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
Training FAIL: Media Training Goes Sideways: True Stories from the Trenches
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Exploring professional mishaps in the world of media training, our guest expert media trainer, Guy Clapperton, shares candid stories from 20 years of journalism experience that reveal how technical difficulties, difficult clients, and embarrassing moments become valuable learning experiences.
• A particularly memorable mishap involved conducting interviews from an unflattering camera angle focused on the "left man boob"
• Managing difficult clients presents unique challenges, especially when company directors intimidate their staff during practice interviews
• Clear expectations must be established before training begins to avoid conflict between stakeholders
• The most challenging trainees are those who don't believe they need training and are just there to show off their existing abilities
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Guy, this show is called From Fuck-Ups to Fame, so we tend to talk about your world is all about crises, dealing with media interviews. Is there one fuck-up in your professional career that you can think of that you've done something wrong and you've learned from that you'd like to share? We've had some people share some exclusive ones, from losing businesses to all sorts of bits and pieces. It always makes for an interesting story because people don't tend to talk about their mistakes, but I think our listeners really enjoy it and that's the theme of the show. So I just wondered if you had anything. Or are you that good at media training? You've never fucked anything up.
Speaker 2:Everybody has these things happening. Often it's stuff that's beyond your control. We're struggling with a weak internet connection at the moment and that has been known to mess up entire media training sessions. Before now we've had Virgin into repair it, or whichever media company I use. There was once a case where I've had to abandon things. It came very occasionally because of a bad connection. This is over. You know about once that's happened over the last 20 years, so that's been pretty bad. I've mentioned already that incident where I had to conduct interviews for my left man boob. That was pretty bad.
Speaker 2:I think that that's quite memorable as the worst one um, the other uh ones, that uh it. It tends to be when you've got people who aren't sure why they're there. I was, if I'm interviewing, if I'm um training somebody. I once had a company where the guy was there, the um, the pr person, was there, and a lot of the marketing people were there, and so was the managing director of the client, the end client, and he felt he was there just to support the other people.
Speaker 2:And yet every time they did a practice interview, his response immediately was if you said that in a real interview, I'd sack you and I was completely at sea. I can't possibly say, no, you can't sack people like that. I did at one point say to him and I was completely at sea I can't possibly say, no, you can't sack people like that. I did at one point say to him and I regret saying to him I sort of almost snapped back and said, well, I'd be very interested to cover the story about constructive dismissal if you did so. So I think that's probably me not managing people's expectations correctly in many ways. But the worst occasions are when the person doesn't think they need any training. They're just there to show off.
