The Dashboard Can't Write the Joke

Every tech company has someone who can tell you how many people clicked the blue button last Tuesday. Attribution, funnels, cohorts, CAC. Great people, keep them. But ask who decided what the button should say, or why the whole page looks like every other page, and it gets quiet. If that person exists, they’re a contractor, or a designer three layers down who got the brief after the strategy was locked.

Software is measurable, so software companies decided marketing should be too. Numbers are easy to defend in a meeting. A creative idea is one person’s taste asking a room to believe in it, which is scarier to put on a slide. So when budgets tighten, the stuff you can’t attribute goes first.

Measurement is great at telling you which of two options won. It has no idea what the third option should have been. Look at any software category page: purple gradient, a headline that starts with “Meet,” a stock photo of someone thrilled about a laptop. Every one of those got tested against the others, and they all rolled downhill to the same spot.

Creative people make the new thing the tests get to choose from. Dropbox is about as engineer-run as companies get, and one of its best early marketing assets was a nerd joke. Before launch, Drew Houston recorded a three-minute demo and posted it on Digg, packed with in-jokes for that crowd: meme-named folders, a Tron cameo, an Office Space reference. The beta waitlist went from roughly 5,000 to 75,000 overnight. No funnel report would tell you to put Tron in a file-syncing demo.

Mailchimp took a mispronunciation and made a campaign out of it. A 2014 audio ad had people fumbling the name, ending on “MailKimp?”, and in early 2017, with the agency Droga5, the company seeded fake brands in the US and UK: MaleCrimp, MailShrimp, KaleLimp. Search for any of them and you got asked, “Did you mean Mailchimp?” Email marketing is one of the least glamorous categories in software, and people went hunting for it on their own.

“But we have designers.” You do, and they’re often excellent. Having designers and having creative people aren’t the same thing, and part of the difference is when they get pulled in. Usually it’s after the idea is settled, when a brief lands that says “make this pop.” The same goes for copywriters: feature list attached, sixty characters, make it sound good. That’s real skill, but it’s execution. What comes back is polished, on-brand, and forgotten by lunch. I’d take ugly over that, because ugly at least gets noticed.

So who do I mean? Writers who decide how the company sounds, down to the error message and what the button says besides “Submit.” People who name things, and hear “MailKimp” and see a campaign instead of a typo. Editors who cut. Concept people, who in tech are often a founder who happens to be funny, which works until the founder gets busy. Makers who can turn out the strange video by Thursday on a budget of roughly nothing. And whoever lives where your audience lives and knows what’s funny there this week. Their title is usually “Coordinator.”

They’re not all designers and they’re not all analysts. What they share is that they can answer what a mockup and a dashboard can’t: what do we call it, what do we say, who is this for, what’s the joke, what do we leave out. When nobody owns those questions, they still get answered, by whoever’s closest, in the safest way available.

That matters more now. Polish gets cheaper every month, and competent, average content is basically free at any volume. Average has turned into noise. What cuts through is work with a point of view and a sense of humor.

If you run marketing, give that seat an owner, with a title and everything. Hire for taste, and hold them to a longer clock than the weekly “what did this move?” meeting: is the work distinctive, and do people repeat it back to you? Let the numbers people tell you where to aim. Then let someone with a weird streak decide what’s worth aiming at. Somebody’s got to write the joke.