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.
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Learn from: The errors that cost thousands and the recoveries that saved careers.
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7:05
We revisit Andy Lambert back in episode 93 to unpack the influencer marketing moment that changed how he thinks about influence in B2B. Andy explains how his team approached creators like a media buy, treating the partnership as a quick transaction and expecting one post to shift perception and drive signups.
He shares the campaign that made the lesson unavoidable. They spent £30,000 on a Facebook Live with a North American influencer, stayed late to watch the registrations roll in, and saw almost nothing. The mistake was not the talent. It was confusing awareness with intent, and expecting demand capture from activity that was really demand creation.
Andy then breaks down what he changed next. He focused on niche operators like agency owners, insisted partners genuinely use the product, and invested in relationships that build trust over time. If you are planning influencer spend in B2B, this episode will sharpen how you judge impact and choose the right value exchange.
Working in PR for the sides of the side of marketing that we come from, it's about relationships. And I suppose that's where media relations, influencer relations, all those sorts of things. I think it's important to build a relationship with that set of um influencers that you're going to work with and the r and have a reason for them to have a bloody opinion on what you're doing. So you just said that you had a problem in what you've done. Let's dive into that. Where have you gone wrong then in that sphere?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you said it yourself, Chris, because um I think the the cardinal sin that most people make is that they see it as a transaction and they see it like performance marketing, where it's like, well, here's the value exchange. You've got an audience, I've got money, let's make it happen. You know, that that can, you know, I'm not saying it can't work, but it's less likely for it to work. And oftentimes, and this is again another cardinal sin. Uh I see companies say, Oh, let's do a pilot, let's, you know, get 10, 20, 30 grand, whatever the number is, and you know, split it across five influencers and get them to post a bad, you know, our
product, service, whatever it is, and let's let's uh analyze the impact in a couple of weeks to post that campaign. Most of the times they'll be like, uh, a little bit underwhelming, right? Because you've done you've done two things. One, you've thought that people change perceptions just off the back of one post, right? Trust takes time to build.
Just because Chris or Will, you start talking about a widget or a product or whatever, you know, might put it on my radar, be like, ah, never thought about that before. But it doesn't necessarily mean that after one post, I'm going to use it ongoing. Now, if I keep on seeing you, Will or Chris, start to talk about things regularly, that's a different thing. Because then I can say, all right, you know, I've started to see how Chris or Will, people I respect, are using this in their workflow. And it now is more contextually relevant to me. So this is bear in mind, like a lot of the lens I talk at this through is is through more kind of complicated tech buying in B2B. Typically, that's the kind of that's the slice of the world that I I typically see and think about the most. So it's that point, transaction doesn't happen, you know, process buying process doesn't happen in a vacuum like that. There's other stakeholders to to engage. There's what we call hidden buyers, people that are in the COO or CFO positions that didn't see your posts, but they need to be influenced. Anyway, go on that forever. But anyway, transaction is a problem. Pilot, looking at things in these little pilot, you know, confined things and not stretching it out over the longer term, again, problems. And that's what we did with uh one particular influencer where we spent, you know, 30 grand for them to do a Facebook live tool of their audience. It just basic basically did nothing. And we fell into the usual trap of going, you know, oh great, this would be we could be stayed late in the office because this person was based in North America, and we're like, I'll watch the signups, come in, lads, and crickets, maybe five, ten signups. We're like, oh. Because we just again misunderstood the difference between demand creation and demand capture, right? We've just started to put this on people's radar, right? We started to create demand. We're this is not a transaction. So that's that's the primary issue that we've fallen into. So how do we how do we resolve that? And or how do we think about it better? Um, number one, we've got to think about the right value exchange. So, what what do these people do that we're gonna work with over the long term that really makes sense for us as a business? So for ContentCal, we spent time working with like agency owners because they were our target audience. So people
that also owned agencies that were gonna talk about us on our behalf. And I also made it you know mandatory for anyone that we work with that they have to use the product. If they didn't want to use it, that's no, I'd let them use it for free, of course, but they had to use it regularly. Because if these people were just willing to trade their thought leadership just to say, you know, just for a few bucks to talk about ContentCal, that's no good, right? I needed that, and the way I've kind of stress tested this in my mental model was like if these people are not advocating for us when we're not watching, then I'm not interested in them being an influencer, right? Because I need, you know, if Chris or Will, you are an influencer for Content Cal, or one of our ambassadors or whatever we call it, um, I want you in your private circles
to go, ah, you know what? I genuinely think you should use ContentCal because that's where trust is formed, not just in a singular LinkedIn post. And I think we we miss that as a as a thing. And that also, you know, that doesn't happen in a moment. That means, you know, the effort that I end up going to, that I would spend time with each of those influences. I don't just send them a brief and go, oh, we got X grand for you to post about us, and then go meet them, either virtually or face to face, understand what they do, build a relationship, get them bought into the product. It takes a lot longer that way. But then what I want is someone that's gonna work with me over the long term. Because one, they'll advocate for it on their own time, and two, they'll advocate for it over a longer period of time, because we know decisions in B2B product buying take time. So anyway, I could go on forever, but hopefully that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I was I was gonna say, I mean, the the fact that you're you know, you gave the example of agency owners, which is quite interesting because they're influential, but they're not influencers, if if you like. Not famous, but they have some influence within their niche, apart from myself and Chris.
SPEAKER_00
But we weren't invited by Andy to the programme, we were just wanna stress that out.
