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.
We don't just celebrate the f*ck-ups; we extract the tactical blueprints you need to avoid them yourself. 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 nasty disasters into your unfair market advantage.
If you have a story to tell and would like to appear on the show, tell us your biggest marketing mistake and drop us a line.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Media Training Error: The Constructive Dismissal Quip That Sparked a Training Fuck Up
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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
Is your strategy still right in 2026? Book a free 15-min no obligation discovery call with our host: 👉 [Book your call with Chris now] 👈
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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.
