If Marissa Mayers were to be a character in The Simpsons: Tapped Out game, then she would most probably have been assigned the task “Way over sleep for a Power Nap”, or someone did not feed her enough donuts to complete that task in double quick time. It proved to be forty winks too long, as the ex-Googler, now Yahoo CEO, allegedly missed a huge and pivotal meeting over dinner with ad executives over in France.
This might not be an annus horribilis for Marissa, but it certainly can’t be one of the better weeks that she has to go through this year. Earlier last week, Marissa Mayer picked up a whole lot of brickbats for her presentation at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Apparently, her presentation was touted to be inauthentic among the advertising community, among other misgivings with different folks in the industry.
Yahoo’s scheduled intimate dinner with ad agency IPG saw all of the top level executives from IPG and Yahoo attend, and because Mayer insisted that dinner was to be held at 8.30pm on the dot, many people had to scramble to rearrange their schedules in order to make it. Unfortunately, Mayer herself arrived 90 minutes late, and she excused herself, saying, “I’m sorry, i fell asleep.”
While this story has yet to be verified among the ad agencies, Suzanne Vranica of The Wall Street Journal has written something in the similar vein, so there must be a ring of truth to it. I wonder how will Yahoo recover from this social faux pas, or will it be like Uruguayan footballer Luis Suarez’s quote that comes to mind, “these things happen”?
Filed in . Read more about Social Hit and Yahoo.