Tech Support Issue #1: who makes the meaning?

*cracks knuckles, takes long pull of room temperature kombucha* hi, you’ve reached TECH SUPPORT, how can I help? 

Dear Tech Support, 

I have been working in marketing for a major tech corporation for over 6 years and am just now beginning to realize the soul-crushing insignificance of every aspect of my job. I spend my hours either navigating the pointless politics of my organization or working on campaigns that are ultimately marketing ourselves to our internal leadership rather than any external being. What’s especially killing me is the fake urgency and lack of perspective: the past few months have been a blur of emergency sprints and war rooms to define how our brand should “show up” for the coronavirus (to be clear, this is not how we, as a multibillion dollar corporation, can make a meaningful impact in the lives of those suffering right now, but how to turn the crisis into a “brand moment” that makes us more relevant and beloved in the eyes of Gen Z). Can marketing ever be meaningful? Should I just call it quits and join the Peace Corps to try to redeem my soul?

Best,

Lost in the Existential Sauce

Dear Sauce, 

When I transferred to Youtube’s Marketing team in 2014, by way of introducing himself, one of my new teammates in London g-chatted me a link to a manifesto called “On Bullshit Jobs” about the rise of pointless office work and feudal management culture in late capitalism. I winced at the cynicism (and he’d soon be quietly whisked out of the picture–his disgruntlement turned out to be more Bartleby the Scrivener than Jerry Maguire), but as the first months on the job ticked by, I had to admit it was almost impossible to articulate what our work as “curation strategy managers” even was, much less the impact it had on a website whose faceless, algorithmic bloodlines pumping billions of views a day didn’t exactly smack of an “editor’s touch.” 

Six months later, I became YouTube’s social media manager. How blessedly tangible it felt, in comparison, to churning out a tweet here, an Instagram there (or if I’m being honest, managing a massive agency team that actually did the work) even though, again, it was torturous to explain to friends what I did (managing the social media presence of a social media platform on social media platforms other than itself? cool cool, blank, numb nod). I reported to one of the most genius bullshit taskmasters I’ve ever encountered–she has a perverse gift for selling utter make-work up the chain as groundbreaking, company-critical–and in my first year, I wrote a 100+ page defining YouTube’s social media strategy in painstaking detail. We had little in the way of measurable business goals–despite our 70M+ followers on Twitter, tweets drove negligible traffic back to YouTube, and platforms like Instagram drove no traffic at all, and I would describe the bulk of our engagement as “bot-driven”–but I framed the work with passion and purpose. The jargon flowed from me with an ease that’s frankly disconcerting in retrospect. We were the voice of the brand, “driving love and building trust with our community” and “shaping the daily conversation around YouTube.” 

Of course we weren’t. Despite our best efforts/tweets about giraffes-in-labor livestreams and International Women’s Day or whatever, the “daily conversation around YouTube” took a nosedive in my tenure (some of the great conversational hits include Pewdiepie, the “suicide forest,” the Tide Pod Challenge, a NYT article calling YouTube “An Open Gate for Pedophiles,” etc.). For YouTube, as with all the Big Tech cos, the “brands” here are the platforms themselves, and they’re complicated and convoluted. They’re not just caught in the crosshairs of the whole “will democracy survive the toxic maelstrom of misinformation, harassment, and reactionaries that is literally plundering the social fabric?” thing but an active ENGINE of it (casual!). The scale is just too vast for the marketing to truly matter. No marketing program or planned PR narrative could ever touch the “brand impact” of Zuckerberg going on Fox News this week or Twitter finally fact-checking a Trump tweet. And when you’re in a department where the work has no real impact, a whole toxic cultural cottage industry crops up. That’s what the “pointless politics” are, Sauce, the stuff that fills the void where the meaning should be. The insights decks devoid of a single insight, the 1000-word “results” emails, the self-congratulatory weekly staff meeting. The politics, the turf wars, the sparring over who gets to “have a seat at the table...” as if there ARE seats, or even a table for that matter (*cues up “sweet baby rays” clip*) 

Can a marketing job ever mean anything? I guess the question is–well, to whom? The cruel flaw in my otherwise deferential, “just here to help!”, give-me-a-gold-star-and-I’m-good brain (I recently unearthed in therapy that one of the things I most prized myself on in elementary school was the annual “perfect attendance” award–analyze THAT) is I do actually care about the existential meaning of it all. And clearly so do you, Sauce. Not everyone does! I’m sure there are many (ok, some) YouTube marketing managers who are happy, maybe even a few who feel genuinely fulfilled (and they should be studied in a lab/psych ward). They’ve carved out something clear to do that they enjoy doing. Or they have a clear idea of how this gig gets them to the next place they wanna go. Or maybe they, like my old boss, are genuinely good at and energized by the never-ending quest to “manage up.” And of course, it’s not nothing to have a good, stable job at a major tech company no matter how existentially complex/torrid its “values” are.  

OK, SAUCE (as my mom would say, “to make a long story even longer!”), if it’s existential meaning you seek, unfortunately you’ve got no choice but to get the hell out of there. But not now! Finding life’s purpose takes time and work, and right now we’re in the middle of a literal airborne toxic event. So I offer the serenity prayer as a way to keep your soul intact while you await your way out. Accept what you cannot change–you’re simply not going to change a toxic culture (I chuckle darkly thinking of how I used to believe the workstreams that cropped up every year after the annual “Googlegeist” survey might actually “move the needle” on my department’s abysmal ratings on well-being, integrity, the whole nine), and you’re not certainly going to fix bad leadership (though hitching yourself to a good manager/person is the only big company survival tactic I’m currently aware of). Find the courage to change the things you can–these incredibly consequential companies desperately need people with integrity and the gumption to speak up when things don’t feel right, etc. And the wisdom to know the difference (which…don’t take that one from me, cf the public conflagration of my Google career). 

Hang in there, you’ve got this, and most crucially, do NOT let the soulless bastards get you down.

Claire

Have a query? Write to me at askclairest@gmail.com

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