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.
My TEDx Talk Got 2,000 Views. Everyone Else Got 30,000
•Prohibition PR
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What happens when you pour your heart into a TEDx talk, expect it to skyrocket, and… nothing? We are joined with Niraj Kapoor back in episode 95, and dive into a brutally honest story of resilience, reinvention, and why failure isn’t fatal. Our guest shares how he went from a thriving career in London to losing everything, job, income, marriage, before clawing his way back through vulnerability and persistence.
We talk about the reality behind those glossy success stories, why some talks go viral while others barely register, and the lessons learned when life forces you to start over. If you’ve ever felt crushed by a setback or wondered why your big moment didn’t land, this conversation will give you perspective, hope, and a few laughs along the way.
It's okay to make mistakes to anybody listening or watching. There's nothing wrong with it. Just do everything you can not to make the same mistakes twice.
SPEAKER_01
Is that a segue into um your marketing fuck up?
SPEAKER_00
Oh god, it made sound.
SPEAKER_01
I was gonna save it until later on, but I don't know.
Ken Hughes
The TEDx is was interesting. The TEDx story that you you've spoken at TEDx. Where where was that and how did it go?
SPEAKER_00
Um it took place in Northern Ireland. Um I I wasn't aware that the guy who was arranging a TEDx was in the audience. So I ran three I I moved back to Northern Ireland, so I had a great career in London. I I loved working in London and I worked around the world uh for five years running shipping events, and so I had a chance to sell in the USA and Canada and Germany, Middle East and Asia. And I I learned so much about people and cultures and body language and how every country is so different. And it really made me very good at those five years. I kind of really excelled as a salesperson. And unfortunately, I uh when I set my own business out because I wasn't very happy with just you know working five days a week, commuting all the time, I wanted to work from home. No boss would let me work from home before lockdown. Nobody. They kept saying, you know, good salespeople do not work from home, only lazy people do, which by the way, I've never agreed with that philosophy, but that's what a lot of people used to believe. And also, my daughter was doing her A levels and I wanted to be a present more as a father, and I just got frustrated. So I wrote a book called Everybody Works and Sales. It became a huge bestseller. Um but obviously I worked on it day and night to make sure it did become a bestseller. It's very important to anybody listening to me, you know that. Um but unfortunately, then my daughter went to university, and I went through a horrendous divorce uh with my ex-wife, and that was bloody and brutal and lasted over a year. That did affect my work in quite a big way. And then two months after the
divorce happened, lockdown happened, and the government gave me nothing, there was no furlough, and I was living off bounce back loans and credit cards. Now, when you're a man in your late 40s and you have no job, you have no purpose in life, you have no income, you have no partner, life becomes
very dangerous very quickly. Um, luckily, I don't do drugs or porn or gambling, any of the dangerous things a lot of men do, which I'm grateful for. But I kind of went from 14 stone to 21. So I kind of ate my feelings and became very sick very quickly. And my parents, God bless them both. Really, I wouldn't be here without my parents, and I'm very open about that. Said, right, put everything in storage right now, you're coming back home. And I said, Dad, I can't come back home. And I procrastinated a few more weeks until finally I couldn't take it anymore. So I moved back to Northern Ireland, a really awful, vile, narrow-minded town where I grew up. I went back and it was horrific. It was embarrassing and it was shameful. And it took me a year to rebuild my life and rebuild my mental health. And when I did that, um, I was surprised how difficult it was to find business in Northern Ireland. I thought I've got all this experience and knowledge, got a best-selling book. Nobody cared. And so I ended up partnering with two guys locally, uh, Jim Irving and Colley Graham. And we ran three major events in 18 months on sales and marketing. And that's what kind of got the attention of people again. Live events, because people were really scared about doing live events after COVID. I was on it straight away because I had no other income. Um and it was the second event I think I did. Uh, a member of the TEDx community was there. I didn't know this. And he said, You managed to talk about email in a way that was actually interesting, and you were actually charismatic, and you made people laugh. It was email is the most boring subject around. Have you thought of doing a TED talk? I said, I'd love to do a TED talk about sales because we need to raise a standard. He goes, No, no, no, that's boring, that's too boring. I want to talk about your story of failure and how you lost everything and you rebuilt your life through vulnerability and
kindness. And went, okay, I'll do that. And that was my TED talk, and that's how the TED talk came about.
