Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the essential top-ten pod for senior marketers determined to grow their brands all by learning from real-world screw ups.
Each week, join hosts Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, seasoned PR professionals with over 45 years of combined experience, as they candidly explore the marketing failures most marketers would rather forget. Featuring insightful conversations with industry-leading marketing experts and value-packed solo episodes, the podcast tries to uncover the valuable lessons from genuine marketing disasters and, crucially, the tips and steps you need to take to avoid them.
Chris and Will bring practical experience from founding the award-winning PR agency Prohibition PR, where they have successfully guided top brands to significant growth through PR strategy, social media, media relations, content marketing, and strategic brand-building.
Tune in to to turn f*ck ups into progress, mistakes into lessons, and challenges into real-life competitive advantages. Well we hope so anyway.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Marketing Blunder: When 500 Becomes 5K: A Coney Island New Year's Disaster
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The podcast explores notable professional mistakes and what can be learned from them. B2B Marketing expert Tom Basgil shares his experience organising a New Year's Eve fireworks event at Coney Island, where instead of the expected 500 attendees, 5,000 people showed up, creating major logistical challenges with insufficient facilities.
• Event was planned at iconic Coney Island amusement park district
• Organizers competed with Macy's monopoly on New York fireworks
• Infrastructure (porta-potties, PA system, vendors) was only prepared for 500 people
• Police were upset about the unexpected crowd size and inadequate security preparations
• The event happened in freezing temperatures, adding to the challenges
• The experience taught Tom to "prepare for the best, just in case it happens"
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The premise of the show is to talk about a professional or you know, yeah, professional fuck up that you've made in your career and what you've learned from it. So I imagine, tom, you've had no mistakes you've ever made anywhere in any organization.
Speaker 2:Is that right? Is that fair? You know, it's really. It's really hard to think about anything that I've ever messed up, yeah, when I think about my biggest, most public one, though. So I used to be in the consumer sector and I used to work in coney island, um, which is an amusement park district in new york. Um, very iconic um, a lot of the first amusement attractions were either shown there or you know, um and uh, we decided to do a new year's eve event.
Speaker 2:Um, and in new york there is macy's has a monopoly on fireworks. There are no near like, unless you get a special permit, they are going to do the biggest fireworks. It's on the river, it's this massive thing and we wanted to do fireworks. So we're like, okay, we'll build this event. Um, we think 500 people will show. Maybe maybe we'll get 500 people if we're really, really lucky and I build out porta potties and all these things for 500 people, right, and 5,000 people showed up, which was a little bit different than we expected. We had a great time, but that is a very significant difference in amount of people on a freezing boardwalk on New Year's Eve and it was freezing, and, uh, that was early on in my professional career. That might have been like three years in, so I think I learned a lot um well, you've done your job, haven't?
Speaker 2:you been getting 5 000 people there if it was getting people to the event.
Speaker 1:You've done brilliantly. I did great, yeah, so um why was it such? A struggle, then, because the queue to the toilet was enormous.
Speaker 2:Well, that was one thing, but you know we had some vendors and things like that, but it was not prepared for that many folks. We had a sound system, but it wasn't built for that many people. You know we had a small PA system. It was not really ready for this stuff, and you know yeah, small PA system.
Speaker 1:It was, it was not really ready for this stuff.
Speaker 2:Um, and you know, yeah, they were all sorts of uh, you know, the police were upset because we didn't tell them how many people were gonna bring. We didn't know, like we only had a couple of cops, so it was a whole. It was a whole thing, but it, I guess it taught me to to prepare, for you know, they say, prepare for the worst, expect the best. Um, I, I feel like you also need to prepare for the best, just in case it happens.
