New Hire Orientation
Hey there, and good morning! Thank you for arriving on time, ready, and eager to start your first day. We are absolutely thrilled to have a new employee start their United Front Incorporated journey! To help prepare for our adventure, your itinerary for today is as follows:
8:00 AM: Start Orientation and Mandatory Paperwork
8:15 AM: Introduction to Company Mission
9:15 AM: Office Tour
9:30 AM: Coffee Break (Coffee, Muffins, Bagels, Adderall, and Lemonade is Available in Employee Lounge)
10:00 AM: Meet and Greet with C-Suite
10:15 AM: Product Showcase
12:00 PM: Client Team Introduction
12:15 PM: Lunch
12:20 PM: Employee Benefits Selection
1:00 PM: IT Equipment Meeting
2:00 PM: Coffee Break (Coffee, Muffins, Bagels, Adderall, Nicotine Tablets, and Lemonade is Available in Employee Lounge)
2:30 PM: Desk Set-Up
2:35 PM: September Company Forecast Message from CEO
4:35 PM: Coffee Break (Coffee, Muffins, Bagels, Adderall, Nicotine Tablets, Prozac, Craft Beer, and Lemonade is Available in Employee Lounge)
5:00 PM: Company Happy Hour
7:00 PM: Closing Thoughts from CEO
8:00 PM: Finish Orientation
I bet you’re thinking: Wow! That’s a lot! And you’d be right, it is a lot. Here at United Front Incorporated, we work hard and we play hard. You’ll see just how hard soon enough, but for now, we just need you to sign a few forms—you know, just the standard, boring stuff. While you’re working on those, let me fill you in on United Front Incorporated’s mission.
The first thing that comes to mind when people think ‘United Front Incorporated’ is usually our outstanding and unwavering commitment to our clients. We’re dedicated to them. We love them, and they love us. It’s that simple. To put it metaphysically, we made our clients. Not literally, of course, but in terms of who we want our clients to be. Through our product, marketing, and sales teams, we’ve identified the perfect traits for a perfect customer: they’re loyal, they’re strong, they’re responsive to our campaigns. They’re everything to us, and in turn, we do our best to be everything to them.
We serve our clients by bringing them what no other corporation can: unparalleled, high-quality, instantly engaging, retention-holding, personalized content. You probably knew that by now, but it’s completely true, United Front Incorporated has the largest market share in the entire video streaming industry space, and that’s for a reason. We’re constantly dreaming up new media—new shows, mini-series, movies, documentaries, you name it—and we deliver it to our clients exactly how they want it, entirely based on their demographic data. In fact, our analytics team can pull up any of our clients, any of the 2.6 billion United Front Incorporated subscribers, and tell you exactly what content to deliver them to drive engagement. You might have noticed it yourself—you’re undoubtedly one of our own clients already! When you finish watching your favorite show, the entertainment just doesn’t stop there, right? We always come to our clients with the next best thing, recommended just for them.
This is a lot of information, but I want to emphasize that last point. It’s important. We empower our clients through curated, personalized content recommendations, and in turn, they live for us. It’s what we call a feedback loop, and it’s quite a thing to look at once you get your computer credentials. From collecting a person’s demographic information, we can tell exactly what type of content will stimulate their tastes. Data is fascinating! And, speaking of data, let’s do a quick, thousand-foot overview of how exactly we categorize our client base.
We measure each client individually using the following criteria (weighted from most to least impactful on our content personalization algorithm):
Sex
Race
Racial Animus
Political Belief
Religious Affiliation
Educational Background
Wealth
Number of Children
Property Ownership
Criminal History
There are more—over two thousand additional measurement criteria—but it’s best just to start with the top ten to give an idea of what we’re working with.
