Your boss — or more often, your boss’s boss’s boss — has a dumb@ss idea and you’ve been handed the assignment. What do you do?
I ran into this situation more than once over 14+ years leading Oracle’s global advertising team. Of course, this situation isn’t unique to Oracle. It happens inside big companies, small companies, governments and even non-profits.
Let’s look at a real-world example, explore different ways it could have been handled, and assess the results.
Back in 2009, one senior Oracle executive was suffering insomnia. Without Netflix and other streaming options, he burned hours surfing the cable channels late, late at night. Just past mainstream ESPN, he discovered “The World’s Strongest Man” playing hour after hour on ESPN2 and ESPN Classic. This event features burly weightlifters competing to lift stones, carry cars, throw logs, and pull heavy objects like locomotives or airplanes.
With never-ending reruns, it must have seemed like this event was always on television.
As you can guess, this senior executive thought it would be an absolutely brilliant idea for Oracle to become title sponsor of “The World’s Strongest Man”. Eventually, this (ahem) suggestion was passed down to me to negotiate and execute.
How would I recommend you handle this dangerous situation?
First, take a deep breath. My own immediate visceral reaction was, “WTF?” If you’re getting this assignment in a group meeting, try not to roll your eyes. I myself failed… but you should try.
Second, take the assignment seriously. I am old-school enough to consider that, just maybe, the executive knows more than I do. I’ve been lucky that 95% of my bosses have been very smart people — perhaps not always communicative, but smart. Maybe business technology buyers are closet “World’s Strongest Man” viewers? It’s possible. At one stage, one of the most efficient non-sports TV programs to reach executive decision makers was the motorcycle drama, “Sons of Anarchy”. Evidently many business executives secretly dreamed of being amoral gangsters.
Third, do the research. Oracle’s primary target audience at that time was technology decision makers at the 2,000 largest companies and governments in the world. That translated into 35-54 year old, college-educated men (sadly) with above-average incomes.
We compared that goal with the audience profile for “The World’s Strongest Man”. Only 19% of viewers graduated from college versus a US average of 29%. Only 8% of the audience were 25-54 with household income over $100K. Anecdotally, the core viewership could be summed up as college boys into weightlifting. Duh, right?
Fourth, build the most rational proposal possible. In our case, a low multi-million dollar, multi-year contract that included pervasive branding across 22 episodes annually — delivering 800K impressions to our specific target audience (plus millions of impressions we didn’t want). It also included commercial spots on ESPN and the option to create unique live experiences for our customers.
Fifth, and most importantly, decide how to position yourself.
Are you a yes-man / yes-woman? Countless successful careers have been built on giving senior executives exactly what they want, when they want it, with no pushback. If this is your path, then become the ultimate cheerleader for this project and cherry-pick the facts to justify why it makes sense. Help sell it to traditional gatekeepers like the CFO and the board. For me, this sounds completely soul-destroying but I’ve also met a number of soul-free people with vacation homes.
Is it your way or the highway? Take all the counter-arguments and craft a blistering takedown of your boss’s brilliant idea. This can end several ways… most of them bad. Best case scenario, your executive respects your independent perspective and makes you his/her go-to for reality checks. In every other alternative scenario, they take your critique badly and your career at this company is done.
Are you more of a professional than a cheerleader? Your final option, the one I chose, was to present the pros and the cons as straight as possible and let the executive decide. My four-slide pitch deck included a summary of the proposal, details on the audience mismatch, and how an investment in cable news — paired with editorial integration — could deliver more and better brand impressions at a lower price.
I’ll admit that we also highlighted the need to “steal” the sponsorship from PartyPoker.com (letting executives decide whether they were our peer-set). And we may have mocked-up an image of a 380-pound weightlifter in a red spandex one-piece with the Oracle logo in white on his chest.
Sixth, learn from the end result. In my case, the short-term result was that Oracle did NOT become the title sponsor for “The World’s Strongest Man”. But that budget was also NOT made available to invest into other branding efforts. One could argue that it would have been better to have the budget to achieve something versus having no budget to achieve anything.
Longer term, this experience — along with others — taught my CMO that I wasn’t the person to go to for unfiltered cheerleading of any left-field executive idea. Was that better for my own self-respect? Absolutely. Did it make going to work every day more joyful? Yes. Did it also limit my ability to interact with some senior executives and therefore take on larger responsibilities? Definitely.
Of course, I am guilty of sharing my own brilliant (dumb@ss) ideas that required colleagues to do hours of research to shut down. Feel free to throw stones at my glass cottage.
And, most importantly, some dumb@ss ideas are actually brilliant ideas. Sometimes, that’s where true creativity lies.
Please share your own stories in the comments — or direct message me for a conversation. I would love to bring together more stories for a more complete perspective. Or, if you can suggest something you would have done differently, please chime in.