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
I Took A Team To Paris And Discovered The Brief Was In Spam
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A missed brief. A room full of decision-makers. A team fresh off the Eurostar waiting to present a tailored proposal that never existed—because the client’s detailed instructions were quietly filed in spam. We tell the whole story with candour, including the costs, the embarrassment, and the uncomfortable gap between personal brand and reality when a simple system failure derails a big moment.
We dig into what professionalism really looks like in sales and agency life: not bravado at the pitch, but the boring brilliance of process. You’ll hear why “creds plus” only works at the right funnel stage, how attendee lists hint at evaluation versus discovery, and where most teams stumble when meetings evolve without explicit re-qualification. We break down practical safeguards—48-hour objective confirmations, shared inbox rules, whitelisting, pre-flight checklists, and backup comms channels—that make important emails unmissable and keep live meetings aligned with buyer expectations.
There’s also the human layer. Pride takes a knock when your edge is process mastery and the basics fail; we talk openly about that ego hit and how to respond without excuse-making. From rapid acknowledgement to a 48-hour turnaround on a tailored proposal, we share recovery moves that rebuild trust and sometimes strengthen relationships. If you sell, pitch, or lead client work, this story will arm you with simple, repeatable habits that prevent single points of failure and turn confidence into evidence.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a teammate who runs high-stakes meetings, and leave a quick review telling us your most expensive lesson learned.
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] 👈
Subscribe to our newsletter
👉 Subscribe to our newsletter here. 👈
Follow Chris:
X, TikTok, LinkedIn
Follow Will:
LinkedIn
Follow The Show:
TikTok, YouTube Instagram
What's what's one mistake you've made in your career that you've learned quite a lot from? I'm looking for a nice anecdote here.
SPEAKER_01Chris, I think I love this uh question and I love the the sort of basic premise of the um of the podcast, right? Because I say all the time, I learn far more from my failures than I do from my success. Success is ultimately a function of how you deal with failure. Uh, I'm going to tell you something that I've never where I failed, where I've never shared this with anybody, and I actually made a point of saying to the team at Hotwire, please, who were with me on this, please can you not tell anyone like this happened?
SPEAKER_00They're the best ones.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So uh we had
Setting Up The Failure Question
SPEAKER_01the opportunity to pitch a large French-based technology comp France-based technology company while I was at Hotwire. And we did a like creds plus and sent it to them. And uh, we then got a meeting in the diary for a pitch. Um, but um in that time, I hadn't seen any correspondence from the folks that we were going to pitch. And I um all we'd uh but we had like agreed who else was going to be in the meeting, and my understanding was there was just like more people who weren't in the original like Creds Plus presentation that we did via Zoom. Okay. And we bought tickets to go on the Eurostar to go all the way to France
The Paris Pitch Setup
SPEAKER_01to pitch to these folks face to face. Um we got there, got into the room, sat down. I had we hadn't done any like formal like proposal or whatever, because my understanding of the meeting was the creds plus that we'd done is what we were going to be taking folks through. Oh, okay. They'd sent me a detailed brief of what they expected to see in terms of a proposal or the rest of it, and it had gone into my spam and I'd not seen it. Oh so I've dragged, you know, uh an account team all the way to France um to do this, uh to do this, to do this pitch. And you hadn't done the pitch. And we had we hadn't done the like full pitch because I thought it was you know that we were taking people who hadn't been in the first thing through the creds plus.
SPEAKER_00And how many people did you take to to France with you?
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's two or three, I can't remember. But yeah.
The Spam Brief Revealed
SPEAKER_01The whole day out of the office, it's uh it's the it's the direct cost of the Eurostar for you know two or three people, three or four people, sorry. It's the um it's the indirect cost of well, what would we have done all day if we hadn't have done you know, done that? And it's a professional embarrassment for me. Like my whole shtick, right, when I was at um was at uh was at Hotwire is I am one of the only professionally trained salespeople in the PR industry. Most other um people that do newbies for agencies are either people that like pitching, so they like, you know, but they don't understand that like pitching is 10% of sales in for for an agency, right? There's all the stuff you've got to do to get into the pitch, and there's all the stuff you've got to
Costs, Consequences, And Embarrassment
SPEAKER_01do after to like make sure to negotiate a contract, get the right commercial terms for both sides, you know, um all the rest of it, right? To give the confidence that you're that they're making the right decision, you're the right people to go with, dealing with procurement, all that stuff, right? Spent my my life as a professional sales leader doing that stuff. So I was always I have this enormous advantage over these part-timers, right? Yeah, I'm a professional, right? You do this, you know, you do this is basically a hobby to you. I do this for a living, pal, right? Yeah, and uh I I made that kind of like absolute school, you know, like error, basically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so yeah, but you it went into your spam, right? So you
Pride, Profession, And A Humbling Error
SPEAKER_00didn't see that. So I can I'm on your I'm on your team here. Like what can you do with that? So d did you not get it then?
SPEAKER_01Funnily enough, we did not. I did I did think though, I was thinking about when you gave me the opportunity to think about other like you know, f ups or whatever that I've done in my career. It's not necessarily a complete F up by me, but it's one that I love.
