A tale of fail.

Every time I start thinking about the badness of bigness, I'm reminded of a story told by the brilliant all-things-digital minds at the Hyper Island Master Class.

Seems that once upon a mid-aughts time, a Swedish social platform called Stardoll had charmed its way into Scandinavian market dominance on the strength of its tween-girl dress-up-your-doll fashion fantasy.

“Dominance" being no minor matter.

In fact, and in the blink of a digital eye, the site had grown hotter than a Barbie-on-Ken kabob at a Labubu beach bonfire with the company becoming Stockholm's — likely Sweden’s — largest employer.

Considering the plentiful and ongoing resupply of pre-teens, courtesy of Randy Svenska parents, there would have been absolutely no reason to expect any sudden reversals of fortune. 

Except for one except. 

Because that was the year all those doting m's and d's decided their adorable liten flicka couldn't possibly do without a shiny new Apple iPad, which, at the time, was incompatible with Flash technology

Flash being Stardoll's enabling technology.

Holy shit, or, as they more often say in Malmo, “men gud.”  If you remember Flash, you can easily imagine how it could turn a doll-dressing experience into a VSCO girl moment. Without it, maybe not so much, but that wasn’t the real catastrophe.

The real nuclear event came when all those Andersson, Johansson, Karlsson, Nilsson, Eriksson, Larsson, Olsson, Persson, Svensson, and Gustafsson LGs fired up their gifts to access their Stardoll accounts.

Brick wall. As in 404-page-not-found error messages. As in, sayonara and hasta la vista, baby.

And with that, traffic, eyeballs, revenue, and whatever else was life-sustaining for the brand fell off the fjord.  

In a single day.  

When I first heard that story, I recall thinking maybe Jay Chiat had it wrong when he famously asked, “How big can we get before we get bad?”

Maybe the real question, at least for the advertising industry, is “how big can we get before we get blind?”