Revisiting My "Don't Tase Me Bro!" Moment
I realized recently that I’d hit my eight year mark at Nielsen. Thinking back, there are so many memorable events. However, one in particular stands out as something fit for a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode.
It was five years ago, and I was relatively new to my role in product marketing and the conference speaking circuit. I was asked to join a panel on metrics for online advertising at the last minute... two hours north of NYC, on a Saturday. It was a schlep.
The event was a relatively uneventful one... until my panel hit the stage. The discussion soon veered toward Nielsen’s role in advancing digital measurement. During these early days (when eg DAR was still OCR), we’d seen excitement for our innovations in digital measurement but also drawn considerable flack for growing pains. An op-ed published earlier that week had criticized our efforts and the deficiencies of our new products, stating “With great power comes great responsibility.”
I made the point that we were trying to contribute to the industry’s evolution and taking an approach that played against the Nielsen stereotype: launching with something that would help the industry now and evolve over time, as opposed to waiting for perfection. I took the opportunity to respond head-on to the op-ed critique, as well as introduce a bit of levity. I called for folks to try to see these products for what they could vs couldn’t do, and I asked for some patience, evoking an earlier internet meme:
It played well in the room, and the discussion moved on. Little did I know that this would be my “Fatwa!”
While I was still onstage, I noticed a columnist attending the event maniacally typing away. However, I didn’t think anything more of it, until my phone started blowing up with a flurry of text messages a few minutes later while making the long drive back from the venue in New Paltz to NYC. The messages were remarkably similar in both tone and content: “What happened?!?” along with a link to an article.
I pulled over, clicked, and read. Given that it was only about 30 minutes since I’d left the stage, it was as if the writer had the piece queued up, like those pre-written obituaries of famous people the New York Times is sitting on.
The headline: “Nielsen Product Leader: ‘Don’t Tase Me Bro"
The article had been blasted out to a popular industry e-mail newsletter the publisher maintained, which flagged it for many of my colleagues on a weekend day. I read it over about three times (admittedly, it was a short article) before I pulled back onto the road.
It was a long drive south. Thoughts flooded my head. How many people were going to see this? Why was I so reckless with my words? Was it worth the laughs? Should I have paid more attention during my media training? Is this going to impact my career? What do I do next?
Mostly though, I was annoyed at myself. I was usually one of the people crafting messages to make life easier for our client service people. Now I worried that I was going to make things temporarily much harder for them, as they had to field calls and prods from clients about poor little currency-wielding Nielsen complaining about the industry. My point was that we cared and were trying to make things better but needed some time and partnership; the article's spin was that we were being defensive and reinforced the idea of us shirking responsibility.
After I got home, I immediately fired off an e-mail to our leadership's distribution list, explaining, apologizing, and offering to help however I could (e.g., field angry client calls, commit seppuku).
The outpouring of support that came in over the course of the weekend from my colleagues was tremendous. Instead of castigating me for my onstage faux pas, they commiserated and even celebrated it. One representative comment: "I thought it was funny and showed that we actually have a personality!" I immediately felt better, and it saved the weekend/week.
Ultimately, there was no fallout. The article passed by as quickly as an incendiary tweet from 1600 Penn. Did I have to deal with a print-out of the "Don't tase me bro!" guy waiting for me on my desk? Yes. But I'm sure some of our client service people also got an e-mail poke or two about it, so I felt like we were all in it together.
I don't know if there's some grand lesson here. With a little bit of distance, it's now just a funny anecdote for me to store in the annals. I still tell jokes onstage... at least some of which actually land. Perhaps I was a little more mindful of how things I say in public forums could be taken out of context.
The biggest thing that stood out to me about this experience was that it reinforced the family feeling I had about Nielsen. In times of immense stress - some justifiable and some exaggerated - it's so critical to have a supportive set of colleagues to put the situation in context, problem-solve, and help you get past it. If you have this, don't take it for granted. If you don't, go find it.
Do you have a "Don't Tase Me Bro!" moment (hopefully figuratively and not literally speaking)? If so, how did you get through it, and what did you learn from it?
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or past employers. If you would like to read more of my writing, you can follow me here on LinkedIn and/or on Twitter at @chrislouie.
You can also read a few of my other LinkedIn posts: