Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading irreverent podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate b*llshit.
Join Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, founders of the award-winning Prohibition PR, as they sit down with industry leaders to dissect the career-ending f*ck-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past any pretty vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes and completely failed companies, to social media crises that went globally viral for all the wrong reasons.
We don't just celebrate the f*ck-ups; we extract the tactical blueprints you need to avoid them yourself. If you are a business owner, or a CMO looking for a competitive advantage that only comes from real-world experience, this is your weekly masterclass in resilience and strategy.
- Listen for: Raw stories from top brands, ex-McKinsey strategists, and industry disruptors.
- Learn from: The errors that cost thousands and the recoveries that saved careers.
- Get ahead by: Turning other people's nasty disasters into your unfair market advantage.
If you have a story to tell and would like to appear on the show, tell us your biggest marketing mistake and drop us a line.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Marketing FAIL: How I made 120,000 Anglers Angry
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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. 😱
• Angling Times (circulation 120,000) ran a front-page headline: "Anglers in fury over YW competition"
• 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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Andy's Professional Mistake
Speaker 1Andy , 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
Lesson Learned: Always Consult Experts
Speaker 1. Uh , competition , a fishy one , and I've been the . Can I just add that ?
Speaker 1A 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
Understanding Angler Ethics
Speaker 1, 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 ,
