This XKCD comic nails a truth most marketers forget: every shiny digital thing you rely on is built atop something invisible. Usually, it’s the unsexy stuff made by one person quietly maintaining it for decades.
Marketing analysis
Your marketing stack is a tower just like this. Google Analytics, your email tool, your CMS—each depends on “Nebraska Guy” somewhere keeping things running. When one fails, everything shakes. The smartest marketers know where their weak spots are and who keeps their tools alive.
Why it works
- Visual humor makes a complex idea simple
- Relatable for anyone in tech or marketing
- Highlights fragility—sparking urgency and respect
- Turns geeky infrastructure into a human story
Examples
- Cloudflare outages taking Shopify stores offline
- Facebook API changes breaking ad dashboards
- Mailchimp integrations stopping when a small plugin died
- OpenSSL bug (Heartbleed) shaking the entire internet
- A single npm package deleted, breaking thousands of apps