The Retention Specialist (Season 1, Episode 3)
Catch up on episode two here:
Or, you know, just start from the beginning:
And now, Episode 3
‘Hello Squirrel,’ said Target Demographic. ‘Long time, no see.’
Y Johnson smoked somberly, staring expressionlessly at his old nemesis.
20 years ago
The most interesting thing about the Consumer Tracking Academy (CTA) was the walls. Well, they weren’t walls — more like screens, really, showing real-time data from several sources at once. The walls were always changing depending on the conversation in the room, fact-checking the words of the particular speaker and providing contextual data for the benefit of the listeners.
CTA had been founded several hundred years ago, growing as technology would allow, a towering yet mysterious academy that helped make sense of the very caprices of humanity. A long time ago it was said that the study of Human Behavior could not exactly be called a ‘science’ because humanity, by its very existence, was a combination of too many variables that made it simply too tough to make sharp projections about basic behavior.
CTA was designed to spit right in the eye of that sort of thinking. It employed the most intrusive and invasive ways to collect human data (both meta and granular) and warp consumer behaviors as everyone deemed fit. It was not the sort of school that existed on any brochure in the world. Rather, quite like Hogwarts, CTA came to you.
Presently, a sleepy procession of freshers walked down the corridors, lethargically following a tall elegant lady who wore round spectacles.
A burly boy, overly eager to impress himself upon his new classmates, spoke hoarsely in their midst.
‘I’ve been here before,’ he said. He paused for a response, but no one responded.
‘I have been here before,’ he insisted. ‘Three years ago. My father and my aunt brought me here for sight-seeing. This place isn’t that secret if your parents know people.’
Again, no one replied him.
‘Seriously, I have been here! I remember that, er, wall? Exactly as it stands, right now, three years ago!’
And the screen shifted to record new data. Construction of the east wall. Fifteen months ago. Reason: to complement data on the west wall and provide two-part viewing for teams.
The hitherto sleepy crowd laughed at him, and he pulled back. In his shame, he tripped and fell over a very small boy wearing a fedora.
‘Ow,’ called the wimpy kid.
The burly boy, already angry, yelled ‘watch your step, you little…squirrel!’
The kid stared at him.
And he stared back.
‘It’s the moustache, right?’
‘Yeah. Makes you look rather squirrelly. Why do you have a moustache at this age? How old are you?’
‘Eight. You?’
‘Seven. And a half.’
‘You look older.’
‘It’s all this body fat. I’m Cornelius Ebuka. You?’
‘Y, pronounced Why. Full name Y Johnson.’
The brats shook hands.
Schooling for these ones was a breeze. But of course — they had been pre-selected when they were two years old, with their parents (or guardian, as in the case of Y Johnson) paid handsomely to set the conditions just right before their induction into CTA. No one knew the pre-selection criteria, only that it got tighter with each passing year. Only a few ever made it into CTA. Only a few ever made it out, and those who did had their data so heavily scrubbed that even they had trouble remembering who they were before they became…whatever people became after graduating from CTA.
On one of the lecture days, Ms Euglena (not her real name, of course) was teaching something very important.
‘Soon,’ she said, ‘you will no longer receive your lessons together as you are, right now. Some of you have…special inclinations, as you will come to understand in the course of this lesson. You will either become acquisition or retention experts in the field. It remains to be seen. What I know, however, is that there are some things that are universally binding.’
‘One,’ she continued. ‘If acquisition is weak, churn will be high. This is why we train everyone here in the art of acquiring customers with a 100% accuracy. Retention, the second skill, is a service we supply to the inept digital marketers and agencies of the world. It is a skill you will not need when you work with any of your team mates in the field, but it is a skill you should understand.’
A girl raised her hand in the group. Her name was Eugene (her real name; what a coincidence, right?)
‘Excuse me, Ms Euglena, but I believe Retention to be the follow-through to the initial acquisition. Customers must be delighted and engaged with to maximize their life time value and to minimize the churn rate.’
Ms Euglena smiled. ‘Someone has been paying attention. You get a ten-mark head-start.’
The ten-mark head-start meant ‘ten points’ really. Students amassed points for showing insight in their lessons, and it was added up until the day of exams. The ideal score per examination was 1000 marks, so it helped to have as many head-starts as possible.
Two students with negative head-starts huddled in the back, staring sullenly at the numeric walls.
