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 Mishap: Using My Name As My Password Wasn't Great
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Moving fast in business means making quick decisions that can sometimes lead to significant mistakes, as Jack Sutcliffe, CEO of Powersheds, found out when their website was hacked due to an overly simplistic password.
• Rapid decision-making is part of their business approach, which inevitably leads to some wrong choices
• Poor decisions have included selecting the wrong systems and hiring staff who weren't a good fit
• A major security oversight involved using "jack" as the CMS password
• The website hack resulted in thousands of Japanese pages appearing in Google search results
• Even after fixing the security issue, the compromised pages remained in search results for months
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So you must have made a few fuck-ups along the way. Shall we say Anything that springs to mind, either with this business or earlier on in your career, that you think, god, I shouldn't have done that I've probably made.
Speaker 2:Because we're so fast to move. We make very, very quick decisions, which means some of those decisions will be wrong. And there's lots of things systems that I've chosen, people that I've chosen to work with, members and staff that we've recruited, people that have chosen to work with members as staff that we've recruited that we shouldn't have done this. So there's there's thousands of things that I do wrong, probably every day. Uh, there's probably some bigger things I've done wrong, like I think um, I remember we, when we set up the passwords for our cms, for our system, to log in to our website, I put the password as jack, which wasn't a great password and we it's called jack no and obviously we got hacked so it wasn't shed.
Speaker 1:That would have been a really well shed one.
Speaker 2:That'd be the next one, our password yeah so we got hacked and um, and then suddenly on the when you got hacked? Did they hold you to ransom, or it wasn't like someone rang us up? What we found was it was a robot, because then we had thousands of pages on on the google search engine results, pages which were just in japanese, and so it was just a strange robot that had put links on everywhere yeah, so you probably got relatively lightly there.
Speaker 1:I mean, imagine if you'd had a kind of a data you know your data had been compromised now with way more.
Speaker 2:Yes, it wasn't customer details, it was our content that got manipulated. How long did it take you to notice that? It got noticed by customers saying what's this page and what's this mean? And then we were like so we got our developers to investigate it. They eventually found out what it was, but even though we fixed it, it took a long time for it to drop off Google it was, but it did, even though we fixed it.
Speaker 2:It took a long time for it to drop off google. Yeah, yeah. So even a few weeks and months later, they were still. It was still there and we're doing everything we possibly could to get rid of them, but it was just uh so the password the password now is jack 99 is it. Yeah, shed one, shed one. Shed one, two, three you.
