Chrysler Easter eggs

Three people have now written in to say that this 2009 Dodge Ram, taken from the Mopar site, is “for real.” (See our full story with more photos and details including the higher-power Hemis.)

But this is not a story about the Dodge Ram. It’s about incentives, Easter eggs, and Jason Vines.

By now you may know that Jason Vines resigned; buried in the story of his resignation, and not even mentioned by the internal Scoop, was Mike Aberlich’s retirement. One wonders if there’s a connection between at least the Vines story and the Ram photo.

Until recently, news was released in a traditional fashion by Chrysler. Major outlets and privileged reports got advance notice of big releases, letting them take the time to edit carefully (or not), with the inevitable leaks at times - one of the glossy magazines was photographed taking photos of the Dodge Challenger, unleashing that prototype months before the planned deluge.

Then, in what may have been an over-reaction to a photo prematurely released on a South American message board - a release that was somehow blamed by some on Allpar, even though we were about the last to post it, waiting for it to appear on Autoblog, Jalopnik, and other sources - last December. At that time, Allpar had the press materials for the January auto show, ready and waiting for posting; and as each car was leaked, we posted the information that was leaked, following the traditional “once it’s out, it’s out” logic. We did not like this system; it’s much easier to set articles to automagically appear exactly at the end of the embargo period than to suddenly have to post right away to avoid being the last one out with the news.

Allpar, by the way, has NEVER broken an embargo. We have, however, released information that was given to us by people outside the company - spy shots, rumors, etc. When given embargos, we honor them. When not given an embargo, we post.

Moving on, there was a lot of talk about the best way to handle this. Most companies would be clever and have a different version of a news story, maybe saying that a gear ratio was 3.91 to one person, 3.92 to another, etc., until the source was uncovered. Instead, Chrysler instituted an Easter egg hunt. News suddenly started to arrive without warning, showing up on any site they felt like posting on. Sometimes it was the Firehouse, sometimes it was the actual news page, then it was the corporate news page on the public site, then there was the internal Scoop. Suddenly we had to be looking at four or five different places at once, never knowing where the next big story would appear. Last week I thought Autoblog had gotten an exclusive on Challenger pricing, but it turned out they just saw a press release where we hadn’t looked recently.

It’s been nutty, and the only rationale I can think of for this, other than possibly having a deep-seated resentment of journalists and/or bloggers and/or enthusiast sites, is that someone might be getting bonuses or performance appraisals based on hits to their web site complex. If you know you’ll be rewarded for hits to chrysler.com, you release stuff there now and then, and hordes of people will have to check to see if anything’s changed. Nasty for the server guys who have to deal with the extra load for no good business reason, but nice for your personal metrics. If, that is, anyone is being judged based on this metric. I do recall that, when the PR people were trying to justify the most recent inane Buy German campaign, they used hits to the askdrz.com site as a public metric to show that the ads were successful. At the same time, they made darned sure they’d see a huge number of hits by making that site the only avenue for electronic communications with Chrysler (by customers and prospects, that is), and by launching a massive Web ad campaign that paid for hits to askdrz.com.

Of course, it’s possible that this jaundiced view is unmerited. That’s what happens when you take training in organizational psychology and apply it to seemingly unrelated facts. But let’s just say that Mr. Vines was being judged, one way or another, on hits to various web sites. What better way to get hits into the mopar.com site than by planting an Easter egg there? And what would you do if you were his boss and discovered this?

Then again, maybe he got a job offer somewhere else, or decided to jump off the sinking ship when he saw product or marketing plans. Maybe these seemingly unrelated issues really were unrelated. And I haven’t figured out where Mike Aberlich fits in, except that perhaps he, too, is tired of Chrysler being a basket case, after being the hottest automaker in the word a short ten years ago.