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
FAIL: When your business feels like your baby, you take the losses personally
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Chris Simmance, Founder of OMG Centre, opens up about the hard leadership lessons learned through emotional reactions to business setbacks and poor financial management in agency life.
• Letting emotional responses to client departures negatively impact team management
• Acknowledging how leadership mistakes create lasting negative impressions that can't be fixed with apologies
• Taking business losses personally while attributing wins to others
• Failing to properly understand financial numbers despite having management accounts
• Experiencing cash flow crises when client departures coincided with new hires
• Not properly provisioning for expenses like VAT bills
• Learning significant lessons that led to starting additional agencies
• Expanding into multiple businesses outside the digital industry through openness to learning
Is your strategy still right in 2026? Book a free 15-min no obligation discovery call with our host: 👉 [Book your call with Chris now] 👈
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Discussing Business Fuck-ups
Speaker 1You said that you've learned from your mistakes . This show is all about I can swear now fuck-ups . This show is all about fuck-ups . So come on then , give us your fuck-ups . What fuck-ups have you made that you've learned ? And you pull into your mentorship and your agency advisory role
Leadership Mistakes and Emotional Management
Speaker 1.
Speaker 1So , from a leadership and management perspective , I let the emotional aspect of the business impact the way I worked with the team . So , client left , I took an emotional personal feeling behind that rather than how can we make this not happen again , which then made me a pretty bad manager , slash leader , and I think that you know , as a big mistake was probably anyone listening to this that worked with me when I ran . One of the agencies will probably be nodding right now and going , yeah , that guy's a dick and they'll never not think that I'm a dick because at some point they won't listen . If they think you're a dick , will they ? Well , I probably just . Yeah , maybe they'll just be burning those effigies somewhere still . But you know , sometimes you realise that it's your business , it's your baby , all the wins are someone else's . But you know , sometimes you realize that it's your business , it's your baby , all the wins are someone else's , all the losses are yours and sometimes you get a punch in the face and , metaphorically , a client leaves or something happens , something goes wrong , and you shouldn't , but you do take it out on someone else . And that I learned the hard way because I realized introspectively later I shouldn't have done that and you can't apologize for that later . It doesn't work just by saying sorry and
Financial Struggles and Cash Flow Issues
Speaker 1the .
Speaker 1The other stuff was genuinely I did not have a proper handle on the numbers . I thought I did , I had management accounts , had all that sort of stuff , but cash flow was what was coming in and I thought we were doing great . And then , when one or two clients left in in the same period of time , just as you've hired one or two members of staff in the same period of time you suddenly realize , ah , crap , where's the vat bill coming from ? Um , and you haven't really provisioned for it properly . That that's I mean the .
Speaker 1There are a lot of agencies that are probably thinking right now , as they're listening to this , that yeah , I'm doing that right now . Crap , okay , and that's what happens a lot , because they just you , I , I , I . I thought I got it , I thought I had a handle on it . I didn't . And when I did eventually get a handle on
Learning and Business Expansion
Speaker 1it . I kind of realized that I've learned , like I've learned , something significant here and this isn't worth kind of just sitting in in one , hence starting the second agency . Yeah , I own a few other businesses outside of the digital industry and all of that's come from learning these things that I've just kind of , I say , happened upon but been open to learning as I go .
