The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus

by Adam Leigh

  Razia was unbelievably keen and would say ‘That’s so exciting!’ to any task given to her. I had a project akin to counting grains of sand on a beach. As she stared at me with a commitment to dedicating her young life to the service of our start-up, I anticipated her face crumpling when I delivered her assignment.

  “Razia, I need you to recruit a team of a couple more willing victims and then you all have three weeks to compile the biggest database you will ever prepare. I want every children’s entertainer, party planner, caterer, bouncy castle inflator, clown, present-maker, toy manufacturer, tennis coach, circus skills trainer, personal tutor, wrapping paper manufacturer. You get the picture. We need them by postcode, and we need them for the whole country.”

  “Oh my God, that is so amazing!” Well, I didn’t see that coming. Not even the vaguest expression of fear or suggestion of being daunted by this Herculean data-gathering exercise. She picked up her coffee, desperate, it seemed, to get started. “I have a couple of friends who we can get in and they’ll love this. Can we pay them, although I’m sure they’ll do it for the experience?”

  I was thrilled that we had found such willing cannon fodder and told her that money was of course available, as was a hotline to Domino’s Pizza at all hours. We didn’t speak again for the next few weeks, but if I looked in her direction, she would give me a thumbs up and then bury her head once more in her laptop. She was quickly joined after this briefing by nameless friends recruited to the task. They never really left the office for three weeks and sat rooted to their computers, emanating an odour of intense effort combined with poor personal hygiene.

  They, of course, did an exemplary job and we had a database of nearly fifteen thousand names in the allotted period. The achievement was significant. Three people working a fourteen-hour day, seven days a week, producing five thousand names each. That works out at about two hundred and thirty names a day or seventeen names an hour or a new name entered into our records every three minutes. That list gave us a foundation of contacts to build on and became the rather cumbersome manual methodology we used when we rolled out across international markets.

  Armed with this database, we developed a plan to announce ourselves with a flourish. Julian and I realised early on that we had to be noisier and more brazen in our attempts to get noticed. In one of our earliest conversations, we had divided up responsibilities for how we would go about being brash and opportunistic in how we marketed ourselves. I was charged with recruiting a creative ‘council of war’ of talented individuals, primarily from the advertising industry, who could generate ideas, make films and help us get noticed. Julian, it transpired, had a very impressive black book of entertainment contacts, from actors to agents and producers, garnered from both his legal career and years of basically being well connected. We had a bit of a head start.

  ***

  Strategy and planning are of course essential, but the overriding ingredient to our success was much more ephemeral. We were lucky. This manifested itself sometimes in not getting destroyed when things went wrong, as they frequently did. Primarily, however, we had two enormous dollops of divine intervention that we could not have anticipated. Dollop one was down to Julian’s connections.

  I had convened a group of designers and writers who agreed to moonlight for us. In turn, I promised them eventual equity in the business, which would make them squillionaires. They were led by Frank and Frankie, a married creative team who worked together with great success, illustrated by the many awards displayed on their mantelpiece at home. Full of ideas, they were either bickering constantly or simpering over one another like teenagers.

  At our first gathering, I briefed them to come up with an idea for a film that would make the world talk about us before we had actually done anything or even launched. I reminded them we were loath to spend the money we had just secured, so we had to pull in favours and freebies. They disappeared back to their day jobs, and a couple of days later Julian and I were chatting over coffee when he suddenly announced, “You know, I completely forgot to say, Charlie Evans told me that he was happy to help us however we need.”

  “Not Charlie Evans, the comic actor star of Baby Boomers?” I asked with incredulity. You will remember that, by then, it was about Series 3. It had become a major hit in the US. Charlie was hotter than boiling water. “How the hell do you know him?” I continued.

  “You remember when he was caught for possessing Class A drugs?”

  “No?”

  “Exactly. He had an amazing lawyer. Got him off and kept it out of the papers. He told me the other day that he’ll appear in a promotional film, anything we want.”

  “You couldn’t have remembered this when we briefed everyone the other day?”

  “I admit, not my brightest moment. We should probably tell them, shouldn’t we?”

  “Oh, my word, I am working with an incompetent. Of course we should tell them. We can make a film with one of the biggest stars in the UK. This is the biggest slice of luck imaginable.” I called Frank and Frankie immediately, but they sounded unimpressed.

  “Well, we could use him, but we might want to do something clever with animation instead,” Frankie informed me. Not the reaction I had expected. I pointed out that they would have to march over my dead body before we produced a promotional cartoon rather than utilising this incredible opportunity.

  Clearly, they valued me alive, because a few days later they came to the office giggling with enthusiasm and announced to Julian and myself that they had solved the problem and we could after all create an amazing film fronted by Charlie Evans. Julian and I smiled at each other and thanked them profusely for their creative flexibility. The idea was very simple and did not change very much from the original script to the finished film.

