Paul Christoforo, Ocean Marketing – The Short Version

Paul Christoforo, Ocean Marketing

This morning, a story went viral via Penny-Arcade – The epic tale of Dave (a customer) and Paul Christoforo (a self-proclaimed “Marketing Professional”) of Ocean Marketing Inc. It’s a long story, with tons of references which we’ll link to. But stay on this page, and read only this article, and you’ll have a quick recap of the events that led to Paul’s complete and shocking career suicide.

It all started with an e-mail Dave sent to Ocean Marketing, complaining about the delayed shipping of an item he had purchased – the item is not of questionable nature. In-fact, the item is fantastic, so I won’t even name it here. Christoforo’s company, Ocean Marketing, was contracted by the manufacturer of this great product to handle some of its operations. Since this fiasco, the manufacturer has severed all ties with Christoforo, as has most (if not all) of his industry contacts.

The customer’s e-mails, while eventually growing somewhat antagonizing, were far from over the line. However, Christoforo’s responses quickly grew combative, immature, and simply not the way you handle customer service. Especially as a representative of somebody else’s brand. Christoforo’s replies got so inane, Dave decided to forward the entire e-mail correspondence to Penny-Arcade, along with a number of other media outlets.

Why Penny-Arcade? And why does this have the general industry in outrage? Well for one, Christoforo name-dropped a lot of people in his correspondence with Dave. Such name-drops included: his PAX affiliatios (Penny-Arcade Expo), multiple press / publishing contacts, and he would even go on to name drop the Mayor of Boston as he argued with Penny-Arcade’s very own Mike Krahulik, who began corresponding on Dave’s behalf. Krahulik had promised to ban Christoforo and Ocean Marketing from PAX East, which only seemed to enrage Christoforo further.

Even in dealing with a true industry professional like Krahulik, Christoforo tried to pull his tough-guy routine. Using a schoolyard thug attitude like [paraphrasing] “I’m kinda a big deal buddy. Who the hell are you? A Nobody!”, Christoforo continued further down the rabbit hole, even going so far as to instigate Krahulik, practically daring him to write an article about the incident, claiming ‘all PR is good PR, so thanks!’ This gave Penny-Arcade all the justification they needed to drive Ocean Marketing out of business with a single blog post… Not to mention drive Christoforo completely insane in the process. With that, they published this article.

The article prompted a huge uproar of public outrage, not to mention a slew of new memes spurred by the countless spelling and gramatical errors seen in Christoforo’s e-mail correspondences. Hardcore Penny-Arcade enthusiasts, to which there are droves, took to Twitter and slammed @OceanMarketting (yes, “Marketing” misspelled) – which has since been shut down, and re-opened by a 3rd party as a parody account. Christoforo appears to be renaming his Twitter account routinely not in an attempt to try to avoid more criticism, so linking to it in this article is pointless now. Hilariously enough, all of his new Twitter account names appear to be misspelled like his original one!

Even GEICO - yes, “So Easy A Caveman Can Do It”, that GEICO – poked fun at the incident in a humorous response to former Treyarch community manager, Josh Olin (JD_2020), in a display of how social media management should be handled by brands. Judging by the # of retweets and favorites, we’d say whoever is in charge of GEICO’s Twitter account deserves a raise!

Of course, this whole incident led everyone cited in Christoforo’s rants to disavow him in an effort to distance themselves from the impending implosion.

The final nail in his coffin…

All this negativity led Christoforo to do the unthinkable… He actually impersonated the Director of Operations for The HAND Media, Brandon Leidel, in an e-mail to Kotaku, pretending to be supportive of Christoforo. This is the quoted response that Paul Christoforo forged: “[Ocean Marketing was a] 3rd party angecy we were using to help us… I think things are a bit blown out of proportion on this today.” – Signed, Brandon Leidel, Director of Marketing.

The real Brandon Leidel would later reach out to Kotaku from a verified e-mail account, condemning Christoforo’s attempt to impersonate him, and disavowing him in the process, closing with the words: “I personally can’t stand him.”

Now if you ask me, that’s the final nail in Paul Christoforo’s coffin. Career implosion complete. There was a very small window of opportunity to react rationally to this situation, and Christoforo blew it by attempting to impersonate somebody else in an attempt to put out the fires he started.

What Paul Christoforo should have done was immediately post a comment apologizing to Dave and all others mentioned in the e-mail correspondences, cited regret for his actions, and laid low. Instead, he tried to justify his actions, commit moral fraud, and go toe-to-toe with an angry mob publicly. From action to reaction, Christoforo couldn’t have made worse decisions. It is hard for me to imagine any circumstance where he will be working with anybody in this industry ever again… Certainly not as Paul Christoforo.

What are your thoughts?