Chris Norton: 1:04

So this show is all about fuck-ups, then. We've heard a lot about your experience, but obviously in your experience I'm sure you don't make many, but you did share one fuck-up with us, which was from way back in 2006, called Walmarting Across America. Yeah, and before you start this, we've got a PR apprentice at ProVision and he sent me a message because he's seen this guest sheet, because I was discussing it with him and he did the PRCA PR apprenticeship and he thinks that this was part of the program.

Marshall Manson: 1:35

Part of the curriculum Amazing. So I can't wait to hear about what happened. So, look, this is a good story and I thought I'd just a tiny bit of context. I thought I would talk about it because, even though it's from 20 years ago now, there are some lessons that we can apply to particularly modern kind of influencer marketing, some real watchouts to learn from. So I hope audience will enjoy it. But this was quite famous. It was kind of everywhere for a while back in whatever. It was 2006.

Chris Norton: 2:10

So Walmart owns Asda, doesn't it? No, it doesn't anymore, it doesn't anymore.

Marshall Manson: 2:14

Because the guys who own the gas stations bought Asda, right?

Chris Norton: 2:16

Oh yeah, they bought it out. You're sitting here in.

Marshall Manson: 2:18

Leeds doesn't know who owns Asda.

Chris Norton: 2:20

Come on, man, we literally direct Asda House as well, I can actually see it out the window. Literally I'm looking out the window at Asda, they'll start throwing cabbages at me instead. I'll let that bit out, don't worry.

Marshall Manson: 2:34

You won't. So yeah, walmart, big retailer I'm sure most people have heard of it at least Big retailer all over the US, and we were doing some work with them. They were dealing with some really tough reputational challenges, some political, some more driven by marketing, but basically they were the biggest and therefore they were under attack. Some of that was related to union politics, some of it related to big national politics. All of that doesn't really matter all that much. Suffice to say, they were under attack and the people who were attacking them were organized and well-funded, and so we were trying to just build a case that look, think what you will of Walmart, but this is an American company, it's a good company, full of good people that plays a really important role in cities and towns all over the US. So, as part of a much, much larger communication strategy, so as part of a much, much larger communication strategy, a few of us were sitting around one day and kind of thinking about a few little tactical execution ideas. And here's so.

Marshall Manson: 3:37

In the UK we've got caravans. In the US we've got RVs. Okay, and if you don't know what an RV is, just check out. Breaking Bad. Well, why, indeed?

Chris Norton: 3:50

So Walter likes to make his product in the back of an RV as we would call it, if you're an American, good quality product, good quality product indeed.

Marshall Manson: 3:58

So RVing is a bit of a culture in the US, the way caravanning is here in the UK, and we discovered, sort of by accident, that Walmart had this amazing rule, and I actually don't know if this is still the case or not. So don't go doing this without checking it out first. Walmart basically said if you're driving around in your RV and you need to stop someplace for the night, you're very welcome to park in any of our parking lots. So you could do an overnighter in a Walmart store parking lot. Pay nothing, no problem. You know, they say go out in the kind of far reaches of the parking lot, don't park right in front of the store.

Marshall Manson: 4:35

But whatever, and actually it's a great thing because, if you know, in the US distances are long, you might be driving a few days to get from one place to another. Having a place you can park and sleep in your RV, get a little rest in, it's fantastic. We love this idea. And you think about the kind of portrait we were trying to paint of Walmart as a great American company, you know, facilitating trips in RVs for folks who you know just going out and enjoying the American countryside. You know what could be more red, white and blue than that yeah, families.

Marshall Manson: 5:05

Absolutely fantastic, right. So the idea was we were going to get some folks to go on an RV trip. We thought we'd get them an RV, we thought we'd outfit it with some Walmart branding and what we thought we'd do is we'd send them on a road trip and get them to stop along the way and write a blog. Now, this was before Facebook and Twitter existed, so no social media, pure blogging, right. So we thought we'd get them to kind of go out and write this blog and kind of basically a travel diary. So we liked the idea, we pitched it to the client, they liked the idea and so we went off to recruit the folks who were going to do the trip and write the blog. Have to be good writers, right. Well, yeah. So actually we thought it would be clever if we could find a pair, actually somebody who could do the writing, and then, ideally, if somebody was along to kind of take some photos.

Marshall Manson: 6:00

Youtube had only just started, so maybe a little video, but uploading from 3G, from the road probably not going to work. So, you know, some photos would be nice. So we were kind of thinking if we could find a writer, photographer, a pair, that'd be really neat. And, as it happened, one of the folks on our team knew someone Great Freelance writer. Husband was a professional photographer. This sounds perfect. So we asked them if they want to do it. Got to pay them some money, fine. So we get them to come in and I'm going to teach them about how the blog works.