  Charlie played the worst parent in the world. Lots of snippets of him doing things badly. Reading a bored toddler Great Expectations, preparing a tea of quinoa-based elaborate salads for a number of kids, dragging recalcitrant children round an art gallery full of esoteric modern art, watching them unwrap birthday presents of random irrelevant and inappropriate items (from garish ties to bottles of fine wine to random antiques), and finally watching black-and-white subtitled French films with a snoozing child. It was the perfect and obvious use of a celebrity famed for sharp British wit and foppishness wrapped in a personality lacking self-awareness. There were two simple title screens at the end:

  Soon there will be a better way to parent.

  PrimaParent.com. Family First

  Making the film was a surprisingly smooth process. Charlie was on a break between series and coerced his team to work for free, including the director. We shot over two long days in March and kept costs down to a minimum. Charlie was very funny, facial expressions and ad libs creating this persona of a well-intentioned but clueless parent. Without really too much trouble, our un-launched and customer-free business had an advertising campaign that could be global in its reach. I told you it was a big dollop of luck.

  We now had to disseminate our message to an unsuspecting world.

  ***

  Growth. Growth. Growth. It’s all start-up businesses worry about. How many new customers, how many new likes, how much more engagement with our website or downloads of our app? It is interesting that ‘personal growth’ is about making us better human beings, looking at our weaknesses and fears and making progress in countering them. ‘Corporate growth’ in the digital age is about eyeballs and sign-ups. Money is raised, an online presence is created, and driving the quest for global domination is a twenty-first century dark art: growth hacking. Dimitri and I were responsible for devising tactics, scrupulous or not, to generate sign-up of customers and sellers. I would think of what we needed, and he would execute the technical sleight of hand to ensure its delivery. There were a number of strands of activity.

  We had our launch film. The first job was to get it out quickly. We were lucky, of course, that not only was Charlie very famous, but he had an unhealthy and s
ometimes inappropriate obsession with Twitter and therefore a huge following. On 2 May, we got him to tweet the film with the message ‘Très Amusant’. (Not our choice, but he wanted to do it in his own style.) Julian made a number of phone calls to his coterie of influencers and got them to do the same thing. We also sent the film to Moshe with the brief ‘Can Avi get this out there?’ We chose not to ask too many questions about the methods he was going to use.

  By 16 May, we had over two million views on YouTube and that figure rose significantly by the end of the month. Most people just watched the film, but over 4 per cent of the views clicked through to the newly launched site. Dimitri built in lots of clever cookies and traps that meant if you did not register, we knew where to find you and could come back in full force to make sure you did not escape.

  Within the first five weeks, we managed to get fifty thousand registrations of interest from customers and, most importantly, just under two thousand potential sellers. This was cemented by an email campaign to the huge list compiled by Razia, which one might call more of a bombardment. OK, so we were a little bit lax in securing consents and opt-ins. But at that time, we confidently felt that there were likely to be few future consequences.

  Concurrently, Dimitri got to work on making sure we appeared everywhere through a very aggressive search strategy. Somewhere in time, marketing a product had changed from making sure that someone saw your advertisement to being sure you advertised yourself to anyone that expressed an interest in your category by typing a search request into Google. The industry had transformed dramatically and what made you rich and famous was your ability to bend the Google algorithm to serve your own needs. We knew we had to be very clever in making sure that if you made the vaguest enquiry about a parenting need, we were the obvious solution that was offered.

  Our ethics were further challenged by Dimitri one day a few weeks into our hacking. He asked to see me and Julian privately and started with a question neither of us expected.

  “What would you say if I told you that we have access to the customer data of a major retailer and the largest online greetings card business? So many potential customers.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked with incredulity.

  “Let’s just say I know some people. Completely untraceable. No identity. Basically, they live underground in countries you will never visit.” Julian, as ever, was inscrutable. He seemed intrigued by the revelation but did not smile.

  “It’s illegal, Dimitri,” he said. “You could go to prison.”

  Dimitri smiled and winked at Julian as if to say, what a quaint and impossible eventuality. He replied with a palpable smirk.

  “You are very naive. Do you not think the world’s most encrypted data is available for a price? This has no cost attached. Someone is helping me because I once helped her.”

  “Favours can come at a price, Dimitri. Are you sure that we could contact people and our methods would be untraceable?”

  “Julian, you are a nice guy. I should take you on a tour of the dark web. This is nothing. Alex, why are you not saying anything?”

  I was silent because I was torn between an impulse to seize this opportunity and an awareness that it would be wrong to do so. I mean, it was hardly a major crime. We’d send out some messages to people who could choose to ignore them. The transgression was really a matter of principle derived from who actually owned some data. And because the digital world is out of control, our data is clearly susceptible to being purloined or hacked by someone. Conversely, had I started a business founded on supposedly being a better human being, only to lose perspective on what should be a clear moral decision?

  I was rapidly turning into Hamlet deliberating the question of ‘to breach or not to breach’. By now, Julian had made up his mind about a course of action and was expecting me to agree. Driven by a realisation that to get where you need to you have to overlook the odd principle, I nodded my head and simply said, “We never talk about this again. Julian and I know nothing about what might be about to happen. Capisce?”

