Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

voldacar

> The brand comes to life in the context of people, cultures, communities and relationships.

What does this even mean? What kind of human could even write such a sentence?

View on HN

Still got nothing on Pepsi

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

You aren't helping... now I need to know WTF two things are!

That's crazy.

Ugh, I had forgotten about that doc. Now my brain hurts.

Dr Graeber, we have a “bullshit jobs” winner.

Any context? Is it a real document or a parody?

This is real. My personal theory has always been that they decided to capitalize on the Obama For America campaign branding, typography, etc — and then made this doc as a kind of “parallel reconstruction” of how they got there.

I'm as tired of marketing jargon as the next person, but what isn't clear about this? It's a simple statement, encouraging you to think of the brand and its relationship to people and culture, and all the different groups who use Facebook products.

Most marketing material like this makes my head start spinning after only a minute or so. I can only imagine what extended periods of _thinking_ in marketing/PR-speak can do to someone

The kind getting $600/hour to write sentences like that

No branding agency bills at $600/hr.

Source: Have triple bid projects to some of the biggest identity design (branding) firms in NYC before.

The rates are more like $250/hr.

However, if this was done in-house...it was probably a massive boondoggle (see Uber's 2nd to last rebrand led by Kalanick for more info) and giant waste of money. Too many emotions and stakeholders involved. Better to farm it out to an independent 3rd party and control costs with a fixed project-based agreement from the beginning.

This is the reason I could not cut it as just a designer. The amount of bullshit required to survive in the design industry disturbed me morally.

Basically that the brand should represent what Facebook is about. But in shiny, marketing oriented, words. I work as a consultant in Marketing and I still have a problem respecting creative people and their explanations. For me it's simple BS. But the reality is that they truly believe in it. We simply expect more science and less imagination from them.

The synergetic, horizontally-scalable kind. /s

It's all fluff mixed with virtue signalling.

As usual.

To think about it someone paid American college money to write meaningless stuff like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com