‘We’re getting kicked out this year,’ said Y Johnson.
‘I had 594. 594. You know what the next ‘bad’ student after me scored? 895!’
Y Johnson only nodded, distractedly. He was on a 177 and knew he had it worse than Cornelius.
‘We have to get the maximum possible head-starts a person can get in the school,’ he whispered.
The walls changed to read: The Dumstramf Challenge.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Ms Euglena. ‘I was going to mention this eventually — I might as well right now. The Dumstramf Challenge is one of those impossible challenges we use to test the minds of students. It was a question proposed by Sir Alexander Dumstramf, one of the founders of the CTA in 1587. It goes thusly: ‘Indeed, it is said that the market cometh before the product, or the product is doomed. But where canst one find the product-market fit for a product no one will ever use?’
‘An antinomy, in the vaguest of senses,’ she coughed. ‘We stack 10,000 matriculation points on this challenge. It’s pointless — ‘ and she laughed. ‘It is impossible to win.’
‘Ma’am,’ said Y Johnson, asking his first question since he stepped foot in the school a year and a half ago. ‘Ma’am. If one were to take up this challenge, how would one go about it?’
‘Well first (and have you been in my class all this time? I do not recognize your face) you’d have to prove the absolute worthlessness of the product to any possible demographic. Next, you would have to sell the product to a verifiable market. You understand why this is impossible now, yes?’
And Y Johnson fell back into his seat. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
He turned dejectedly to Cornelius to comment on how stupid Dumstramf was, with his stupid challenges that only served to make him sound smarter than everyone else, but he was surprised to see a maniacal grin splayed across Cornelius’ face.
‘Don’t panic now, squirrel,’ he grinned, ‘but I have a plan.’
Now
It looked like it might rain. The clouds above grumbled their displeasure at this potential meteorological outcome. In this nondescript garage, The Boy With The Nose was being interrogated by three gentlemen in suits. They had soft faces and gentle grins, but they held guns so their intentions weren’t particularly vague.
‘Where,’ one of the asked conversationally, ‘is the Retention Specialist?’
‘He did not say, sir,’ said the Boy with the Nose.
‘I see,’ said the man. Then he whacked the boy right in the face.
‘Ow,’ said the boy, convincingly. ‘That hurt.’
‘Ah, yes. I expect that it did,’ and the man whacked him again. And again. And he just kept going….
The other two men watched on in measured combinations of scientific curiosity and primal bloodlust.
‘YOU ARE HIS AMANUENSIS!’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I do not know what that means, sir,’ said the Boy With The Broken Nose.
‘A, er — Eric, what’s a synonym for amanuensis?’ One of the men asked another.
Flipping through a dictionary, the other man responded: ‘I have here: prothonatary, scrivener, archivist — ‘
‘No, you idiot — something simpler!’
‘There’s nothing simpler that fits your contex-’
‘FINE! YOU’RE HIS BLOGGER INTERN. HAPPY NOW?’
‘Oh, I get it now,’ said the boy. ‘Yes, indeed. I am that.’
The man sulked. ‘Amanuensis is much cooler to say than ‘blogger intern.’ Where is The Retention Specialist?’
‘No idea sir.’
‘Well, then, I hope you’re not sentimentally attached to your nipples,’ the man said, as he lit a cigar.
‘I am not concerned with why you would try to tamper with the growth curve of a random betting company,’ sighed Y Johnson.
‘I know.’
‘I want to know what the plan is. This isn’t arbitrary. It looks like you wanted me to be at this location, right now, at this moment. What is your play, Cornelius?’
‘Call me Target,’ Target said, swelling imperceptibly. ‘You were always the smart one. How come you cannot figure it out already?’
‘I’ve been busy, and CTA has not really been on my mind in a long time. I’d hoped I would never see you again.’
‘Yet, somehow, you must have known that if it ever came to it, I would be the one they would send.’
Johnson took a long drag of the cigarette, extinguished it, kept the remainder in his breast pocket, then released the smoke in a slow, patient stream.
It began to rain.
‘It has been nice watching you play your games in the open world, Y, but a storm has been brewing in the horizon, and now it has climbed over the mountain. Your world is about to be rocked, starting…right….now.’
In a different location, a Boy with a Broken Nose was experiencing the peculiar agony of having several cigars put out on his nipples.
The saga(?) continues.
