Marketing Blunder: When 500 Becomes 5K: A Coney Island New Year's Disaster Artwork

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.

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Embracing Marketing Mistakes

Marketing Blunder: When 500 Becomes 5K: A Coney Island New Year's Disaster

June 26, 2025 • Prohibition PR

0:00 | 3:54

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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Show Premise: Professional Mistakes

Speaker 1 0:00

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 0:12

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

Tom's Coney Island Disaster

Speaker 2 0:21

. 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 0:40

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

Learning From the Experience

Speaker 2 1:30

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 1:35

you been getting 5 000 people there if it was getting people to the event .

Speaker 1 1:38

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 1:48

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 2:06

It was , it was not really ready for this stuff .

Speaker 2 2:08

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 .

People on this episode

Chris Norton

Host

Will Ockenden

Host