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
The Weight We Carry: Authenticity and Mental Wellbeing in Corporate Life
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Mental health neglect emerges as the most impactful career mistake, affecting happiness, security, and stability in both personal and professional realms. Many people recognise mental health issues too late, silently carrying burdens that significantly impact their relationships and performance.
Authentic Alex shares her story.
• Tendency to ignore mental health concerns until they become impossible to dismiss
• Personal anecdote about a friend struggling silently despite having a busy career
• Started writing about therapy experiences seven years ago, and grief on LinkedIn five years ago
• Corporate conversations about mental health have transformed dramatically in recent years
• Current global circumstances continue to place extraordinary pressure on people's mental health
• Many remain unaware of the burdens they're carrying and that they have the option to set them down
• COVID-19 intensified universal experiences of grief and mental health challenges
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Career Lessons in Mental Health
Speaker 1What's the one mistake that you've learned the most from in your career, would you say? Probably something around. Well, naturally, authenticity, but also something about not looking after my mental health or not being aware of the importance of that, and what a big part that plays in my happiness, my joy, my satisfaction, my kind of sense of security and stability in in life and work. I think it happens to so many people and I think we catch it really late. We have a tendency of ignoring that it's there.
Speaker 1I literally had a conversation last night with a very good friend of mine and you know he was sharing that.
Speaker 1You know he's not been in a good place for a long time and he's not told anyone and, um, he's got.
Shifting Corporate Conversations
The Burden We Can Put Down
Speaker 1You know he has an incredibly busy career and it just it has such a massive impact on our lives and on our families and our friendships and relationships, and I think I'm so happy that when I began talking about this seven years ago, I started writing things about what I was learning in therapy and I started writing about five years ago I started writing about grief on LinkedIn and that was back then where there was barely any of those kind of conversations, because societally, and especially in the corporate world. We weren't talking about that at all but luckily now that's massively changed and those conversations are being had and that content is being shared. But there's always room. You know, statistics are still high, especially with what's happening in the world and the level of chaos and grief and confusion and but all those kind of things is massively impacting people and I think there's a lot of people that may be unaware of what they're holding on to, that's causing that weight, that heaviness that I talked about at the start, that they're carrying, that may be unaware that they can put down. Yeah, I mean, yeah, most people have been through grief, and mental health is a big thing that I think everybody struggles with, particularly during COVID and all that made it accentuated and I thought
