
Bill Hicks, who's famous skit on marketing and advertising
Brilliant!
Workday tasked itself with the challenge of what to do if you’re the third or fourth vendor in the global market for enterprise-grade finance and HR software and came up with the answer: Super Bowl ads. This weekend's US sports extravaganza will coincide with the launch of a less-than-targeted set of ads for the SaaS provider …
It's interesting how besuited, Gucci-wearing so-called high-level executives want to be associated with what is commonly known as a depraved, drug and alcohol-filled lifestyle.
Maybe they have learned this from politicians? Or more likely, they themselves are also depraved, drug and alchohol filled but jealous that they don't the perks of being a a real rock star?
My employer has been using it for a couple of years now. It is, indeed, terrible, but I actually like it because what we had before was even more terrible (a cobbled together combination of Lotus Notes applications, IBM mainframe applications in a terminal window, emailed PDFs. and actual paper.)
I’ve discovered It’s an awful UI and not a great product now that I have to use it. Even my manager has said it’s not great but what we have to work with. I quite like the advert but then I wouldn’t rate Workday as a rockstar product (nor most if not all of the software I’ve used) and I’ve never called anyone at work a rockstar………Is this a US thing?
There's been something of a fad for stupid job titles in the US for a while now, with people using terms like "Rockstar" and "Jedi" and "Ninja". It's obnoxious and embarrassing and sometimes outright offensive, but it lingers yet.
It's the sort of cringe-inducing cultural trend that we'll eventually use to mock the early part of the century, much as we sneer at the leisure suits and medallions of the '70s or the shoulder pads and popped collars of the '80s. (We ought to sneer at the flannel and moping of the '90s, but it's still too depressing to remember. The '70s and '80s had questionable taste; the '90s were mostly flavorless gruel.)
Probably because today's programs "apps" were drawn after Marketing got a new box of crayons, coupled with the necessary short attention-span theater required to sell pretty much anything to ... OHHH! SHINEY!!!!
Whatever it is, there sure as hell isn't any design or engineering in any of it.
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I thought "badass" in the article was wonderfully ironic. As soon as I saw "rockstar" I wanted to jump to the comments and say "badass too", but the article beat me to it. They are both overused in my locality. In my view they are rarely applicable to someone else's performance, and never applicable to one's own performance.
I've seen this referenced before in the context of writing ads for IT jobs. It was (maybe still is?) trendy to advertise for "rockstars," "gurus," even "ninjas," but that was found to turn off lots of people, reduce the diversity of the applicant pool, etc. Just explain what you actually need in the position, use broad categories rather than a pile of random software package names, and include the pay scale in the advert.
> "rockstars," "gurus," even "ninjas," but that was found to turn off lots of people
... and yet it continues. Maybe somewhat diminished, but still used in today's job market.
I don't know exactly when HR recruiter types, headhunters, etc. decided "hip, cool, trendy" was the right way to go about hiring people, but it's pretty awful, and frankly, yes counter-productive.
Can we also do away with nonsense like looking for "passionate" candidates? We've just seen a couple months of big wheel executives demonstrating they're more "passionate" about their share price and bonuses than retaining employees, even while corporate profits are fine. So expecting the rank-and-file to treat their employment as anything beyond the business arrangement that it is, is pretty hypocritical.
Perhaps not rock but one of Rupert's colleagues of the 1990s, PC Direct magazine's reviews editor Adrian Sutton, went on to write the original stage score for 'Warhorse' and 'Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' - a couple of crowd-pleasers that some readers might have heard of.
Who buys any sort of software based on a TV ad? Games, maybe. Can't think of much else that might experience much of a sales boost thanks to television advertisements.
(Of course, I'm not the typical audience member. I don't even watch the Stupor Bowl, which in the US is just this side of treason.)