**MOOPs** Episode 10 - Chris Hoell, Head of Marketing Ops at Twin Strands Biosciences

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals. Tune in to each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career. All right, Chris, thank you for joining Thanks for joining us for another episode of Moves TV. We are really excited to be learning from all of these guests that are coming on, just like yourself. You kind of teased before we started recording here that this is, this is a pretty fun one. So I'm excited to learn from you. I'm sure the audience is too. So to kick things off, let's just do some introductions. You know, who are you? What, where do you work? And, you know, how long have you been in the role? That kind of stuff. Why don't you share that with us?

Sure. Great. Thanks for having me, Mike. My name is Chris Hale. I'm currently head of marketing ops for a startup in Seattle, Twin Strand Biosciences. I've been with Twin Strand for about 5 months now, but I've been in marketing ops for about 12 years now total.

Nice.

Going all the way back to days as a— getting my feet wet with a company called Systems Maintenance Services, basically building out the stuff from scratch with a company that really had no idea what marketing ops was. We were basically doing a lot of dialing for dollars. It was actually a sales role and I kind of built myself into a marketing, kind of marketing ops role.

Nice.

Honestly, I hated calling, you know, 150 calls a day. So I built myself into doing marketing ops.

That's different than others, right? So a lot of us fall into it. You were like, no, no, no, I'm going in.

Yeah, yeah. I went to school, I got a marketing degree from college. So I knew what I wanted to do. It's just, it was 2012, you know, economy was not the greatest for marketing people. So I was in a sales role and I saw the need. I built it out, put together a business plan, pitched the CEO, and he goes, you know, go with it. Okay.

Nice. Well, good for you, man. That's awesome. Okay, so let's get into it. So pre-Moops, you know, what was it that you were trying to accomplish and what systems were you working in? And then, you know, What happened? Like, what caused this thing to break?

Well, what happened was, um, I was managing the email operations team for Getty Images. Uh, it was actually my first week on the job. Um, I had just moved from Minneapolis to Seattle, um, really just getting my feet wet. Um, and we were sending out a, um, kind of our weekly kind of image email to our entire customer base. Getty has over a million people in our contact base.

Oh yeah.

So I was working with our guys to basically get this, build out the email, get it tested, get it sent out and whatnot. We were working in Eloqua. Eloqua is our primary system, but we were— we had great developers at Getty and our developers were pulling— put together a script that actually pulled imagery from our Getty, from our Getty systems. We have millions of images, right? So we pulled a kind of a relevant image that would show up based on, you know, whoever the audience was. So we put it together, did it, did the tests, everything looked great. And we built this out so it would land at 9 o'clock local time across the globe.

Yeah.

So we started in US, you know, Eastern time through all the time zones around the world. Well, I get into the office at about 7 o'clock and I have about 20 emails. Oh my God, did you see this? Oh my God, did you see this? What happened? It turns out that our developer who had built the scripts to pull the imagery did not exclude nudity. And by this time, it had gone out to right around 500,000 people.

Oh boy. Oh boy.

So this is a— oh, you know, oh yeah, we gotta fix this. First thing we did is I stopped it, said, okay, we can't do this. Um, let's put a stand— let's ditch the script, put a standard image in so we can just keep going across everybody else through the rest of the globe. But yeah, it was— oh boy, if you had clicked on that image, the first thing you see is— It's just a woman's—

just a naked body.

Naked woman right there.

Oh my gosh. And so, oh my goodness, but what a, what a crazy— I imagine that you had, uh, different— obviously you probably weren't intending on sending out a bunch of, uh, naked imagery, but The— I'm imagining you have a bunch of different audiences that you're trying to manage different content for in general. So you're trying to test across all that. And so, you know, maybe there was a break in the testing chain or something, right?

Well, actually, the testing worked fine, but what we didn't—

we just didn't think of it was that it just purely pulled in the content.

It pulled a complete— it just pulled a completely random image when it sent.

Okay.

So when we tested it, it looked Great, it looked fine, no breakages. It's— but when it— we hit, hit the, the live go, it just ended up holding a random image.

Got it. That was that. Yep. Oh boy. So, so who actually noticed it? I mean, you sounded like you logged in and got the 20 emails, but like, do you happen to remember which of the, you know, 20 came in first?

Um, it was a bunch of our— we have global marketing teams, so there was a bunch from, um, Like our European teams, they were, they were seeing it. Um, and then we had some salespeople in New York who saw it. Um, yeah, my boss was angry at the time. And when we looked at— when we figured out what happened, you know, you have to laugh at it because it's like, I mean, we didn't do it on purpose. And I'm out here, I'm a week in and I'm sitting here going, oh shit, am I gonna get fired like 3 days on the job because I'm the one who okayed this?

Right.

Oh boy.

Uh, okay, so, so to remedy it, you wrote, uh, well, you stopped the email from going out entirely.

Stopped the email. Dropped a new image on, and then, uh, going forward, we figured out that we put the script in, we have to— our, our developers had to put that lovely exclude nudity.

Right, right. Yeah, pull that feature in. Or exclude that feature, I suppose. All right, so, so moving beyond the MOOPs, um, you know, what did you learn during the remediation process? Did you try to implement any new procedures for, for things like this, or is it just purely that you just wrote this new script? And, you know, did your process change in any way, um, in order to avoid mistakes like that in the future?

Uh, we did put a final review on, um, so we did put a little bit of a delay between like go-live so we could see it. And I had one of my guys basically sit up all night. I felt so bad. They would sit up all night and watch the drops go, make sure everything was okay.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Oh, my dogs are going off today. So this is a live recording, everybody. And so the final thoughts, what would you say to someone who, you know, has made a similar type of mistake? Just, you know, obviously maybe not sending out something as explicit content-wise as maybe yours was, but just generally, you know, making mistakes like this in a review process. And what would your advice be to fellow marketing and RevOps professionals out there?

Um, my biggest thing is, you know, you can put all the processes and checks into place and mistakes are going to happen. You know, we're human. The best— I mean, I always told my team when we make a mistake, you know, we're not curing cancer. You know, let's fix it, let's roll forward, and let's just don't do it again. You learn from it, you modify your processes, you modify your procedures, and it doesn't happen again. And if you can Do that, you know, you're going to be successful most of the time.

Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. Well, good deal. Thank you, Chris, for sharing your MOOPs with us. That is, uh, definitely an interesting one to say the least. But like, my goodness, uh, what a scary thing to wake up to on a weekend and see 20 emails about, you know, some explicit content being sent out to a large sum of people. But, uh, sounds like you guys put a nice fix in place and you learned something from it. So thank you for joining us on MOOPs TV. Really appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks, Mike.

Appreciate it. Oops.