Read on Twitter
Interesting discussion in my PR course tonight. Ethics. Integrity. What industry would you not work for? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Me, quiet, immediately thinking back to a time at a multimedia company I worked for when the boss announced we'd be venturing into online adult entertainment
Me, quiet, immediately thinking back to a time at a multimedia company I worked for when the boss announced we'd be venturing into online adult entertainment
I was the ONLY female employee that worked at the dev team level and the only staff person with a business writing & marketing background. All eyes were on me that day to see how I would react. I also had website design & print layout skills and could understand tech dev and code
I asked to see the RFQ and my 25 year old self took it home and poured through it. The male programmers on staff thought this was the coolest possible gig ever. In the parking lot, before I drove off, one colleague in particular told me to "keep an open mind".
The RFQ was impressively structured. The project was backed by a well known venture capitalist & an unknown angel investor. The plan was to offer a "choose your own adventure" adult entertainment website. In 1999, video streaming video was emerging tech and expensive...
This would be a cutting edge project with a potential to make a lot of money from a subscription based model but also for many, like me, not something I felt I could personally be involved in. It just felt dirty. Not that I'm a prude but some of these "adventures" that I read...
... were not for me. The next day I pulled the creative director aside and asked his thoughts. He wasn't comfortable with it. Adult entertainment marketing and production was not anything either of us had ever aspired to. Nor did we even want to try to P.M. this for a client ...
... no matter how much money it could generate. We passed on the project. The boss wasn't happy because he was seeing this as an opportunity to dominate the online video streaming market and before others took hold. I said we could do it with other industries like real estate...
... virtual walk-throughs as we had pitched this a few months earlier to another client. So tonight, thinking about where we are now with online tech, how far along video streaming has come, I still have zero regrets for standing my ground and refusing to support and possibly...
... passing on a fortune. So yes, there are industries I could never work for, but it ain't tobacco or alcohol.