Ken Hughes
That is very brave. Like, because and then also a TED talk for those of you who have never seen it before, you've got like a spot, right? You've got to go out and stand on the spot, and most people don't even have I've not done it, and you've got I mean, I've presented a lot of things, but I imagine it's pretty terrifying. And you you have was it being filmed as well, live?
SPEAKER_00
It was being filmed, and the problem is you can't move from the spot, you're stuck there. And you know, because I spent sort of two years going to the professional speakers association and and speaking courses, you're taught to move on the stage, and all of a sudden I had to unlearn everything I'd be I'd been taught just for this one event, and it's so difficult not to move for 15 minutes. It's so difficult. Um, and you can't interact with an audience because all my sales training, my link train training, it's interactive, but you cannot talk to the audience, and so you have to unlearn everything, and it was incredibly difficult. But you know what? I was incredibly proud of that moment. Um, I'm incredibly proud how I opened up my heart. Um, I looked at all the other speakers and thought, okay, they're all using slides. I'm gonna do this without slides, which made it more daring and more different. And at the end of the evening, people were queuing at the door to speak to me, which I thought this is amazing. It's the greatest moment of my career so far. This is gonna take off, like Simon Sinek or Mel Robbins in a huge way. And then when the TED talk came out a few months later, all the speakers did very well 20,000, 30,000 views. And I got 2,000 views, and I was devastated. I was just heartbroken. Um, it just didn't take off. People just didn't care. I mean, a few of my clients saw it, a few former clients saw it, a few friends watched it and said, Well done. But nobody cared. And that that was that was hard to accept at the time. But at the same time, it's a very good talk. And about eight months later, a beauty therapist who was building her business in Belfast and scaling quite quickly went, That talk was amazing. Can I hire you for
sales training? So there that's a good example of thinking long term in sales for eight months. All the other speakers were getting so much work, and I'm like, nobody, nobody was even talking to me.
SPEAKER_01
The the credibility of being associated with TEDx, though, you know, irrespective of what you I mean, we'll have to share the video link in the show notes actually, because I'm sure people will be listening to this wanting to.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it's a good example of A, thinking long term and B in sales. Sometimes, not just in sales, but in life, you do good work. But it doesn't get recognized until a long time later. The best example, I think, in the movie world is probably, you know, it's a wonderful life. Nobody really cared about it when it came out, but 20 years later, it was shown on TV, it became huge. Shawshank Redemption, one of the greatest movies of all time, came out, complete flop. But then several months later came out and well, at the time VHS, and everybody talked about it. It took off. And sometimes that just happens. And the amount of work I've now had for my TED talk years later, people just going, Oh my god, that was an amazing talk. Can you speak at our conference? But it took years.
Ken Hughes
What why do you think it didn't take off then? Because the others did and you yours didn't. What what what's the magic? If I if there's like people listening to this, they're thinking, what can I learn from that? Why did the others I suppose why did they take off and yours has just kept going but slower? But you've well at least you've had one piece of business out of it. Anyway, that's good, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00
I had one piece of sales training out of it, which was lovely. And then I've spoken at conferences two years later. People then hired me, but that was two years later. I think I spoke about vulnerability. Um when you think of vulnerability in TEDx, you think of Brene Brown, who is truly smart, exceptional, talented, groundbreaking, probably the best in her field, or I should say the best known in her field. So you know you can't compare yourself to that, but that it's like if somebody did a talk about your why, they're always going to compare you to Simon Sinek, no matter what, you know. Um Brene's talk was just so much better than mine. And I think, second of all, I was fundraising from November, so I look like a Mexican bandit. I mean, I did. I have this ridiculous mustache, I just look ridiculous. Um yeah. And it's almost like, and I actually mentioned
in my talk, you know, I'm raising money for November just so you I don't normally look like this, but I look at myself thinking, God, that mustache looks ridiculous. It's a handlebar mustache, and it looked ridiculous. Um that's probably the first time people have seen me speak, and they're thinking, This guy just what's what's going on there, you know?
