Earlier this week it was announced internally that I am leaving the development organization. After a decade of coding in general and five years spent on two different Seapine products it was time for a change.

What’s the change you say? I’m glad you asked.

I’m now officially a member of our Corporate Strategy group with the somewhat silly title of Technology Evangelist. What this really means is that I’m going to be involved in a lot of content creation and messaging as well as strategic planning. Essentially, it will be marketing and analysis.

To be honest it is a bit of a weird feeling to be starting something completely new. I’ve changed jobs before but it was always linked to day to day coding. I’m still going to get the opportunity to program, probably for Seapine Labs, but not being on any kind of product development schedule is a tad unnerving. Thankfully the good natured grief I’ve been taking is at least dying down a bit and I’ve finally gotten all my junk moved to the right floor.

Why are you making the move? Again, I’m glad you asked.

One of the development managers here once said something to me that kind of went like this:

“You’re not really a Computer Science major, you’re an English major that got lost.”

What he meant by it was that even though my degree was in CS and I was actively working as a developer, I didn’t live and die by the code. I could be happy enough doing it, but at the same time I would also be happy doing other things. Some developers are defined by being developers, that is who they are and what they are meant to do. That’s never really been me.

Tangent: Did you know that I didn’t start college as a Computer Science major? It wasn’t even my second one. Or my third for that matter. Had I not suddenly come to the realization that I needed to graduate it might not have been my fourth either. (The others? Criminal justice, Electronic Media, Public Relations. Ironically, English is the one I skipped for Computer Science.)

So we’ll see how this grand adventure goes. It is always strange to leave a comfort zone for a new challenge, even in the same company. I’m not worried though. If worse comes to worse I can always find a sidewalk and cardboard sign that says: “Will code (or evangelize) for food.”

Marketing and advertising are things that for whatever reason I’ve always found terribly interesting. I’m not sure if it is because of the dynamic of trying to make something appealing to the masses or because it is a medium that plays toward a five second attention span. Not that I’ve ever been accused of that mind you. Wait, what was I talking about?

Bad puns aside, I’m not going to wax philosophical on what can be done to market a product or make some grand statement about how to make your company bajillions of dollars by following my simple plan that I invented while broke living out of my tiny one bedroom apartment.

No, today I’m going to talk about the single most brilliant job of marketing I’ve ever seen because it involved making the product stand out in a situation where it normally simply sells itself.

What I’m referring to is Captain Spacemen selling beer at a baseball game.

First, here’s a little background. About five years ago I was in Denver visiting a partner’s site with the previously mentioned Jeff Amfahr for Digineer. It was late September and the Padres were in town to play the Rockies so we headed downtown to catch the game. Not that it was much of a game, both teams were something like 20 games out of contention. The highlight on the field was Ricky Henderson playing left field right in front of our bleacher seats. He didn’t care at all about the game and was instead posing for pictures and interacting with the crowd. This was WHILE play was going on remember, it was that type of game.

But the event of the night, and the purpose of all this, was our introduction to the beer vendor at Coors Field named “Captain Spaceman.” Now, the old Captain looked like he’d lived a colorful life but he was certainly no dummy. In fact, he was a marketing genius. What he did was he had a pile of business cards with his picture on it and his cell phone number. He told us whenever we needed another beer to call him and he’d run over get us a couple. Pretty simple idea huh? We kept an eye on him all night and bought a couple of beers apiece from him. Through the use of some business cards and phone he was taking orders from the entire outfield, and if I had to guess, he was outselling the other vendors something like six to one.

I even found a picture of him online at someone’s flickr page:

Captain Spaceman

He’s even taking an order in the photo, and you can see his impact in that Brett stopped him to have a picture taken. I don’t actually know Brett, he looks like a nice guy who is having a good time though.

So here’s to Captain Spaceman, if you ever want to see some great product marketing go catch a Rockies game and buy a beer. You could probably even expense it as a seminar in diverse group advertising. (And you’ll get a beer and baseball game out of it. Score.)