Introducing you to Bjorn - my Marketing Manager - has been overdue for quite some time but his performance over the past week means his time has come to finally take PR-adise centre stage. Quite the self-paradox, Bjorn is beauty industry furniture and a gay immigrant who (career-threateningly) let slip to me that he votes BNP. The aforementioned credentials born in mind, I'd be fascinated to see how he went down at his local party meeting.
Bjorn provides me and most of the office with our main source of both amusement and frustration during the working week. Better still, whilst he's always been glaringly incompetent, he's currently becoming more of a Fireman Sam with every day that passes as he whiles away 9-5 chasing around the office attempting to put out the fires he's started.
One of Bjorn's principal talents is wasting terrifying amounts of company money on hair-brained marketing schemes and ill-thought out, plucked-from-the-air, quick fixes. A good example would be the 18k he quite recently decided we needed to spend on a magazine advert with coupon; all hap-hazardly knocked together in 4 days. It delivered 12 redemptions from a circulation of circa 400,000. That equates to a quite spectacular minus ROI returning £1 for every £1,500 pissed up the wall (or a Christmas bonus for every member of staff that won't get one this year, look at it how you will.) Of course, the latest disastrous plan he's hatched hardly blindsided me, nor has it come as any surprise that I'll be managing the project. Yes folks, yours truly has been charged with the creation of...a radio advert! Jesus wept.
Yet with every comic cloud comes a silver lining. As whilst Bjorn can fritter away company money like there's no tomorrow, he's also very keen on cutting corners where he (misguidedly) believes he can save us a few quid. Which is is why he's decided that either Trophy_Wife or Fuchsia_Cohen will be the plummy voice of the brand on commercial radio. I could have framed Trophy_Wife's expression of both exasperation and horror but better still, with the C.O.O. partisan to the idea, she can't say no! The icing on the radio ad cake is that managing the project, I'll be swinging the production work the way of one my friends. Fully aware of quite how cheaply but professionally I can have this thing cut, the big question is thus: do I have the nerve to take a cash bung in return for allowing them to double their hourly production rate?
