by Adam Leigh
“My last competitive match was an incredibly tight semi-final, which I lost. It was the furthest I’d ever got in a national competition and I played the best game of my life against a much higher-ranked player. In the end, I lost the tiebreaker when my forehand went down the line, landed millimetres on the wrong side and the umpire called it out. Previously, I’d have tried to maim him with my racket. But the only thing I felt was incredulity at the randomness of it all. If the wind direction had been slightly different, if my racket speed had been altered by the tiniest of fractions, would the rules of physics have carried that ball in? Could it have been different? I decided immediately that my tennis career was over and locked my racket in a cupboard. I didn’t want the fickleness of the cosmos to shape my future. I knew I wanted to win more than anything. I would just have to take charge.
“When I said just now that ambition could be limitless, I was talking about us as individuals. If Alex hadn’t bumped into Nigel, of course we wouldn’t be here. But we wouldn’t be mourning the loss of something we didn’t know existed. I’d be chasing the next opportunity and expecting it to be successful. Unambitious people want rules and guarantees. I’m successful because I only see what I want and my own path towards its achievement. Nigel, how different are we? Do you actually like children or teenagers, or do you just think they represent the best way to use your writing talent and have the most impact? Your books are successful because you never expected to fail. So yes, of course I’m grateful to you all. But rest assured, I did not give up tennis to fail at something else.”
He sat back and took a large gulp of his drink, having ranted for longer than perhaps he had expected. Lucy stroked his arm in approbation of his perfect delivery. No one else spoke. Inevitably, uncomfortable without making a contribution, I looked at Julian and said, “Did you make that all up?”
Ignoring me, he took Lucy’s hand and led her to the dance floor.
***
The next eighteen months were the making of our business. We released the book in forty-four languages, and it was downloaded nearly twenty-three million times. Remarkably, by making everyone use an e-book reader, we changed behaviour. Kids were now glued even more firmly to their devices, but parents didn’t mind because they were reading. We inevitably relented and produced limited print runs of an expensive special edition, which sold out immediately.
We attracted approaches from authors and production companies wanting to shake up established entertainment and publishing practices. PrimaParent rapidly became not just a resource for delivering products and experiences for your children, but also a means of curating their reading and viewing habits. This was a much bigger opportunity commercially than we could have expected.
We brought in a Head of Innovation called Clark Templeton. Recommended most forcibly by the Johnsons, he had enjoyed a succession of ever-upward roles at a variety of Silicon Valley businesses. At the music app bopdewop he had caused an industry stir by signing major artists away from their labels. His remit was to create future growth opportunities by developing new revenue streams. We had to relocate him from the US, paying him the largest salary in the company, which Julian tried, unsuccessfully, to resist. We both agreed that he had a silly name and resented that he was not entirely our choice. I was much more expedient and knew that he represented progress. Julian conversely called him ‘Quick Simpleton’ as often as he could behind his back.
He was fearsomely bright, having come top in his year at Harvard Business School, and spoke in complex sentences liberally laced with jargon and acronyms. Charming, yes, but he also displayed a detachment in the initial relationships he formed. It was hard to know what he was thinking as his manner was cheery but inscrutable. I wasn’t sure if he was impressed by my leadership or reporting my incompetence to our principal investors. Quickly, I grew fearful of his abilities. He had a prodigious work ethic and soon developed compelling new business ideas to broaden our appeal.
We embarked on developing a ‘flash sale’ children’s clothing offering. We would buy brands, unsold or end-of-season inventory, samples, whatever we could get our hands on. Parents loved the deals we secured from major brands, irrespective of whether it was last year’s stock. To bolster our fashion credentials further, we persuaded a number of high-profile designers to produce kids’ ranges for us. These were limited and very exclusive, not to mention eye-wateringly expensive. (You may remember the furore when the Japanese designer Yota Miyoshi produced babygrows that we sold for £1,000 each.) Our disruptive assault required that we recruit people from major retailers, fashion houses and even ex-editors of glossy magazines. A PrimaParent child was going to be not just entertained but well dressed too.
Clark’s other big initiative was the launch of our Expert Division at the end of 2016. Our research showed that while parents loved the breadth of experiences and products available, they also looked to us for guidance. Rather than facilitating chat among enthusiastic laypeople on parenting, we would bring in a panel of experts and make customers pay for the privilege of their guidance. Our proposition was ‘It’s better to pay for good advice than solicit a lot of unwanted opinion’. Menu pricing allowed access to a panel of medical, behavioural and entertainment experts, to deal with a range of enquiries and produce bespoke PrimaParenting guides for our information-hungry customers.
After four years of trading, we had nearly thirty million global subscribers, annual revenues of £90m, and were even making a small profit, unheard of for a new digital business. We were constantly valued in the press because of the ridiculous noise we had made in our infancy, and speculative valuations suggested we were worth nearly half a billion – that’s basically a unicorn without the horn. I owned 19 per cent of the business. I was, on paper, a very rich person.
Virtual wealth does not guarantee happiness and this achievement was built on some shaky relationships and fragile alliances. Remember, the Greeks used three words for ambition and one of them can be translated as ‘strife’. That was about to become manifest in the future progression of the company. Our ascent had certainly involved some skirmishes on the way up, but success had come quickly and more easily than I could have expected.
