We hired a pigeon. He has notes.

Pingo the Pigeon is PingRoom’s mascot. In this fictional chapter, he joins us as Chief Marketing Officer. The bird is made of clay. The frustration is probably familiar.

His first request was a smaller chair.

His second was to cancel the meeting about introducing him.

We explained that people should get to know our new Chief Marketing Officer. Pingo looked at the presentation, then at us, then at the presentation again.

We are doing a blog post instead.

Before the title, there was the stairwell

Before he had a desk, Pingo had a route.

Across the landing. Down the stairs. Around the person who had stopped in the doorway to finish a story.

He was the unofficial messenger of an apartment building where everyone knew everyone, but nobody seemed to know when to come downstairs.

The taxi was outside. Someone had brought the spare key. The food had arrived. Small, useful things. Pingo would turn up, get the message across, and leave people to it.

He liked that part. The moment a person understood, grabbed their coat, and went.

He liked the people, too. Even the one whose “one minute” required sitting down.

Then the building got a group chat.

Forty-seven messages. One cold dinner.

The group chat was lovely at first.

Photos. Recommendations. A surprisingly detailed discussion about a chair somebody was giving away.

One evening, Pingo made dinner.

“Dinner’s ready.”

Someone asked which room. Someone answered a question from the morning. Someone sent a photograph of their own dinner, which seemed unnecessary given the circumstances.

Pingo tried again.

By the time the conversation returned to the original subject, forty-seven messages had passed. The pasta had become one large pasta.

He looked straight ahead. Slowly lowered his eyelids. Said nothing.

That was the look that got him the job.

Not immediately. First, he ate.

Our recruitment process had an open window

We met Pingo at the window of our little studio.

He had heard we were working on a way to send the small messages people needed. He brought a folded note. No portfolio. No introduction deck.

The note said: “Dinner’s ready.”

We asked him to tell us more.

He looked concerned that we had missed the point.

Eventually we pulled up a chair. Pingo told us about the stairwell, the taxi, the spare key, the dinner.

We recognized the problem. We had been trying to explain it for several paragraphs. He had brought it through a window on a piece of paper.

“What would you change about our marketing?” we asked.

Pingo glanced at the deck on the table.

“How much time do you have?”

His first presentation was one card

We had prepared slides about positioning, messaging, awareness and several other things that sounded important when arranged in a row.

Pingo arrived with one card.

Start with the person still standing outside.

That was his entire presentation.

He meant the person waiting at the door while everyone discussed where to meet. Start with what they need to say. Once they’re inside, leave them to their evening.

Then, if there is a joke, make it good enough to send to someone.

We offered him the CMO role. He asked whether the role involved more presentations.

We said we would work on it.

Chief Marketing Officer. Allegedly Chief Meme Officer.

Officially, CMO means Chief Marketing Officer.

Pingo has been telling people it means Chief Meme Officer. We have decided this is close enough to the brief.

His department will cover the important subjects: plans getting cancelled just as you finish getting ready; the voice note with an intermission; doing one email and needing a weekend to recover.

There will be reels. There will be small illustrated stories. There will be a bird doing something completely unrelated to the message he has not answered.

The joke should work even if you have never heard of PingRoom. You should be able to send it to a friend with “you” and consider the conversation complete.

Pingo is on the side of the person in the joke. He has been outside. His coffee has gone cold. He has also said “leaving now” while remaining extremely inside.

He has no moral high ground. He has very short legs.

What the job involves

His brief for the real team is less grand than the chair suggests.

When we explain PingRoom, Pingo’s job is to set up the situation: the waiting friend, the ready meal, the person who made it home. Then we show the real product and what it does. Pingo isn’t allowed to invent a button just because it would fix the plot.

He’ll be our regular face in reels and illustrated stories. Some posts will explain PingRoom. Some will just give you something to send a friend. His one standing objection is to a sales pitch after every punchline.

Public comments and stories people choose to share will give us more material to work with. The human team reads them and decides what happens next. Pingo supplies the look when we overcomplicate the answer.

He also reserves the right to end a post once the joke is finished. Meetings, too, although we are still negotiating that.

One practical boundary: Pingo is a character, not an autonomous employee. He cannot read your private Rooms, send Pings on your behalf, or make decisions about your account. His CMO title lives in our storytelling, not in your permissions.

His first campaign ends at the table

For his first campaign, Pingo proposed going back to dinner.

Same friends. Same table. Fresh pasta, for obvious reasons.

This time, the little message got through. Everyone came over. They sat down. Somebody began the story about the chair again.

Pingo let them.

He had never wanted his friends to stop talking. He just wanted them to get there while dinner was warm.

That is the kind of CMO we have hired.

You will find him in Pingo’s corner of PingRoom, in our stories, and occasionally treating a very small task as an entire working day.

For now, his calendar is blocked.

Dinner.