Chris Norton: 6:32

Which platform.

Marshall Manson: 6:33

Typepad. It was TrueType actually, oh, okay.

Chris Norton: 6:36

Back in the day.

Marshall Manson: 6:37

Oh sorry, hang on. No, I misspoke, it's TypePad.

Chris Norton: 6:39

It actually was TypePad. I was thinking when you were saying that it was back in the days of blogging, because it was TypePad and WordPress.

Marshall Manson: 6:44

Why don't you ask me that again and I'll just agree no, it's yeah. So I actually have to say our designer, who was a genius and I've actually lost touch with but, um, uh, he built we. We thought it'd be really fun to um, to overbuild the thing, so we actually did three, three themes. So there was an Indiana Jones theme, there was like an Airstream 1950s theme and there was a third theme I can't remember what it was and they were all beautiful and you could sort of toggle between them. Um, you know, get different views, differentents. There was a big map that was going to be filled in along the way. It was really we had a ball with it.

Marshall Manson: 7:20

The development of it was as much fun as I've had doing any of this. So, anyway, so the two of them, our writer and photographer, come in to see me to get their blogger training. So that involves a bunch of stuff. I'm going to teach them what blogging is, because they didn't really know. I'm going to teach them what blogging is, because they didn't really know. I'm going to teach them how to use the platform. And then you know we'd done a lot of blogger training at that point. I was going to give them some just you know best practices in terms of blogging ethics.

Marshall Manson: 7:46

That was kind of the curriculum and I had a half a day with them. So our designer developer walks in with the laptop, with the site on it, and says, right, we've set everything up for you. Writer, here's your account with your name on it. Obviously, all your stuff will be bylined. Photographer here's your account. Anything you publish, it's going to say as all the blogs did at that time posted by Marshall, posted by Chris, whatever Flickr Indeed, yeah, and we had a Flickr feed for him actually it's a good shout.

Chris Norton: 8:15

We did have that.

Marshall Manson: 8:20

So anyway. So that was the moment where it all went off the rails, because they looked at me and said oh no, we don't want our names on the site. I said, sorry what they said oh, we're going to do this anonymously, we don't want to have our names on the site. I said, well, that's a bit weird. I'm going to have to think about that. I think we probably need your names on the site. So, whatever, we finish the training, I go away and I start talking to our bosses and people around the building. Whatever team, they don't want their name on the site. This feels like it's a problem, not sure. Anyway, we had some discussion about it. Ultimately, we decided that it was okay, we'd let the thing go ahead.

Chris Norton: 9:01

Anonymously.

Marshall Manson: 9:02

Yeah, if they wanted to blog anonymously, that was okay. We just have it.

Chris Norton: 9:05

Did you not think about maybe going to somebody else, Because you could have replaced them with whoever couldn't?

Marshall Manson: 9:09

you. This is a classic PR stroke marketing campaign problem, right? I'm training them on Thursday, they're leaving on Monday, right, last minute? Yeah Well, I mean, it didn't need to be any more or less last minute. Right, it was the right time to do the training. The site was built, they were going on the trip, so would we have done that three weeks earlier? I can't imagine a scenario where I'd done the training three weeks earlier.

Chris Norton: 9:30

Why did they want to be anonymous?

Marshall Manson: 9:32

I mean, I don't know. So I want to give them some benefit of the doubt here, particularly because it was 20 years ago and I've had no contact with them since. But my recollection is that they were both, in effect, freelance journalists and I think they were concerned that if their byline was on something that was fundamentally a corporate project, they might struggle in the future to get other freelance journalism gigs Got you got you.

Marshall Manson: 10:00

I want to be clear. That's an assumption on my part. I don't mean to impugn their motives with any. I have no idea. That's the best of my recollection. So we took their name off the site and we let them fly off to. I think they started in New Mexico. We let them fly off to New Mexico to start the trip and everything was fine. So they got to New Mexico, picked up the RV. It looked amazing. They started the trip, went from one Walmart to another and the idea was that they were going to interview other RVers that they encountered in Walmart parking lots kind of talk about the culture of that.

Marshall Manson: 10:35

And so forth, and I have to say they got some credit. They got some great stuff. Some of the stuff they were writing was just absolutely lovely. You know some really nice things about importance of Walmart and communities and so forth and so on. And then they kind of later in the trip we had arranged for a journalist who covered the company to come down and just bump into this and interview them. And the journalist did come down.

