1997 Calling
You know the drill. Drag yourself into their office, laptop bag on one shoulder and projector on another, ready to run the latest brag reel and neat little Powerpoint about how you’re gonna cut through the clutter, reach that audience, engage them, create a community. All the latest interactive marketing buzzwords, carefully woven into a seamless whole. Or that’s the idea.
Except this time was different. I was standing in front of a big honey-oak desk, and there was a guy glaring up at me. A little plaque on his desk poked through a catastrophe of papers, ring-binders and books. It read: Geoffery Palmer, Director of Marketing.
"Who are you?" he asked.
I opened my mouth to say something. That was when I realized I had no idea how I’d gotten there. It seemed like your normal meet-and-greet meeting, but there was no comforting weight of projector or laptop bag on my shoulder. I reached into my overshirt pocket to get a card, but it was empty.
"I, uh . . ." Was it possible I’d blanked out? Just, like, lost it? There’d been a lot of late nights lately. Play it off, I told myself. You’ve gone in cold before. You don’t need the presentations.
"Good to meet you, Geoff," I said, sticking out my hand. "I’m from Centric, Agency of Change."
Geoff’s eyes rolled briefly heavenward. "Oh. Yeah. Another one of you guys. Sorry, I must’ve missed it," he said, pawing through the debris on his desk, apparently trying to uncover a heavily scribbled desktop calendar.
That was when I started noticing more details. The stuff on his desk were a bunch of CMYK overlay proofs. A pristine copy of The Dilbert Principle peeked through the mess. Geoff himself wore a shirt and a tie, and a blazer hung carelessly on a chair parked behind him. A chair that sat in front of a beige Compaq computer displaying the ancient Windows starfield screen-saver. An antique Motorola flip-phone, the grey plastic kind that looked like they’d been made out of melted-down ball-point pens, sat next to it. One of the big ring-binders was Dymo-tape labeled, Concurrence Networks Marketing Plan 1997.
And the desk calendar? The top of it read, June 1997.
This ain’t happening. I shook my head. But . . . when was the last time you’ve seen a marketing guy wear a suit around the office?
"I’m in 1997," I said.
Geoff looked up at me and frowned. "Yeah, and?"
"When I woke up this morning, it was 2007."
"That’s great. Why don’t you give me the lottery numbers, then?"
I reached in my pockets, looking for a dollar bill, a credit card, a drivers’ license, anything to show him. Nothing. "I. No. Really. I’m from 2007."
Geoff sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. "Neat pitch."
"What?"
"Never had an agency come at me like this."
"This ain’t a pitch."
Geoff’s eyes narrowed. "So, you’re all running around in flying cars? Something like that?"
"No, still waiting for those."
Geoff stood up and looked me up and down. "You aren’t wearing any futuristic clothes or anything like that."
"Man, it’s only been 10 years," I said, sitting down.
"You said you were from an agency."
"Yeah."
"Media or creative?"
"Uh, well, interactive. But leading-edge stuff, social media, virtual worlds, things like that."
Geoff sat back down and laughed. "Interactive agency, oh that’s rich. So, you’re another web developer. We just had our first site redone, we won’t need anyone for a while."
My mind was going a mile a second. They didn’t know what was coming. They had no idea. Google didn’t even exist yet. Was Overture around? I’d forgotten. Had eBay even gone public yet? The things I could do with what I knew–but first, I’d have to get a job.
"We can still help you out," I said. "I mean, with my knowledge, we can put your site way ahead of anything else out there."
Geoff waved a hand. "Our website? Who cares? That’s IT anyway, not marketing."
"Not marketing? Are you guys crazy? What do you think your site is for?"
"As far as I’m concerned, it’s a necessary evil. It’s not like most of our potential customers even have web access yet. Yeah, it might grow in the future, but I’m not going to bet on that."
"But it will!" I said. "In fact, one video-sharing site, YouTube, has the reach and engagement of a major television network. In, uh, 2007."
"Video? Online?" Geoff laughed. "Dancing postage stamps. No studio’d spend money on that."
"But it’s not the studios. It’s the users. User-generated content, they call it."
"What? People just go out and do movies, shows, sitcoms, things like that?" Geoff looked skeptical.
"A lot of it is shorter content, but yes, people have done that."
Geoff crossed his arms and looked at his antique phone, which didn’t even have a LCD display. He was clearly thinking about throwing me out. I needed to think of something simpler, something he could understand.
"Wait," I said. "We could start up SEO. Search engine optimization, get you listed on top of Google . . . ah, I mean, what? Lycos, Inktomi? How about Overture? Pay per click ads."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or why I’d even want that."
"Flash banners . . . uh, I mean, banner ads, and an email program."
"I hear ads are going to destroy the internet. And, who would we send the email to?"
"All your prospects."
"Like they have email addresses. They’re still rolling out personal email here." Geoff’s hand tapped on top of his phone. "Look, that was a neat pitch, but it’d just be better if you told me what you were selling. The internet is interesting, but it’s really only for a small, tech-savvy audience. We can’t afford to spend any time on it."
"I . . ." I didn’t know what to say. How could I explain to him that this was only the start? How could I tell him to forget this job and help me start one of the first SEO or PPC firms, or one of the first email marketing firms, or just wait a little bit and start up social networking, be the MySpace before MySpace, or the YouTube before YouTube, or maybe even the first Second Life? Would he even believe me if I told him I looked up traffic on my Treo before checking my email, that we had offices in China, or that we helped companies build presences and marketing programs in worlds that didn’t even exist?
No, it wouldn’t happen. He’d probably just cross his arms and say–
"Look," Geoff said. "I know there isn’t anyone making money on the internet, for all the hype and fluff. Come back when we need to update the site in a couple of years, or come back when you have some case studies about how you helped people move real product."
I looked at him one more time, at this man who still lived in a world of Casual Fridays and checking your AOL email once a week and cellphones that bragged of 2 hours of talk time and 200MHz Pentium IIs and overlay proofs and sighed. There was no way I’d be able to make him understand his entire way of doing business, his entire way of living, would change over the next 10 years.
Geoff seemed to see it. "But it was a good pitch. They should have you in creative, not sales."
What could I say? I thanked him, shook his hand, and walked out of his office . . .
. . . and right back into the current world of 2007. Projector bag, laptop bag, Treo. And Julie beside me saying, "You know, we may want to tone down the virtual world stuff, these guys don’t really believe in it, they think it’s a geeky tech audience and a fad, they want to see the 100 million impressions, not the 100 tastemakers."
She couldn’t understand why I had to stop outside the thick glass walls of the building and laugh, uproariously, for a good three minutes.
