In recent times, SDL Tridion have been putting out marketing videos on their very own YouTube channel. Each one takes a fictitious (or perhaps anonymised) use-case for their products and presents a fairly non-technical view of it by means of animated graphics, with voice-overs in disconcertingly generic varieties of British English. Never mind British, it's English English, of a sort of carefully not-too-posh-but-not-too-common-either, home-counties kind.

It's a bit strange for me. Obviously, I'm not the target audience. The videos are aimed at non-technical people who are not familiar with Tridion. Over the years I've got to know Tridion pretty well, both as a company and as a product suite. From so close up, the videos have an almost surreal aura. The multitudinous mismatches between the marketeers' in-world reality, and my own, leap out at me.

Why British English, when it's a Dutch company, whose biggest growth market is the US? Why this particularly strange variant of British English? (OK - full disclosure here; I'm a Geordie!) Is this the SDL influence, or does this come from US marketeers?

And are the examples real? I'm curious.

And so on....

As for the content, at least the most recent one (SDL Tridion WCM Platform for Syncronizing Online Content) had me jumping up and down in a couple of places. Like this: "... I can always revert back to previous versions of any content. It is important for our compliance department that we have proof of how a web site looked at any date in the past". Talk about a confusing message. Firstly, normal versioning in Tridion is not intended for that, and won't meet that need. They have a separate product called Archive Manager, which could be used to implement a solution for this problem.

Of course, if their marketing department were to put out a message aimed at someone like me, they would almost certainly deserve to be fired on the spot. It just hits my weirdness button. Know what I mean?