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 small thing.
In fact, and in a then-unheard-of blink of a virtual eye, the site had grown hotter than a Barbie-on-Ken kabob at a Labubu beach bonfire with the company behind it becoming Stockholm's — likely Sweden’s — largest employer.
Considering the plentiful resupply of pre-teens courtesy of randy Svenska's parents, there would have been absolutely no reason to expect any reversals of fortune. Blessed with all that bigness and all that market strength, the future must have appeared smooth as a Swedish Bikini Team after a visit to the waxologist.
Except for one except.
Because that was the holiday season, 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, thanks to Apple trying to load all the online crack pipes with HTML 5, was entirely incompatible with Flash technology
Flash was Stardoll's enabling technology.
Oy vey iz mir or, as they 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 discoverymoment. Without it, maybe not so much, but that wasn’t the real catastrophe.
The meltdown came when all those Andersson, Johansson, Karlsson, Nilsson, Eriksson, Larsson, Olsson, Persson, Svensson, and Gustafssondaughters fired up their new 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 roughly a single post-holiday 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?”
