Work is Funny

I know I try not to talk about work on this blog, but I'll try to keep this mostly anonymous.

1. I was on my way to work this morning when I got an email on my blackberry. It was from the person in charge of tracking our traffic on the websites. She had one question:

"Are there any viral videos on tbs.com?"

Seriously? Are there still people out there who don't know that a "viral video" is an organic happenstance, not a category you assign during digitization? I've been getting the "we need to make a viral video" request from marketing for years, but even that noise has died down by now. We've had to explain a million times that "viral" just means that people like it and pass it around--it's not something you can force onto a video with marketing mojo. It's much the same as the term "hit show". You can make a good show. You can even make a great show, but you can't make a hit. Only the fans can do that.

It's sad to hear a person who actually works in the digital field showing such lack of understanding of such a familiar concept. I expected the next question to be, "Is there anything funny on tbs.com?"

2. With as much traffic as the Family Guy videos on our site get, I'm amazed nobody's written in about this, yet. You tell me: Is this a good thumbnail to use for a video on an "all audiences" site?

We had to let our video guy go last week due to financial and structural reasons, and I was absolutely sure he must've done this to get back at us. I was starting to worry that there may be a whole bunch of pornographic thumbnails buried in our video player. But then I checked the "submitted by" tag on the image. It came from a former coworker who's now a designer for an agency that does websites for major studio movies, and who happens to occasionally read this blog.

Hey, Eugene, thanks a lot! If I find images of Peter naked on our site, I'm coming to LA and tracking you down, man! ;)