Embracing Marketing Mistakes

FAIL: How I made 120,000 Anglers Angry

β€’ Prohibition PR

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Andy Green shares his biggest professional mistake from his time as deputy head of PR at Yorkshire Water, when he inadvertently angered 120,000 anglers by running a competition featuring a photo that violated pike fishing ethics. 😱

β€’ Angling Times (circulation 120,000) ran a front-page headline: "Anglers in fury over YW competition"
β€’ The fundamental rule in pike fishing is to catch, photograph, and then release the fish

Key lesson: 
When dealing with specialist subjects you're unfamiliar with, always consult an expert who knows the audience and subject matter. While a tad embarrassing, Andy notes his mistake was relatively minor compared to Government mistakes that can impact financial markets


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Speaker 1:

Andy, what's the biggest fuck up in your professional career and what have you learned from it? Well, someone's putting me up here saying I will, but I disagree with that. Now I don't know what we've got, but I once got on the front page. I was once an editor of a fishing magazine. So I used to be deputy head of PR at the old Yorkshire Water Authority. So pre-privatisation, they were responsible up for fishing licenses and stuff. And I ran a competition, uh, that inadvertently used a photograph of a young angler with a giant pike tucking into it, not realizing that the worst thing that any pike fishing can do is not to throw the thing back. And so the front page of angling times, which those days had a circulation of 120 000, had a big like head 96 point headline anglers in fury over yw. Uh, competition, a fishy one, and I've been the. Can I just add that?

Speaker 1:

A lesson from anything always in life. So if you're dealing with a specialist subject, particularly when you've got no knowledge of, always have, like an expert, someone who knows the audience, someone knows the product service you know close at hand there. So you know, yeah, so anyway, but uh, we live and earn but we grow from. That is it. Is it sorry just to go back through that, just to deconstruct that? Is it that the fact that they were eating the pike, that was annoying the anglers, right? Uh, well, it was the fact that there's a fundamental if you catch a pike, yeah, take a photo of it then throw it back, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the fact that he was eating it, right, well, the fact it was wasn't thrown back, that you know it was like dead and uh, not not put back in the waters for other anglers to have a go at and respect the pike perhaps on it, okay, wow, I mean, you gotta make careful when you're fishing. Kids, way to go, guys, yeah. But you see some of these cock ups about uh government, uh spokespeople who say something wrong and then they knock millions off the stock market and stuff, so, uh, you know, relatively like, maybe in grand scheme of things,

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