Knock, knock…

Somewhere right now, on a Sunday, a marketer is opening a laptop to “just get ahead for the week.” 

Oof. 

Well, Sunday Scaries, meet your Sunday Funnies. This is the first ever issue of Crowd Work, the weekend edition of The Standard. It exists because one of us (ahem, Sarah … aka me 👀) said they wanted to write a funny newsletter and nobody had the energy to say no, which is also how most of the campaigns shipped this year came to exist. You can quote us on that.

So, yeah, on weekdays we make you better at marketing. On Sundays, we sit with what marketing has made of us. 

Please clap laugh.

I‘ve spent 8 years as a working standup comedian in New York City, which means an unhygienic man in a Rick and Morty shirt has told me, the one female comic in the room, to my face, over a flat Bud Light, that I’m not funny.

For the record: New York Comedy Festival selected me as Best New Comic. HBO put me in their Women in Comedy Festival. I’ve headlined festivals, appeared on Hulu, performed at Lincoln Center, and, for reasons that remain unclear to me, the United Nations. I’ve written jokes for celebrities, and David Cross, Taylor Tomlinson, Ronny Chieng, and Roy Wood Jr. have all shared the stage with me at one point or another. 

None of that matters in a basement stewing in body odor and blue razz vape smoke at 11:40 p.m. The room decides. The room decided that night that it was Rick and Morty’s turn to be right.

I bombed. 

There’s no dashboard for that. No attribution window or slide called “Key Learnings.” Nothing but silence with some gnawing texture to it, and a drive home doing forensics on a bit that died in front of 11 people.

Then, bam! I’m back in my marketing day job, where a campaign can fail so completely that the client stops answering emails, and the recap deck will call it “strong early signal.”

What I’ve come to understand… LinkedIn is an open mic. 

8 people on deck, 3 in the audience — and all 3 are waiting for their turn. Every person reading your post is also drafting one. Your audience is your competition, and your competition is your audience, so everyone claps for everyone, because the clap is currency and the exchange rate is brutal. 

In a basement, that means sitting through the host’s set with your coat on because the guy who goes after you is the guy who books the room. On LinkedIn, it means you like the post. You don’t want to like the post, but you like the post anyway. What? You think there’s pride in a career networking platform?! Think again. He’s a prospect, a hiring manager, or a man with a podcast.

They’re not there to be funny. They’re there, because just like in comedy, it’s the only room on earth where you can say the worst thing that’s ever happened to you into a microphone and a stranger will make a noise back.

LinkedIn is that room with a business-casual dress code. Same folks. Same material. Better salaries.

The differences are where it gets ugly (not unlike that Rick and Morty guy): 

• Comics get a light. 5 minutes, then a red bulb at the back of the room. Say what you came to say and get off. It’s the most humane invention in the arts. LinkedIn has no light, which is why a man you’ve never met is 900 words into a story about his daughter’s under-11 soccer game. She scored. He cried. He mentions, in passing, that it was his weekend with her. There’s a $2,400 tier for his thought leadership course.

• The audience is never wrong. If they didn’t laugh, the joke is broken. It doesn’t matter that your friends “liked” it. A comic who bombs knows which word did it. You move it 3 syllables left, and the next night it works. A Linkedin marketing post that bombs gets a meeting where someone suggests the market wasn’t ready. Half a trillion dollars in martech exists so nobody has to admit the post was horsesh*t. 

• A heckler pays cover. I have more respect for a drunk woman yelling that my sweater looks like a couch than for the entire comment section of a post about resilience. She bought a ticket and a two-drink minimum. The man typing, “Insightful, thanks for sharing 🙌” is farming. I’m not a crop, dammit!

Standup is the only job I’ve had where you find out immediately whether you’re any good. Marketing has built a sophisticated apparatus for delaying that moment, possibly forever, and we’ve agreed to call the apparatus a discipline. Consistency.

So this newsletter is a room. We’re going to say things out loud, in front of you, and find out.

Some of it will bomb. When it does, let’s make fun of it.

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard

DoorDash’s bad ad about buying ads

Introducing our first victim for Bad Ads … DoorDash’s ad to advertisers, which is like a dentist with brown teeth handing you his business card. 

11 words to tell me ribs are messy, which are 4 fewer than my last therapist needed to tell me I was the problem. The soap looks edible and the ribs look like soap with the wet sheen of Zac Efron’s face. Can’t believe someone at that agency rendered this in the wrong order, looked at it, and said “ship it.”

And the tagline "Life happens, we'll make sure you're there for it" is basically what a suspicious man in a trenchcoat tells you in a Target parking lot 10 minutes before you lock the doors.

h/t to our Emma Miller, who clocked the AI ribs first.

Alright, that’s my time! I’m George Carlin. See you next week. 

— sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked? Claude's output now carries a watermark that survives copying, pasting, and even some editing … and I love it. Gimme a receipt proving the good sentences were mine, because right now the only thing anyone believes I wrote is the typo in a client subject line.