#168: "Tell Me You're Just Messing With Me"
Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables
No. 168
“Tell Me You’re Just Messing With Me” #houstonwehaveaproblem
The sponsors are in today. They come in once a quarter and review ad budgets and performance, etc with the Committee. This is normally pretty straightforward, but Slothrop’s presenting a new three-pronged “strategic vision”, the main components of which are: more cats & dogs, less polished/more “authentic” panels, and of course, his overhaul of the Slater-Miyazaki Caption Scoring System, which he is adamant has been suppressing performance. The sponsors seem to be buying it, there’s a lot of head-nodding and occasional laughter. Some of the licensing partners are in from Hong Kong this afternoon and the Committee’ll take them through the same dog & pony show. I was up late putting the Powerpoints together for the meeting, so I was hoping to sneak out early. But we’ve got about a thousand panels and caption alternatives to run through the new S-MCSS. So Hanelore is in there on note-taking duty while Inky & I try to get this sorted out. It looks like they’re going through the engagement metrics now, which I haven’t been looking forward to. Our numbers have been choppy. If you’re reading this, per InstaAnalytics, you’re in the 4% that scroll down past the panel. The other 96% of our “traffic” sees the panel and just moves on. When Slothrop saw these numbers, he looked right through me and said “it seems like managing social media can be automated”. He didn’t dwell on it, and that seemed to contradict his point about “authenticity”, but it sounded pretty ominous to me. Inky is already freaked out that inking panels is now “off-model”, and he’s been interviewing. Let me know if you need a good inker. I opened a LinkedIn account myself. But for the moment there’s job security for both of us bc who else is going to re-run this many panels? Meanwhile, here is #168, which you may notice hasn’t been inked and doesn’t have any cats or dogs. Maybe they’re inside the ship. Also it scored a 14.0/23.0 on both the old and new systems. So now we have two data points. Doesn’t bode well for the strategic vision, but it takes three to make a trend. -Ed.
