Inside the Haircare CGI Mishap That Stopped a Campaign Artwork

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.

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Embracing Marketing Mistakes

Inside the Haircare CGI Mishap That Stopped a Campaign

December 04, 2025 • Prohibition PR

0:00 | 5:20

As Creative Marketer Anil Manji joined the show, he reflected on an early-career incident that continues to guide his thinking today. We take you into this segment of episode 40, inside a haircare TV ad that reused legacy footage, layered on a week of pricey CGI to turn shampoo into conditioner, and accidentally created a texture that read like something no brand wants on primetime. The client’s blunt feedback changed everything, and once we heard it, we couldn’t unsee it either.

We break down how efficient asset reuse can backfire when context and semiotics are ignored, why fluid simulations demand more than photorealism, and how a single freeze-frame can become meme fuel. From the first treatment to the final cut, we map the decisions that led us there: close-up hair shots, a convincing squeeze-to-palm animation, and the overlooked risk in colour, opacity, and flow. Then we show the fix that is warmer tones, micro-bubbles, altered angles, and strand separation which pulled the work back into brand-safe territory without losing impact.

This conversation goes beyond one mishap. We talk perception checks, diverse feedback loops, and how to design review gates that ask, “What could this be mistaken for?” We dig into sunk-cost bias during CGI iterations, how to use cold reads at key milestones, and why creative teams should plan for what social media might clip and share. If you work in advertising, brand management, or production, you’ll get practical steps to reduce risk while keeping speed: better briefs for reused footage, early semiotic audits, and a culture where someone can say the awkward truth sooner.

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Click on this link to the full episode 40.

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Setting The Show’s Theme

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Um well the the theme of the show is um embracing marketing mistakes. So we we are what we often ask ask our guest um what mistakes have they made during their career and what they learnt from. With you having such a um a big career already and and you you're just 30, I'm imagining at the moment. Is that right? You're 30? What's the you you've put down a mistake here about a TV ad, which has made us laugh a little bit. So do you want to walk us through what happened in your CGI TV campaign?

SPEAKER_00 0:27

I'm very interested. Yeah, this one's a little bit gross, so apologies. But um, yeah, this was when I first started out my career. I was working in the world of hair care. Um, and we were launching a new conditioner campaign. Often what happens, this is one of the fantastic things about work in advertising, you learn all the random trade secrets. You'll often take a shot from another TV ad or an older TV ad, so you don't need to re-shoot everything. So if I've got a new advert with a brunette, I might talk to my American team and say, okay, do you guys have anything that we could use? And you just chuck it in. We did this with a new conditioner campaign. We had

The Haircare Campaign Setup

SPEAKER_00 1:04

a model with blonde hair, and so we took an old advert, uh a shampoo advert with a model with uh with blonde hair. Same brand though.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Was it same brand?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Same brand, yeah. Yeah. It happens all the time, all the time. Um and you wouldn't notice because you know sometimes the shot's like three seconds. So we used an older advert that featured Eddie Golding. It was a close-up of her hair, you couldn't see her face at all. Um, it might not have even been her in that particular shot, but you never know. We took that particular shot and we needed to turn it into conditioner. So we spent a huge amount of money on CGI, uh, looking at the application of the conditioner in the hair, thinking about the colour, the texture, the way it squirts out of the bottle, put onto the palm. Um, and we saw that iterative process. So, you know, every few hours we'd see it in CGI, and then a few days later we have the final product.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

So, how long did it take to do that? Up that process?

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Just under a week. It's uh it's really, it's a long time, really long time. Um and we finally packaged it up, put it into the main TV ad and send it off to the client for their review. We heard nothing back. Chased a few times, and then a few days later, I get a call. And I was quite junior at the time, so it's unusual for for me to get called about these things, but it becomes very obvious why a bit later. Um the client said, I hate it, I'm not putting this on TV. You need to you need to redo the CGI. I can't we can't just do that. It costs thousands. You know, what what's the feedback? We'll

Reusing Footage And CGI Plan

SPEAKER_00 2:40

try to fix it. And he just wouldn't tell me for a while. I finally got out of him. And he says, It looks like cum. And I was like, What? Sorry. It looks like cum. It looks like semen. Uh I'm not putting this on TV.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

And it was interesting conditioner. Two bottles into the shower. Um blind. I mean, I can kind of see how. I mean, I want to see the video now. God gonna lie.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Honestly, it was such an awful moment, and this particular client was male, and all of my managers were women, and I just don't think he really wanted to have that conversation with anything else. So you had to. Yeah, so then I had to go into a room with all of these senior people, the producers, um, you know, the agency

Client Fallout And The Reveal

SPEAKER_00 3:32

that was doing the CGI, and deliver this feedback. And the worst thing is, you look at it, and when someone says that, it clicks. And you're you look at it and you can't he's completely right. He's completely right. And it looks awful, and you could just tell, you know, you there's such a worry there when you're like, Oh gosh, if this goes out on TV, with the right editing, it could become a terrible but hilarious meme. Um Yeah, it was a horrible, horrible week.

People on this episode

Chris Norton

Host

Will Ockenden

Host