Over the passed 5 days i have been trying to sort out how to make a particular type of rich media ad. Working with in the parameters of the ad vendor should be fairly easy. They have developed the ad type thus one would thing implementing it would be a piece of cake. Even if that piece of cake requires you to copy the code from a prior ad into a new add so it has the same functionality. One would think that and one would be wrong.
Friday last a sent and email to Vendor X, saying. ‘ive copy/pasted your example code, can you look at it and tell me if its set up correctly?’
“thanks for your email we will have a look and get back to you this afternoon.”
Great, well get this thing sorted and be ready to move on to the next thing later today. As 530pm approaches and still no word, i try and take solace in the fact that maybe even though their area code is similar to mine, maybe just maybe they are not in office and thus have a different set of office ours so later today could mean tonight for me. I checked my again. Nothing. Time for a follow up email. Just checking up. At this point its the weekend IMO, 830-9pm I check my email. Yea new message in the inbox. Vendor no, full of apologies says issue will be sorted and a solution will be to us by Monday morning. Great. Weekend shit….
Now Monday rolls around, 9am, 10 am, 11am, no emails solutions. So its time to fire off an email again. Later that afternoon, we are alerted to the fact that vendor as passed issue on to the ‘tier 2 team’, oh shit son watch us work it out! Tuesday morning, 10, 11am, maybe ill shoot out another follow up email. Noon, my project manager send out an email inquiring about our previous inquiries. Sometime around 1pm Tuesday we get a vendor response, tier 2 will have a solution by EOD. Now im not holding my breath but, my middle name is Give-chances so were off to the races to wait for the race to resume. Surprising as it maybe EOD came and went with out and email from vendor.
We wont even bother to redundantly recap Wednesday, please see Tuesday and extrapolate.
Checking my work email first thing Thursday morning, inbox, i new message, form vendor, with attachment. There is one attachment even though i sent them two and need to parts to make the ad work. Not to worry lets have a look see. The email said Tier 2 had fixed some compile errors on line x,y,z blah blah. Ummmm the issue wasnt compile errors it was was the stucture set up in the right order and was the basic syntax correct. A monkey could press a button and have the program tell you how ot fix the errors, the email was talking about. Well that was annoying but lets have a look and see what was done. OH fuck i cant open the attachment as tier 2 saved it in a newer version of the app im working in. GREAT! I was able to have Preys open and resave the file backwards before Vendor could respond to my request for a older versioned file. So after 5 days of waiting i I open the file, so the email made no mention of solving my questions, but itll be in the file right? ummm as it turns out Not in the file at all. IN fact it seems that it took 5 days to change 1 set of Microsoft quotes into Unicode quotes, and the deletion of 3 orphaned open parentheses (“(“). What took 5 days all but amounted to 15 seconds of copy edit….
Im still waiting for my original question to be answered.
While there are a ton of awesome ads created by agencies using EyeBlaster Rich media services, the technical support provided by the Eyeblaster account team has been horrible. Not to mention that this is also a quick overview of their incompetence, it in no way shape or form details the extend to which they suck. Were i to attempt that, i would’ve mention the support call i arranged only to find that the support tech didn’t have the app we needed to use on their computer; I would also mention on the same call the seconds after the tech stated how straight forward all this was, she then went on to admit she hadn’t looked any of this code in a long time- even though i was told this was new ad type for them which suggests it hasn’t been around for a long time. Or she and i have terribly different views regarding time and its length… I wish viruses on all of their machines. I also wished this ad issue would have been sorted on Friday last, so i don’t hold much hope for the computers dying from some new computer virus…. So suffice it to say that Rich media you suck!
below is the sketchbook page thats been sitting under my keyboard for the last few days, Lots of spaghetti. Searching lines Divine Time. Doodle in your down time, and on conference calls. Theres nothing better then an 8 way project kick off call that really only requires two or three of those 8 or more people to actually discuss things while the rest of sit there uncomfortably listening to information that doesn’t in anyway affect what were gonna be doing after the call, which will waste 50 minutes but produce 3-5 minutes of actual business talk while the rest is nervous pleasantries and attempts at levity; How bout we sack the levity and get some brevity and so i can get back to work, thanks.
Mother skeme- “i dont doodle”
Skeme- “you DOOO doodle”
Hev- “with all due respect, Mother skeme, heavylox also doodles”
***PROOF reading is for Pansies that care to be understood think someone might read what they wrote.
****** proof reading is for pansies that care to understood