Not for much longer.
19. Attack
I couldn’t get in the lobby of our office because of all the demonstrating clowns.
There were perhaps two hundred of them defying the snapping cold of a January morning, and they were angry, even with the enormous smiles painted garishly on their faces. They carried placards that read ‘Poo PrimaParent’ and ‘Toot your horn if you hate PrimaParent’. A barrage of custard pies was lobbed at anyone foolish enough to cross their makeshift picket line. It had all been an innocent misunderstanding and The Global Federation of Clowns had lost their legendary sense of humour, simply because of a slightly misjudged advertising campaign.
Frank and Frankie had joined us full-time in 2016 as our in-house creative directors, building a team of fertile minds ambitious about producing talked-about ideas to support our increasing fame. One morning, the husband-and-wife team dragged me into a conference room to show me a visual, with the excitement of sugar-fuelled children opening presents on Christmas Day.
It was certainly arresting. They had mocked it up very realistically by shooting it with their team all dressed as clowns. The image showed five of them standing disconsolately, reading the paper or scrolling through their phone, clearly with nothing very much to do. The headline stated ‘Who needs Clowns?’ and the subhead explained: ‘There’s more to PrimaParent than you think. Take your kids a bit more seriously.’
“It’s quite aggressive to clowns,” I observed. “We have loads of them registered, don’t we? I’m not sure we should be attacking them in public. We might upset them, and no one likes to see ‘the tears of a clown’.” Ignoring my feeble humour, they mounted a well-prepared case for why the art of clowning was rapidly dying out. There was significant evidence proving that children were now afraid of the murderous
appearance of traditional clowns. Entertaining kids these days required a better look.
We debated the ad for some time. Alice was all for it, believing that clowns were symbols of the ‘entertainment patriarchy’. Julian hated clowns too, associating them with unhappy trips to the circus with grandparents attempting to cheer him and his sister up while their father was in prison. Clark, our newest addition, was entirely rational and felt that the ‘data suggested a brand net gain’. Only the brooding and increasingly dark Dimitri, who rarely commented on marketing, had a curious loyalty to them. He cited some ancient Ukrainian folklore that suggested if you cross a clown you will meet with misfortune or, at the very least, a nasty rash. In the end, the overwhelming consensus was that we needed always to be challenging, even if we lost a few sellers along the way. We were rather brazen about the risk of reputational damage.
The campaign ran with considerable investment from us, the first conventional advertising we had ever attempted. For a few days, we got favourable and amused comments. Then an extremely disgruntled deputation from the aforementioned Global Federation of Clowns arrived at our offices. Their commitment to the cause was such that they arrived in full clown regalia. I found myself in the unexpected position of sitting with Alice in a meeting room with four people dressed like Ronald McDonald. Resisting the urge to order a Happy Meal, we listened intently to their anger and agreed to think about it and respond.
The campaign was due to end ten days later, so rather than lose money pulling it, we told them that when it was over, we would not run it again. (We had no intention of doing so anyway and were already working out the next minority group we could offend with the follow-up.) Sadly, hell hath no fury like a pissed-off clown, and this was not acceptable to them. They decided to demonstrate as often as they could outside our offices. Since none of them could find much work as a clown, this turned out to be weekly.
At first, it was distracting but not problematic. It garnered a lot of publicity and the prevailing view was that clowns were contradictory, as children could not be entertained by a character they found frightening. Then the demonstrations got angrier and more disruptive. A discernible shift in public opinion suggested we were acting like corporate bullies. When an article appeared in the business pages of a Sunday paper claiming that ‘PrimaParent is exhibiting the tantrums of a spoilt child’, we knew it was time to act.
On that January morning, I asked the GFC’s executive director, who used the nom de guerre ‘Lovable Giggles’ but was really called Roger, to join us in our office. We apologised to him, handed over a sizeable donation to their benevolent fund and agreed to eat humble custard pie by printing a retraction ad. A couple of weeks later, we took out a full-page in The Times with the headline: ‘This is what happens to naughty boys and girls’. The visual was seven clowns with custard pies in their faces. Excruciatingly, we knew we had to appear in our own ad to show some contrition. I made sure I stood at the back and was unrecognisable under my orange wig.
The ‘Clown Wars’ were a sobering but ultimately useful experience. We turned opinion back in our favour, and there was a positive correlation between any news story and engagement with our site. It also showed that we were now no longer a scrappy start-up looking for fame at all costs. Everything from now on was a fight to preserve our reputation and behave with integrity rather than opportunism.
***
Our love of PR always got us extra scrutiny from journalists and bloggers looking to halt our progress. There were several examples of our vulnerability.
A few months before the clowns, we had to weather a drugs bust. One morning, the lift doors opened and a battalion of uniformed police emerged, to the confusion of our half-awake workforce. I was quickly called to talk to DCI Helen Mason, who asked me to take her to two developers, Jan and Michael. Being something of a coward, I was completely intimidated by the arrival of law enforcement officers, who were all much taller than me, and led them meekly to the two individuals. Ashen-faced, they frantically tried to do something to their computers and were immediately arrested.
