As I am an ancient creature from the Before Times, I had my first marketing job in 1997. Back then, you had to have a somewhat successful company to start issuing terrible press releases, all of them making clumsy attempts to make incredibly non-newsworthy products into products people might somehow see in the news and (for no really compelling reason) purchase.
As with so many things, the Universal Blessing of Social Media, the vast technological architecture which destroys the cares and worries of the past by inventing an endless bounty of woes which make all prior pain feel numb in comparison –
Social Media, the great panacea, brought its many benefits to terrible marketing. Now, we’re so used to press releases that no company is too mighty to be really, really bad at it, and no company is too small to add to the crushing weight of electronic trash under which we have buried the fragmentary remnants of our remaining hopes and dreams.
Still, many corporations struggle with how to make poorly-written public statement.
I thought I would help, because I am a helper.
As you may know, some thing happened. It either happened with us and we’re trying to pretend it’s newsworthy; or it happened in the bigger world, and we’re pretending we’re a part of it. This marks a major, impactful change in this dynamic industry.
Given this release, we wanted to share an update on how The Company That Totally Wouldn’t Lie To You is adapting to these changes. We will begin prompting anyone with appropriate parasitic electronic mind-control circuits already installed. We’re also making key updates across various products, including several links on our website that you have never even seen because the idea of having an intuitive user interface, as opposed to a painfully complicated one which pushes you to spend money because you can’t seem to find anything without doing that and we work real hard to convince you it’s you, when we totally made this problem; I mean, you know that thing where casinos used to have no windows and no clocks so it created a hermetic environment where you’d be able to pretend the dough you’re losing isn’t really real because you don’t have any of the things humans require, such as sunlight and meaningful communication? The whole damn Internet is like that now, only moreso.
Now, the new changes may briefly convenience you, but we will fix that. As soon as we determine that too many people are getting substantive value out of what we’re doing without paying every cent we can possibly milk out of them, we’ll change everything around to make it vastly more unpleasant, with the perpetual promise that there’s something real, real good just a couple of clicks away.
But the real good thing, like Tomorrow, never comes; like Xeno’s Paradox, you can get closer and closer to happiness, but you’ll never make it, not because you’re not capable of being happy – oh, you are absolutely physically abl to be happy; even if you have severe depression, things could feel better than they do now. Do you remember that old comic strip where that kid was always trying to kick a football, knowing the jerk holding it was always, always going to pull it away at the last moment? If you don’t know it, the moral of the story was supposed to be something about this guy never learning, but seriously, the real lesson was: the dickwad with the football was a stone-cold sociopath, who kept preying on her victim’s empathy and desire to do good and deliberately causing him pain because she liked it.
The whole thing’s like that. And we assure you, we will be regularly releasing product updates to help maintain stability of lasting depression and improve performance of anxieties along the way.
In conclusion, the World is a giant, luxurious bathtub filled with marvelously refreshing water and enticing, aromatic oils, and you have our solemn process that after we’ve taken the bath, we’ll feed you a droplet or two of used bathwater. Because we’re all in this together, except you, obviously.
