Masters of Their Domain Name

The late 90's were a great age, an era built on a quivering, Jell-o-like foundation of bloated hope and empty promises. The media landscape was littered with modern-day robber barons -- wannabe Rockefellers with freshly-minted MBA's trying to weld a ".com" onto everything they could. They fluttered around, desperately seeking funding for their shaky -- at best -- business proposals, drawing their self-importance like gunfighters, even though there was seldom any substance to be found.

During the heyday, I worked for a consumer title as its ad director. As part of this gig, I'd inherited the "Director of New Media" title from a colleague who himself chose to stake his claim in the wilds of Silicon Alley. Along with this post, I was endowed with a stack of greasy business cards and a directive to "see what these assholes are all about." One of these cards, marked with a large, cocktail-sauce thumbprint was for Blake Rothwax*, director of business development at Hombre.com.

ombre.com billed itself as a site for men who do all those things men do. It provided softheaded frat boys and socially stifled geeks with enough obnoxious ammo to enter the battlefields of condom selection and choosing the costliest leather recliner on which to drink oneself into a Budweiser stupor while watching Sportscenter. It made Maxim look like The Paris Review, thanks to a combination of editorial lifted straight out of last night's drunken conversation and re-purposed junk from other, equally egregious sources -- mashed together with all the élan of a 10-car pile-up. In the interest of full disclosure, my tastes run only slightly above the lowest brow, but Hombre was just stupid -- and there's never an excuse for stupid.

My initial call to Blake was pleasant enough, leading to a scheduled meeting at our office to discuss "synergy." To me, synergy was a word I'd throw around in order to guzzle whiskey and eat filet on the company dime, but for Blake, it was what got him out of bed every morning. The day before we were set to meet, Blake left me an excited voicemail to announce that he would be coming to the office with a special guest -- chief executive hombre himself, Mr. Roman Romanus. In anticipation of his arrival, I asked the marketing department to prepare a few gross of rose petals to toss at his feet, but they were too busy pandering to our circulation director.

Blake and Roman arrived at our office 15 minutes late. The mélange of stale cigarette smoke and wet wool that usually filled the air was instantly replaced by a sickly sweet aroma -- eau de pure arrogance. As someone with a low tolerance for legends in their own mind, I could tell it was going to be a special day.

We gathered in the conference room, where Roman presented the publisher and I with media kits -- not for Hombre.com, mind you, but for him. Yes, the man had his own personal media kit. He'd been one of the first 25 employees at one of the few truly successful Internet companies. He had the requisite MBA from the highfalutin' Ivy. The upshot of this epic was that his efforts resulted in a paid five-year lease for 15,000 square feet of prime Bay Area property, in exchange for a significant portion of pre-IPO stock. In other words, the only thing protecting us from an explosion of pure bombast was the healthy skepticism his tall tale engendered.

 

       

This was the new media, and he was breaking ground, a modern-day William Randolph Hearst trafficking in hangover remedies and bikini model clip art.

The print version wasn't enough, though. He spun us his tale, packed with the hyperbole of the time: This was the new media, and he was breaking ground, a modern-day William Randolph Hearst trafficking in hangover remedies and bikini model clip art. He saw us being shoehorned into his vision by allowing Hombre.com to use our archived content as his. We would get a cut of all ad revenue based on page views of the channel where our old editorial ran. It all sounded good enough to us. No one on our side of the table was blinded by his aura, nor were we choking on smoke, but he wasn't asking for any money. Our content was essentially rotting on a server in Florida, so why not throw it his way and maybe make a few bucks?

A week later, Blake called to see what we thought of Roman. While he was obviously eager to hear how impressed we were, it was simpler and far less offensive to say "Yeah, nice guy" and move along. Blake told me that they were just waiting to get the contract back from "legal" and he would send it our way to sign off. Three days later, a 15-page PDF file landed in my inbox, an impressively pointless document filled with words like "heretofore" and "fiduciary." Before I committed to actually reading this garbage, I figured I should make one more phone call to old Blake.

"Say, Blake, just out of curiosity, how much are your ads selling for now, and how much do you anticipate selling in six months?" I asked

He responded with an extended silence, finally breaking it with "Um... let me call you back."

I wasn't surprised that I never heard from Blake again. On closer inspection, there wasn't even a faint whiff of advertising anywhere on the site -- no banners, nary a button, not even a hyperlinked keyword. Nada. It seemed Hombre.com wasn't the man it claimed to be. Unfortunately, those heady days were marked mostly by light ideas given weight simply through greed. Maybe it's not all over, though. As I lean back in my third-hand Aeron chair, staring at the broken second-generation blueberry iMac perched on the foosball table, I wonder when the renaissance will begin?

*Names have been changed to protect the... you be the judge.

 

Comments

[salesrants]

Thank you for the link to your blog on my blog. It did serve as a great inspiration. Now I just have to keep enough crazy customers coming in that I can keep mine going! Best of luck to you and I look forward to reading more of your work and getting more comments on mine from you.