Quote:
Originally Posted by DVTimes
Playboy could have been huge online.
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Playboy completely missed the boat when it came to the Internet. To make matters worse, the entire company is completely dominated by the magazine who gets first right to everything, sucks up a lot of the company resources and money, but hasn't made a profit in god only knows how long.
On top of this it takes them forever to do anything; I kid you not we had conference calls to decide who would be in on conference calls. Every step had to be approved by the "standards and practices" department, and then by legal. Just to give you an example, at ICS we created a common landing page that members would be directed to when they first hit the members area. This way we could upsell them before they even hit the members area. In any other company this is a twenty minute discussion and a few days of work. At Playboy, we had to get the green light approved by someone in Burbank, then standards and practices, then legal, then have a conference call to plan out the main conference call. (Keep in mind here that nothing gets done by management on Wednesdays due to their company wide weekly conference call so we could discuss what Kendra wore to the Kentucky Derby.) Then we would have to go through the tech department so they could spend a month evaluating what server resources would need to be allocated to the project, and only then could we decide who would physically do the work. Then the people picked to do the work would have to be briefed by legal, standards, and the server department and.... It took four months of meetings and conference calls to make an improvement that should only take days. THEN once the project nears completion everything had to be reviewed by all departments, and then changes made. Then it would need the final approval of people in upper management that we had never met in person and who might just kill the entire project after six months of work because they were handed big bucks to come over to Playboy from a cable company and have no freaking clue what a landing page is. If that is not enough, after the project was completed, we would have to devote resources to track it's effectiveness and profitability.
The worst part was they didn't want anyone to use the Playboy name or any of their content.