WEEK 37: One After the Other

Sometime this week the need arose to share the YouTube link of our recent animated film ‘Dive In’. The video was posted on Arctic Fox’s YouTube channel. The entire office was jolted out of what they were doing when our intern, who was tasked with sharing said link, declared that Arctic Fox’s YouTube page no longer existed.

This caused considerable panic in the organization for the following reasons:

  1. If Arctic Fox’s YouTube channel was deleted, all of the money we put behind promoting their content (not to mention the results of the same) would have gone to waste. Even if we created a new channel and re-uploaded all our videos, their view count would start from zero again, thereby wasting all our previous distribution efforts
  2. All of our SEO for the YouTube channel would also be wasted. This means that even if we created Arctic Fox’s channel again, it would be difficult to find as you would have to type in very specific words to access the channel (for example, it used to be that when you typed ‘dive in arctic fox’ the first video would be our 3D animation film. Now, that’s all gone. Even if you typed ‘arctic fox dive in’ all you would find would be documentary clips of arctic foxes plunging into the snow)

At that point, the entire team focused on finding out how this had happened and restoring the page (if that was even possible). After a while, we found the source of the problem – an accidental blunder from Arctic Fox’s end – and the channel was thankfully restored.

But our intern’s troubles were far from over. The Red Fort script had to be transliterated into Devanagari script. It was sent to a third party, but since our intern is proficient in Hindi, the task of copy-checking the script fell on her. Unfortunately, she found that the transliteration was nothing short of horrific, and had to spend over 4 hours painstakingly correcting each typing error in a 50 page script.

On another note, I recently watched a documentary called FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened. It talks about the Fyre festival and how it went up in flames (pun intended) because the creators followed an advertising-first model while developing the festival. They relied on advertising to promote ticket sales, and intended to build their infrastructure only after they received money from those sales. But in their advertisements they showed some of the top models in the world partying in the Bahamas. Essentially, the audience that was consuming their advertising about the ‘biggest festival in the world’ was being sold something that did not exist.

And because the creators did not have their backend in place, when their tickets sold out they suddenly realised that they still did not have enough money to create the setup they had promised. This spiraled out of control and the event was a complete disaster, with people having to fight over supplies, stranded in the Bahamas.    

Surprisingly, I have seen this happen a few times in some form or the other among certain brands. They have approached us in a primitive stage of development and asked as to take care of their branding; and the money from this would go towards improving their backend. To such brands starting out, my advice is to learn from Fyre and not make the same mistakes. Advertising should only take place after all backend systems and processes are ready.

Speaking of disasters, this week the creative team held one of the worst meetings in Humour Me history. The whole thing was pandemonium from start to finish. To begin with, we had the wrong impression of what the meeting was about. We prepared for the meeting with a certain agenda in mind, only to be told on the morning of the meeting that the agenda was in fact, not what we had thought it would be. This resulted in the team frantically thinking of new creative ideas on the day of the presentation (which, needless to say, should never be done – it’s like changing the choreography of a performance on the day of the show).

The final presentation, as expected, was a fumbling hotchpotch of disorganized thoughts. We were blind-sided yet again by the client, who walked into the meeting with a completely different agenda which we then had to spontaneously incorporate into our existing hastily put together agenda.

We had a very serious debrief after the meeting.

Anyway, to end this entry on a happy note, the Vahdam film is nearly ready to go and I should be able to show it to you soon.

See you next week!

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