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What is the most flagrant example of conceited "bullshit" you've ever encountered?
Today I stumbled upon a pdf of Peter Arnell's redesign of the Pepsi logo, touted by a person on twitter as "the height of human bullshit". And it reminded me of the time I worked at a small start-up company, where these kinds of overblown but substantially empty ideas were common currency.
So I'm wondering: do any of you have any funny or interesting stories of encounters with these kinds of things.
The hedge fund space provides a deep well of human bullshit.
A particular example I can think of involves a gentleman pitching a strategy with a Sharpe Ratio of 6.0 with unlimited capacity. For those unfamiliar, the Sharpe ratio measures the expected excess return ( meaning in excess of the risk-free rate) divided by the standard deviation of excess returns. The US stock market over the last 30 years has a Sharpe ratio of 0.39. Berkshire-Hatheway, the fund run by Warren Buffett, has a Sharpe ratio of 0.76 from 1976 to 2011. Capacity refers to the amount of money one could put in the strategy. It is, generally speaking, relatively easy to find strategies with high Sharpe ratios that have a capacity of a few million dollars (an example of this would be learning the rolling pattern of a larger institution and then front-running the roll - this can be a profitable strategy but it inherently has a capacity of some fraction of the assets being rolled). So a Sharpe ratio of 6.0 would be a fantastically profitable strategy and unlimited capacity would mean any amount of money could be put into it. This would be like a magical money-printing machine.
Suffice to say, we didn't actually believe this guy's claims, but it's fairly common for people to generate decent strategies and not assess the capacity correctly. My boss decides we'll fly him the Bahamas and take him out on my boss's boat for a chat and to hear his proposition. Initially, the dude agrees on the stipulation that my boss send his private jet to pick the guy up, and then fly a very particular route to bring him here. He then "compromises" to just a first-class ticket and a particular route. We plan another call to discuss it. The second call happens and in the course of us, it is revealed that at the essence of the strategy, and the demand for a particular flight route, is some belief in the golden ratio, which is the basis for the claim of the strategy's unlimited capacity. That was basically the end of the call.
This happened years ago and the guy emails the claimed results of his strategy to us to this day. While he has made money on it, the Sharpe Ratio is not anywhere close to 6.
He actually wanted the plane to fly a route that somehow conformed to the golden ratio? That is absolutely absurd, especially when trying to convince investors that your ideas are sound.
Yes, exactly this. It had to be set up so that the longest leg of the flight was the end component to the Bahamas.
As an example, normally when I fly to Europe, I'll do something like Bahamas->Miami->London (and then my destination in Europe as oddly enough I've never been to London outside of the airport). There is, however, a British Airways flight that goes directly from London to Nassau (and vice-versa). This guy wanted a bunch of shorter hops (all private jet or first-class) culminating in the London to Nassau flight.
The guy is based in Australia so this is also basically the reverse of how one would normally fly.
I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge
I was really enjoying the doc until I saw the actual redesign. The idea of attaching identity to the brand is solid - think about how much success Coke had with putting random names on each can of Coke. It falls apart simply because the logo doesn't look like an emojii and just isn't doing what the doc says it does.
I know you're not asking specifically about marketing, but I always thought that the making the McDonald's Happy Meal into a anthropomorphic monster was utter crap. It's creepy to me and the art-style reminds me of bad 2000s computer animation. There is no identity or personality to the character. No reason for being. He's just a box that came to life...for some reason., probably because it was a deliverable on some VP's end-of-year review.
https://i.gzn.jp/img/2014/05/20/mcdonald-new-character-happy/01.jpg
The most damning thing about Arnell's logo redesign, aside from the sheer ostentatiousness of claiming the geometry of your logo works because it is inspired by the curvature of the earth, is that none of it really works unless you are looking at the logo with the document besides you. Arnell's skill as a marketer don't seem to be so much in designing as in trying to sell you on his designs.
Fun fact: that mascot is actually an import product from Mcdonalds' French holdings, where it had been used since 2009 (France, for some reason, seems to love to produce these weird unsettling CGI mascots). At the time the mascot was probably a response to rival chain Quick's own little monstrosity Quickos.
The Atlantic even speculated that it's introduction in the Americas was botched on purpose.
A few years ago I worked at smallish enterprise company developing software and services for ultra high end conference rooms. I had a task of improving the time it took from when an error occurred in a room to when we found out about it, but I had very few resources to accomplish this. I basically ended up writing very descriptive errors to the logs -> then using a tool like sumo logic to ingest and centralize the logs -> then using that tool to generate an alert into another system that we used for dash boarding. It worked ok but was overall a pile of garbage.
Well our clients were happy so hooray, end of story.
Well my boss found out about this "client win" and wanted to understand how the system worked so I gave him a breakdown. He took this crappy idea, repackaged it a bit, and pitched it at a conference for above said tool as his own idea. The company loved it and wanted to sell it to other companies. I was and remain completely baffled and uncredited. BTW, the way this thing was implemented would never work at scale, we only had a couple hundred rooms to service so it worked ok for us.
That boss later laid-off everyone in our office and offered some people jobs with a worse title and lower pay in a state half way across the country.
Uhm, admittedly off-topic and noise, but what I saw in that pdf, was that a real thing or some sort of satire or something? I really hope it's the latter.
Apparently it's pretty close to the real thing, in any case it's not satire.
I agree with that sentiment. I think they could've just made it a few pages - past logos, how the new one is designed (page 19-20), color palette for the cans (page 25), and the emoji marketing fluff (page 22).
When I read "Gravitational Pull of Pepsi" and "Pepsi Energy Fields", I feel insulted. It feels like everything else was just made to make it seem like Pepsi got their money's worth with this.