Flying monkeys and why your marketing department is awesome

Let's imagine you work for a company that hosts spectacular marketing events. You pitch events to potential new clients. In this case you pitch to Wonder-ears, a company that makes hearing aids. Wonder-ears wants to give their image a new boost. It should be fresher. After brainstorming with your creative team you know what they need. It will be an experience. Not just an event. You show the board the Amsterdam canals. You show movie stars running around. In track suits. And umbrella's. Fireworks coming out of their ears... they can hear better thanks to the wonder of wonder-ears. And and... there are monkeys flying around in little airplanes. Ooo. Ooo. Aaa. Aaa.

Everyone in the meeting room stares around with a surprised look on their face. Why ooo ooo why did I put in those monkeys? Then the CEO starts to clap. He loves it. Now everyone starts to clap. They all love it. You're the star.

You're asked to create some traction online for the event. Everyone who signs up and wins a little lottery can see the monkeys. With a couple of clicks you create a new event website using your CMS platform. And a mobile app. Your designer adjusts some javascript and css to get into the canal theme. Your video editor adds loops and track suits. Your editor Linda adds a form with a lottery. And she creates a press release that calms people down. The monkeys are safe. They have parachutes.

It seems to go well or you, but after a week your guy at Wonder-ears is a little worried. He wants to boost their image for sure, but he also wants to sell some hearing aids. They're not getting a lot of traffic yet. Aren't you targeting too much for young hipsters with these monkeys?

You start to panic. You're very creative but can't handle all these questions. You think out of the box. You suggest to add some very loud fireworks to expand the demand for hearing aids to a new and younger demographic. This is too much out of the box. What are you doing? Wonder-guy strangely enough likes your idea, but definitely wants to check with legal. Ok, now what?

Linda says you don't have to worry. You already track all the visitors on your website. Wow, she says, our website went viral yesterday. Twitter is blowing up. Some B-level actors and sport stars are trying to be associated. This is good news. Linda checks the statistics. Just a little bit leaning towards a younger demographic, but definitely lots of middle aged and older people too.

The older people don't like the fireworks, she says. Their bounce rate is really high. She changes to milder images for older people. No fireworks.

And in the sign-up form she's adding some conditions. If you are older than 35, you definitely can go to the event. If you're younger, you'll have a small chance to go.

Hmm... Only 2% clicks through to the wonder-ears website. That's why wonder-guy wasn't happy yet. Linda runs an A/B test for the click-through banner. We'll know soon if that will make things better.

Your panic attack stops. You sit down in your chair. You think back to how everything changed since your marketing department dragged and dropped the developers and took matters into their own hands.