  “Capisce,” Julian replied.

  Dimitri looked at me enigmatically.

  “I wish I understood what you are talking about most of the time, Alex.”

  ***

  These early days were really just about creating fame. If you call someone a ‘hack’, you are suggesting they are only interested in writing for money, with little artistic integrity. But call someone in a start-up business a ‘growth hacker’ and you are marvelling at their opportunism and skill. We were very proud of our cavalier disregard for probity and ethics in acquiring new customers. Our aim was simply to get noticed by as many people as possible. Fame was generated by our film with Charlie and its immediate ubiquity. It was enhanced by the volume of data we mysteriously had to play with. We realised, however, that PR was about so much more, and we needed to create some ideas, stunts and events that announced our arrival.

  Big time.

  9. Self-Publicising

  Dodging the summer rain, I wearily trotted into the office, tired and lacking energy after a particularly punishing few days. As I entered, the mood seemed subdued and the room went silent for a moment, as if everyone was trying to hide something from me. Julian hadn’t arrived yet, but Alice saw me and came running up clutching a tabloid.

  “You’d better see this. We’ve made the paper.”

  “Already? That’s amazing,” I shouted, and gave what can only be described as an extremely badly co-ordinated fist pump. Alice shook her head wearily and handed me a copy of the Mirror.

  There was a large colour photo of a very cute ringleted girl, flanked by her parents, with the doleful expressions of a family whose pet hamster has been accidently flushed down the loo. The headline read:

  DID SOMEONE ORDER A BOOZY CASTLE?

  A drunken delivery driver working for the appropriately named company ‘Bouncy Mayhem’ had got into a fight with Tabitha’s grandfather and run amok among the jelly and ice cream until his arrest, which became a quasi-siege as he crouched behind the fairy castle claiming to be armed (with a hand-pump only, it transpired). Tabitha’s incensed father knew a journalist and hence the story ran on an otherwise quiet news day. The article concluded with the disastrous sentence:

  We contacted PrimaParent and a spokesman commented, ‘I don’t know what the fuss is about. The reservation system worked perfectly.

  I suddenly felt even more exhausted.

  “Who took the call from the newspaper and gave that idiotic comment?” I shouted with unfamiliar anger in my voice. There must have been a mouse scuttling across the room, because suddenly everyone was staring intently at their feet. After a moment of silence, Dimitri piped up from behind his bank of computer screens.

  “I spoke to someone from some paper. Why?”

  Suddenly all became clear. And terrifying.

  “Dimitri, what on earth did you say?”

  He looked bemused. “I told them that our site did what it is meant to do. It recommended someone for a party and facilitated the reservation. Why is it our problem if the man got drunk and started a fight?”

  I suppose I was grateful that at least further investigation wasn’t necessary, as the smoking telephone was in Dimitri’s hand. Angry father informs journalist friend who speaks to emotionally incontinent but genius chief technical officer. There was only one outcome possible.

  Julian arrived shortly afterwards and frowned as he read the article. We sat with Alice in The Bored Room and debated our response. We did have a couple of enquiries from other journalists and ensured that the calls came to me. I wrote a short statement about how upset we were and that the only memories we wanted to create were happy ones. We decided to buy our way out of trouble. We ordered Tabitha the most expensive fairy princess costume we could find, hand-sewn by magic pixies and enchanted squirrels. I personally took it round to her, a good move as it placated her father and he even let me take a picture of Tabitha, looking like a slightly bemused Tinker Bell
. The case of fine wine we also purchased shut Mum and Dad up most effectively.

  We knew we had to tough it out and turn this experience into a lesson in how to manage an unintended and inevitable consequence of the quest for fame. Julian said to me several days later, as the pressure subsided, “Well, it could have been worse.”

  “I suppose the delivery bloke could have thrown up on Tabitha.”

  “Not quite what I meant,” Julian continued. “Have you seen how website traffic has spiked since the article?” I hadn’t actually checked, and he was right. We had seen a huge increase in people not just visiting but engaging with us.

  “I think Dimitri could be an asset in more ways than we thought.” Tact and diplomacy were clearly overrated.

  ***

  Awareness, fame, curiosity – ours was not a complicated PR strategy. We were well-networked, but we had to be loud and obnoxious as often as was possible. This initial piece of adverse publicity was actually in stark contrast to the rave PR we had been receiving.

  First, we decided to have an enormous launch party at Soirée, the nightclub Julian had a small stake in. We got quite carried away with planning a very cool and chic late-night gathering that would be crammed full of celebrities, journalists, bloggers and influencers enjoying our alcohol-fuelled largesse. The party planner (a friend of Julian’s, of course) was due to come in with initial ideas, when Alice caused us to reconsider. She had not been involved and made an obvious point we had overlooked.

  “Look, boys, far be it from me to interrupt your attempt to recreate Woodstock or the last days of the Roman Empire, but I think you are missing something quite important.”