Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Every marketing expert has a "greatest hits" reel, but their biggest wins are usually built on the back of failure. Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate bullshit.
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 screw-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past the vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes 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. 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 disasters into your unfair market advantage.
It's time to stop pretending everything is perfect and start learning from the biggest mistakes from the world's best.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Marketing Blunder: When 500 Becomes 5K: A Coney Island New Year's Disaster
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.
