Alphahole (Alphahole Roommates 1)

“Did you go on the dashboard?” he asks.

“Yeah, I did. I uploaded a new ad. I uploaded new leaderboards on four platforms the day before yesterday. Ally made those fantastic banners.”

“Then, you screwed up and set the budget wrong.” He’s typing, clicking keys.

Did I? I’m stunned. I don’t think I’d be so careless. I always triple check settings that are changed for anything I do.

“I fixed it,” he grumbles.

“I honestly don’t think I did that. I could contact their helpdesk. See if there’s a glitch.”

He shakes his head. His father is in his office doorway now.

“What’s this?”

My heart sinks.

“One sec,” I say and dash back to my desk to have a look.

I hear Aiden filling his father in and Aiden sounds utterly irate about it.

I click through a few screens and my eyes nearly bulge out of my head. I click through to our internal lead manager software.

I rush back in there.

“Um, excuse me.”

Mr. C turns around and his eyebrows are up.

“I honestly don’t think I made that mistake. I’m extremely careful. But, if I did, it may have been serendipitous. And only because I told it to switch to contextual.”

“Because?” Aiden pushes.

“Because the conversion rate on the new Lingo ad is 64% and we have four new leads, sixteen newsletter sign-ups since this morning. One of them is someone from Babylon Unlimited. Isn’t that Franklin’s number one customer?”

Mr. C’s eyes light up. Franklin is our number one competitor.

Aiden gives me a look that makes my blood run cold.

What the heck?

“Well, interesting…” Mr. C is scratching his head. “Who at Babylon?”

“I’ll check. I’ll send a message to the helpdesk at Lingo to trace that budget increase activity, but it might have worked out okay after all. They pushed it out via contextual ads in their email. Their search engine is outdated, yes, but they still have a huge following on their business email suite. A lot of big companies still use that email, so I flipped the switch to push our ads to email and their contextual network, but I didn’t change the budget. Unless they can prove we did this, I’ll be able to get them to credit us.”

Mr. C claps his hands. “I’m calling Brad in Miami. I want him running with the Babylon thing. When does that newsletter go out?”

“Tuesdays,” I reply.

“Is the next newsletter done?”

“It is. Queued up and all scheduled,” I say.

“I wanna see it. Can you get me a draft? We may want to strategize for a special copy going to the Babylon address only. Aiden, you and I need to talk with Brad about that. I’ll schedule a Saturday call.”

He smiles at me and rushes off.

Aiden is shooting lasers at me with his eyes.