Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to the world's number one podcast on Marketing Mistakes by Prohibition PR. This podcast is specifically for senior marketers determined to grow their brands by learning from real-world screw ups.
Each week, join hosts Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, seasoned PR professionals with over 45 years of combined experience, as they candidly explore the marketing failures most marketers would rather forget. Featuring insightful conversations with industry-leading marketing experts and value-packed solo episodes, the show tries to uncover the valuable lessons from genuine marketing disasters and, crucially, the tips and steps you need to take to avoid them.
Chris and Will bring practical experience from founding the award-winning PR agency Prohibition PR, where they have successfully guided top brands to significant growth through PR strategy, social media, media relations, content marketing, and strategic brand-building.
Tune in to turn f*ck ups into progress, mistakes into lessons, and challenges into real-life competitive advantages. Well, we hope so anyway.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
When Twitter Turned On Royal Mail
A single missing gesture can set the internet alight. We open up about a day when Royal Mail faced a fast-moving backlash over Paralympics stamps and how a quiet policy gap looked like a loud value judgment on social media. From the first surge of tweets to the uncomfortable hours stuck in monitoring mode, we walk through what happens when your team lacks the tools, approvals, and scripts to respond at the speed of the timeline.
You’ll hear how the narrative formed in real time: honour given to Olympians, absence for Paralympians, and a rush of anger that framed the issue as dignity denied. We unpack why silence isn’t neutral, why a clear holding statement can stabilise a story, and how early Twitter’s velocity made every minute count. Along the way, we get practical about social listening, crisis playbooks, and the small operational choices, like pre-approved templates and escalation paths that create big advantages when things go sideways.
We also talk about brand symbolism and equity. Commemorative stamps seem simple, but they carry cultural weight, and unequal treatment reads as exclusion. That’s why policy stress testing matters: diverse eyes, scenario planning, and checks for unintentional bias before a campaign goes live. If you work in comms, marketing, or customer care, you’ll find clear takeaways you can implement today: set up the tech stack, define who can speak when, rehearse the response flow, and protect your team with debriefs that turn chaos into learning.
If this conversation helps sharpen your crisis plan, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review telling us the one change you’ll make this week.
Is your strategy still right for 2026? Book a free 15-min discovery call to get tailored insights to boost your brand’s growth. 👉 [Book your call with Chris now] 👈
Subscribe to our Newsletter
✒️Don't miss a hilarious mistake or free event by 👉 subscribing to our newsletter here. 👈
Follow Chris Norton:
X, TikTok, LinkedIn
Follow Will Ockenden:
LinkedIn
Follow The Show:
TikTok, YouTube
We often ask people if they've been through a social media crisis. And these these bits always give me a little bit of anxiety, but also make me uh reassured that there's other people out there going through social media. So anybody that's out there dealing with a social media crisis, trust me, we've all been there. Um but you've put one in from Royal Mail, which I thought was quite interesting about the 2012 Olympics. Do you want to share the story behind that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um this was uh just after the main Olympics have ended. Um I've uh joined on a contract at Royal Mail. There's just whole all these big plans to roll out all these new initiatives, new website, etc. Um, new marketing team. We were with an interim team to prepare the the ground for the the permanent team that would come in that were being hired. Um the Paralympics uh were just beginning to start. I can't remember exactly. Uh anyway, a row broke out that um Royal Mail weren't going to do any stamps for the the Paralympians like they had for the main Olympians. Um and of course, you know, uh because they're disabled, etc., that this was really like annoying a lot of people. Twitter in its early, I think this was you know still quite early days of Twitter, and it just blew up. Literally, people were saying all kinds of things about us, and how could you leave these people out? Why are you ignoring the Paralymphians? Blah blah blah. Um because we were an interim team, we hadn't set up our all our sort of processes and and tools. Uh we we were literally evaluating a social listening tool called Meltwater at the time. We hadn't signed the contract. Um and there was no free trail. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and we couldn't uh we couldn't respond to the flood of uh inquiry, you know, not inquiries, but you know, tweets coming through. Um so in case of managing it, the only thing we could do was sit there. I literally sat there on Tweet Deck just watching all the hundreds of tweets and complaints coming through, and it was just like you just wanted to hide and not be associated with it. How long did hundreds?
SPEAKER_01:How long did it go on for that? How long what sort of time period? How long was it going for?
SPEAKER_00:I mean a normal nine to five work day. I think it around lunchtime it kind of blew up, and I was sitting there watching it for hours on end. I don't know if you ever use TweetDeck, but if you can you kind of put your feed fit feeds in and there's lots of tweets going by, then it's like uh it's just like a uh film reel or something, it's so fast. I mean you couldn't read little tweets, done that. Had we had something like meltwater in place where you can have sort of canned responses, the common themes we could have like sent something back, oh we're sorry, or whatever, we're looking at it, or anything, but there was just no response from us.
SPEAKER_01:Just silence. Did you not did you not issue a statement then saying we're gonna come back and respond and deal with it?
SPEAKER_00:The sort of PR guys and all that were uh after uh did issue some sort of response. But in that particular period when it was really like going mad on Twitter, there was not a lot I could do.