You might have noticed that these criteria categories are broad, but the truth is, they’re broader than anyone could have possibly even imagined! The sheer number of possible permutations for just a single person is humongous, and with 2.6 billion United Front Incorporated subscribers, it takes an awful lot of computing power to identify the right content for them, a total of 174.7 gigawatts per day—that’s higher power consumption than all of our competitors combined. And, understanding our core mission of delivering content to our clients, we’ve reached a bit of a crossroads: keep expanding our power usage (wastefully) as we accept new subscribers, or do we be the change we want to see in the world?
With all this in mind, our C-Suite has found a means of reducing our technology overhead: changing our client base. That’s right. It sounds absurd, but it really couldn’t be any simpler. Instead of altering our energy-hogging process of content curation to suite the needs of an infinite number of possible personal interests, why don’t we just change the interests? We know that certain people like certain things; personal qualities are heavily correlated with an attraction towards specific types of media on an almost one-to-one basis. This is abundantly clear from our data analysis. So, if we modify our client base over time, we can limit our scope, limit our algorithm, and limit our expenditures across multiple other fronts.
Allow me to explain: with 2.6 billion United Front Incorporated subscribers, our company has more reach than virtually any other organization on the planet. Cool, right? With that influence, we can have a real, measurable impact on the demographics of almost half the globe! You’re probably thinking: Wait. How is this even possible? You can’t change a person’s immutable characteristics! And you’re right, at least in the short term. We have our production team working out the details on this, but the basic idea is that through small, subtle changes in the media a person consumes, they themselves change. Now, obviously, if we show someone a scary movie, they’re not going to start believing in ghosts! But, if we introduce ideas bit by bit, slowly, over the course of years or decades, then the norms themselves change. Likewise, the people change too.
We’re not just doing this out of our own self-interest, either. We’re a responsible corporation. Think back to before your time, back to the movies and shows popular in, for example, the 1950s. Could you even imagine anything so sexist, racist, and exclusionary being broadcast on screens today? And things only get worse if you keep traveling backwards in history. Thankfully, the times we live in today are much more Diverse, Inclusive, and Equitable. But why stop? We have a real opportunity to elevate social solutions to social problems. By homogenizing different groups of people, say, on the political or religious axis, we can effectively eliminate the social strive caused by those differences, and at the same time curate the exact right content to drive engagement. It fits together too well to deny.
We call this initiative: The Perfect Subscriber. It’s a working title, so bear with us! Our marketing department is dying for a rebrand.
It’s all rather brilliant, neutralizing seemingly incompatible elements—people, I mean—towards one common taste, but there are limitations to keep in mind as we move forward; namely, you can’t make these changes too quickly, or else risk alienating a large percent of your subscriber base—and in our case, that would equate to hundreds of millions of people we’d be depriving of content! No, no. We have to do it slowly. A sort of de-Balkanization campaign.
All said, this will take time. The weighted criteria used to personalize content in our algorithm, the ten I shared with you earlier, clearly cannot change overnight. But, with enough of a coordinated effort across our departments, we can effectively bridge those gaps. Political and religious affiliation to start, then maybe racial animus, and then the others. You may be left wondering how we’re going to tackle the coalescence of sex and race, and, well, we’re still working on that. Nothing is impossible, and as an LGBTQAS+ ally, we’re doing everything we can to meld the sexes into one, but time will tell for everything else.
Soon, when we look back at the programming shown in years past, we’ll be able to appreciate how far we’ve come. Maybe we can eventually model our subscribers to take on social causes as a part of their personality! Instinctually! And, at the same time, create the perfect, singular content to keep their eyes on our streaming platform. Wow!
The opportunity to bring this change really needs to be taken, and here at United Front Incorporated, we’re doing what no one else can. I know I mentioned that it was our C-Suite that came up this idea, but really, it was the genius vision of our CEO. You’ll be hearing a message from him later this afternoon, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: he’s going to announce his campaign for the presidency! Can you imagine? We can’t wait to see him bring his vision to the forefront of American policy, and we’re so excited to bring you on board.
Now, let’s do the office tour! I can’t wait to show you the ping-pong tables in the employee lounge!