It turns out they were running an amphetamine and ecstasy distribution business from our offices. Using the dark web and our servers, they controlled a network of East London couriers responding to orders. We never saw them again, but the investigation was time-consuming as an angry and shocked Dimitri had to help the police unravel what had happened. Jan and Michael had been popular and engaging members of the team, without attracting attention to their side business. Dimitri took the betrayal very badly and it made him angrily question his control of the people who worked for him. We obviously hoped to keep the story out of the news. Not so the police, who were eager to showcase how they had uncovered a multi-million-pound drugs business outsmarting the technical wizardry of an arrogant start-up. They couldn’t wait to host a press conference, and we found ourselves defending our integrity from news stories that revelled in headlines like this:
DRUGS FACTORY ASSEMBLED IN PARENTING
WEBSITE… AND THEY WEREN’T USING LEGO
Our corporate self-defence went into overdrive and there were a number of consequences. We had to ensure a code of behaviour among our young staff based on zero tolerance of any drugs-related misdemeanours. On the orders of Brooke and Cole, we reluctantly introduced random drug-testing, which we hated. Overnight we went from being liberal and tolerant to an unforgiving workplace with a rigid code of conduct.
Moshe had little concern for the physical well-being of our staff but was truly horrified that there had been such a dramatic breach of security protocols. He sent his beloved Avi Ram with a small team to review our systems and to introduce some bespoke protection. Dimitri was incandescent and insulted by this intrusion, doing everything possible to be unhelpful. We had to intercede at one point to prevent him taking a hammer and smashing the laptops of the exuberant Israelis ordering him around. When they left, he became like an insecure dictator afraid that power was slipping away and imposed the equivalent of IT martial law on his team. They could not get a glass of water from the kitchen without his consent. It would be fair to say that he was no longer considered an inspirational team leader.
We sensed a divine power resented our success, because it was one bad story after another. Some weeks later, I received a call from a journalist who gleefully asked me to comment on the situation with ‘Threads for Teds’. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so he emailed me the article he was writing, giving me almost no time to digest its implications before calling me back.
Teddy bears were always in need of decent clobber, often arriving at their new home in nothing more than a flimsy scarf. ‘Threads for Teds’ was the solution to that problem, offering a host of costume choices. Now they could be dressed as Construction Worker Teddy, Cowboy Teddy or Biker Teddy en route to the YMCA. They even had a bespoke made-to-measure range. The ambitious start-up prospered with us, particularly due to our international expansion. Americans loved fancy-dress soft toys, it seemed.
Unfortunately, our teddies were being kitted out courtesy of ten-year-old children in several well-hidden factories in Myanmar. The horrific story was made worse by allegations that they were being kidnapped from their families. UNICEF was leading an international investigation with a thorough examination of their supply chain. To make matters worse, their success, for which, as a major channel of distribution, we were partly responsible, meant the evil factories could be linked back to us.
The journalist relished my discomfort at this revelation. Pushed for a comment, I spluttered something spontaneous about being horrified, shocked and angry and said I would lead a major investigation into our vetting procedures. Unfortunately, I did not do the most obvious thing and sever our commercial relationship. The next day a headline appeared, decrying our hypocrisy:
PRIMAPARENT: PROFITS
BEFORE CHILDREN
Alice had to instigate a huge review of our sellers, introducing new terms of business conduct that took great effort t
o implement throughout our global organisation. It also became an open season for critics to undermine the rapidity of our growth, highlighting a lack of ethical behaviour.
We built a big PR team to deal with daily negative stories, using Twitter extensively to bolster our response when under attack. Naively, I had assumed success would mean days spent with feet up on the desk, chomping on a fat cigar. Little did I imagine I would be grappling continuously with endless complaints from disgruntled parents around the world about children’s parties that had gone wrong. (Imagine little Sven’s disappointment when the piñata we ordered proved indestructible.)
We were attacked for promoting books with dubious moral content, and criticised for not having a view on Brexit, failing to endorse Trump, having a Jewish founder, and selling designer dresses to under-tens. The more famous we became, the more an unseen global chorus of criticism would come our way. If our PR team grew fast, our legal team grew even faster. Julian hired Charles Tomlinson from Disney as chief counsel. Charles was a bundle of neurotic energy. He trusted no one, was volatile and prone to bouts of unexpected anger. His desk was covered in mounds of randomly assorted paper and his coffee consumption was prodigious. The giant sweat patches under his arms would spread like a rancid oil slick during the course of a stressful day. He was perfect.
Commercial contracts and litigation started to flow freely. First, we had publishing, distribution and talent deals to sort out. We also had to ensure that our seller arrangements were watertight and internationalised as we spread across territories. If a product was late, if a service did not live up to its description or if a download didn’t work, we were threatened with some form of legal action. Most of it was fairly harmless stuff – amateur attempts to win compensation, often through the indiscriminate use of Latin. You know the sort of stuff. We were threatened with a bit of habeas corpus because we failed to use lingua franca and were caught in flagrante delicto.