Marshall Manson: 11:03

In retrospect we didn't pick that journalist very well, but be that as it may, that journalist came down to meet up with them in a Walmart parking lot, did a lovely interview where these two said all the right things, everything that you'd hope for as a PR person for the company, and she wrote up this really lovely sort of 400 word story. But the last line of the story was, by the way, these two advocates for the company refused to give their names. They wouldn't give their names to the journalist. In addition to not having their names on the site, and let me guess this spiraled quickly and this opens a whole can of worms about all sorts of issues.

Chris Norton: 11:43

Why, why, why?

Marshall Manson: 11:44

Yeah. So now we go from having something that, if done right, is a really lovely kind of not very expensive nod to a community of people in the US who the company values, who values the company and you know a potential reputational positive. You know beyond that audience. Now you're into hang on a minute. This now feels really dodgy. Is this contrived? Why is the company doing this? You know, have they just made the whole thing up? What's the, what's the? And you start digging into motivations and whatever. And so the first couple of days after that initial story hit were pretty awful because there was a lot of interest in the company at the time. We were on the front page of the New York Times, we were on the front page of the Washington Post. We were on the front page of the Washington Post and what were the headlines? I don't really remember.

Chris Norton: 12:41

I've kind of blotted all that out of my mind.

Marshall Manson: 12:44

They were every bit as bad as you would expect, you know, but actually it was the PR and marketing trades that really hit the hardest, because the mainstream media was basically taking the angle of you know this a bit uncool, you know, controversy, whatever the trades were really, really dissecting it and hitting us for all the right. I mean to be clear, all the criticism we took was justified, but they were hitting us on the really nitty-gritty, granular stuff that I had been sitting in meeting rooms talking about four days earlier and getting wrong.

Marshall Manson: 13:24

So they got us. And I think the other big thing was this was Edelman in 2006. Richard and all of us in the company had staked out a big positioning on we're going to lead the way in digital and we'd done some really good work. I've got some clips actually some from Walmart at home on my wall that I'm genuinely proud of Stuff we were doing with bloggers, some of the stuff we were doing with content. We were there before anybody?

Chris Norton: 13:50

Yeah, you were. I was reading your stuff when you were doing that.

Marshall Manson: 13:52

It was great. Some of it was genuinely great, but we got this wrong. It was great, some of it was genuinely great, but we got this wrong, so anyway. So the first few days were pretty crap. And I was essentially in UK PR speak. I was a senior account manager at the time. In the US, I was a senior account supervisor. I don't know why the difference. I was a senior account supervisor. I don't know why the difference. So I was at best a sort of mid-level person in what was then a 3,000-person agency working for one of the world's biggest companies. It would have been really easy to pitch me overboard, right. And I remember the guy running the account came around to my desk in the middle of this and said hey, listen, richard's coming down tomorrow. He wants to see you.

Chris Norton: 14:39

Oh God Lovely.

Marshall Manson: 14:42

Great, hello, mr Adelman. And so Richard came down, who I maybe talked to, but I certainly didn't know Anyway. So I wound up sitting in the head of the DC office's office with Richard Shaking Pretty much yeah. And really thinking I was going to get fired In retrospect. Actually, in retrospect, 20 years on, I realized I never should have thought that, because if they were going to fire me, they just had an HR person do it right, yeah, yeah.

Marshall Manson: 15:08

Anyway, be that as it may, so I'm sitting there with Richard and he said right, let's talk about what happened. We went through it all. I talked about some of the points where we made the wrong call and I said, Richard, the moment I should have pulled the plug on this was when the two of them told me they didn't want their name on the site. That was the point where we should have known this wasn't going to work. Of course, the challenge was what. We built the site, We'd outfitted the RV, which was not a small amount of money, and we made all this planning right. So the sort of gravitational force of getting the campaign away was really, really strong.

Chris Norton: 15:45

We've all been there.

Marshall Manson: 15:46

Yeah, you've spent a ton of cash. You want this thing to go. If you've got to call a client and say we're calling it off, that's a terrible call to have to make. So, anyway, we had this conversation and at the end of it Richard said to me listen, we're doing stuff here that nobody's done before. Nobody knows what the rules are. We're working out the rules as we go. We have to trust ourselves to practice ethically at the highest level of ethics that we can imagine. We didn't get it right here as a no, we didn't, he said. But actually we'll learn a lot of good lessons from this and I want you and the team to go on and keep pushing boundaries and whatever else happens in my professional career, I will never not be an advocate of Richard Edelman on the basis of that conversation, because it would have been really easy to throw me overboard and say some mid-level guy in Washington did a bad job on this.

Marshall Manson: 16:48

It's his fault, he's taking responsibility and he's no longer with the company. Yeah Right.

Chris Norton: 16:52

How many times have we?

Marshall Manson: 16:53

seen that statement and Richard said no, no, there's a new thing. We don't know what we're doing. None of us knows what we're doing, and you guys are coming the closest to getting it right. Keep going.