new topic with a different outline.
The Freelance Writer hesitantly asks for the current invoice to be paid first before starting work on a new assignment.
The Content Specialist says that this is all part of the same assignment, isn’t it?
The Freelance Writer stammers that this would go on a new statement of work because it is a completely new deliverable to be executed from scratch.
The Content Specialist says that she’ll “run the message up the chain.”
The Content Specialist Slacks the AE to say that she needs more budget.
The AE forwards the email to the AD.
The AD emails the Comms Director to ask for more budget.
The Comms Director calls the AD on his cell phone to yell at him, using several swear words while criticizing the AD’s lineage and legitimacy of birth.
The AD emails the AE to say that there is no more budget.
The AE Slacks the Content Specialist and tells her to just get it done without any budget.
The Content Specialist, who has been paying attention and definitely doesn’t want to go through the whole process all over again if she’s the one who has to write it, asks ChatGPT to rewrite the Freelance Writer’s first draft “in the style of a CEO.”
The Content Specialist saves the result into a new document and Slacks it to the AE.
The AE emails the new document to the AD.
The AD forwards the new document to the Comms Director.
The Comms Director, in the interests of expediency and optimizing positioning for blameshifting, immediately emails it to the CEO without opening the file.
The CEO’s Chief of Staff sees the email and texts the CEO that the new draft has come in.
The CEO texts the Chief of Staff that he’s too busy and tells her to use her judgment.
The Chief of Staff again makes some edits for “tone”, then emails the Comms Director the revised draft, writing “Approved.”
The Comms Director, without opening the file, forwards the email to the AD, noting the changes and writing “Good job.”
The AD forwards the email to the AE.
The AE emails the article to an editor at the top publication covering the client’s industry, asking if she’d be interested in publishing it.
The next day, the editor replies back to politely decline.
The AE shops the article to an editor at another major publication covering the client’s industry.
The second editor replies back that afternoon to curtly decline.
The AE shops the article to an editor at a second-tier publication covering the client’s industry.
The editor emails back the next day to say that the publication is about to close down because of budget cutbacks and will not be publishing anything else after the end of the month.
The AE shops the article to a fourth publication.
The fourth publication’s editor – who is going through a contentious divorce and custody battle – emails back to tell the AE that, if she had ever bothered to once look at the publication’s website for more than five seconds, she would know that the article is out of scope for the publication.
The AE shops the article to a fifth publication – and doesn’t hear back.
The AE, going down the agency’s outdated list of editorial contacts that was purchased from a third party, shops the article to another 18 publications; all reject the article or decline to respond.
The 24th editor that the AE solicits emails her to say that his publication would be thrilled to publish the article if the writer could revise it; the editor includes detailed in-line notes to guide the revision.
The AE sends an enthusiastic reply email, agreeing to get a new draft to the editor as soon as possible.
The AE forwards the 24th editor’s email to the Content Specialist.
The AE receives back the Content Specialist’s out-of-office reply (the Content Specialist has taken the day off for a dentist appointment).
The Comms Director emails the AD to ask for a status update on the Content.
The AD forwards the email to the AE, asking her to move things along.
The AE shops the article again.
The managing editor of rand0m-content-mill_4_u_🤠.io emails the AE back, agreeing to publish the article as-is in three weeks’ time.
The AE emails the managing editor with enthusiastic thanks, cc-ing the AD.
The Freelance Writer emails the Content Specialist to ask about the status of her outstanding invoice (if that’s okay) – payment on which is now late (but that’s okay) – and how the agency wants to proceed on any further assignments (if that’s okay).
The Content Specialist forwards the email to Accounts Payable.
Accounts Payable ignores the email.
Three weeks later, the Content goes live on rand0m-content-mill_4_u_🤠.io.
The AE emails most of the agency and everyone she has an email address for at the client company to announce that the Content is live.
Everyone on the email chain emails each other compliments and notes of congratulations, except for the CEO (who has ignored the email chain despite the Content appearing under his byline).
The Content garners 6 unique viewers with an 83% bounce rate.
A week later, the Freelance Writer resubmits the invoice to the Content Specialist.
The Content Specialist forwards the email to Accounts Payable.
Accounts Payable ignores the email.
Four weeks later, rand0m-content-mill_4_u_🤠.io’s web host receives a DMCA takedown notice for several (unrelated) instances of copyright infringement.
The web host suspends the account; rand0m-content-mill_4_u_🤠.io goes offline forever.
Nobody notices.
The agency submits its quarterly invoice to the client company’s Accounts Payable team.
Accounts Payable ignores the email.
Would this resonate with anyone you know? Please share it.
If any of this sounds familiar, or if you think your own experience tops this, let me know in the comments or send me a message. Thx. -JS