Chris Norton: 0:00

Welcome to a very special milestone. This is the 100th episode of Embracing Marketing Mistakes. To celebrate hitting triple digits, we're going to be doing something a little bit different today. We've dug really, really far back into the archives to bring you the ultimate countdown of the most shocking, jaw-dropping, and unforgettable marketing missteps we've ever heard on the show. So we've got live uh TV disasters from boardroom torture to astronomical financial wastage. These are the top fuck-ups that have left our guests reeling. So sit back, relax, and let's get into the definitive leaderboard. But before we do all of that, William, we have had, well, a hundred episodes. How does it feel? Who's been your favourite? What's your which one's your favourite episode, if I ask you?

Will Ockenden: 0:44

Yeah, I mean it's been great, hasn't it? Every guest has had an amazing story to tell. And I I must admit, um some of the fuck-ups people share are just incredible, aren't they? And and they um some of them, I must admit, um I feel like I could have made that similar mistake. You know, and there's certain ones we're going to talk through where they you know they they they kind of ring true with what I've done in my career, but some of them are just wild. Um and you know, it's hard to pinpoint as a single guest. I must admit, uh one of my favourite episodes is um Ken Robertson from Paddy Power, who just um eloquently talked us through some of the the wild stunts he's done over the years for Paddy Power, which I'm not sure you'd have got away with half of those today. Um Greg Mutuski was brilliant calling in from the States, and he just had some brilliant anecdotes. In fact, one of his uh mistakes we're gonna focus on, but really it's it's hard to pinpoint a single guest, and it's just been so many fantastic stories.

Chris Norton: 1:39

There has, and I can reveal today an absolute exclusive that we've not what uh uh the Chris and Will show have not revealed on this podcast. And William, I haven't prepped you for this, but um it's because I remembered it yesterday, um and I thought, how the hell are we running a marketing mistakes fuck up show for the last three years? It's gone to number one in the UK. Thanks to everyone that's listening. We're absolutely thrilled with that. And we've never mentioned the You're gonna love this. We've never mentioned the the social media strategy workshop that we ran in Harrigat about nine years ago. Now, do you remember the one I'm referring to?

Will Ockenden: 2:22

I thought you were gonna reference another fuck up there. Um, so I'm pleased you've mentioned that one. Uh yeah, that was in the early days of Prohibition, wasn't it? I think we um we were yeah, we worked with uh quite a prestigious uh financial brand, and we were doing a workshop, and I won't mention who they are, we were doing a workshop with them, day-long strategy session. We had the C-suite in the room, brainstorming, flip chart, taking notes. I think even the chief exec came in at one point, you know, top brass, our chance to really get some kind of FaceTime with them, really good workshop. Our job was to basically take notes, interrogate everybody, and then come back with a strategy. And we had some amazing conversations, etc. etc. Went really, really well, didn't it? Drove home, looked at the notes a few days later, and then started to write the strategy up.

Chris Norton: 3:12

But yeah, except that except that didn't happen, did it?

Speaker 9: 3:17

Yeah, so they flip shots. We must have had 10 listeners.

Chris Norton: 3:21

We must have had For the listeners, we had about 15 people in the room and we decided to take two roles. So I think I was I was like speaking to the uh so interviewing them essentially and pulling out the ideas, and then you were like scribing, and we were we were sort of tag teaming to do the um to run the session, and you were like taking the scribe and you took away the the notes, um which were on one of those big easel uh notes pads we bought specially for the training session. We'll put them in his car. Um and on Monday we we got back to the office which was in Headingley Park Leeds, and um I said, Great, uh can you go get the notes out of your car and um we'll write up we'll I'll you know I'll I'll get to work writing up all the uh all the uh notes and this this the strategy basically and he went, Yeah, great, and off he went for the boot of his car, opened the boot, and he you'd done something over the weekend, he'd had Wellingtons in it and all sorts of kids. You'd been doing something. I can't remember what had happened.

Will Ockenden: 4:18

Yeah, I don't know where it had ever gone. Anyway, it wasn't in there. Um and then we uh we asked the client, I think we had to ask the client um in a really vague way, have we left it have I let you know I'm just checking I've not left anything in the room? And they're like, No, no, nothing was left in the room. So we then had to develop a really comprehensive strategy based on about 20 pages of flip chart notes purely from memory. Yeah. We um we absolutely nailed it in the end, didn't we?

Chris Norton: 4:43

Yeah, well I remember what I did was after sheer panic, we had an agenda, and I went to the agenda and just remembered everything that I could remember when we were talking through, and I was imagining the scenario of talking to people, which is unbelievable because I haven't got the best memory. I had I had a solid 1990s in Hassie Endry, Manchester, so my memory is not the best, and anyone in the creative sect will know that. Um, but I managed to remember 90% of it, and I remember you turning around to me and going, This is your best work ever, because I literally could remember the conversations that we'd had about each point on the agenda, which is good because I didn't have to I wasn't writing the stuff down, I was just talking and making sure that we stuck to what we were talking about.

Speaker 9: 5:23

We we we got away with it, didn't we?

Will Ockenden: 5:25

Just yeah, well they said we sent it off, and the the irony irony of this was we, you know, we'd spent all day working on it, trying to memory, got it right, and emailed it to the client and they said, This is great, thanks very much. And we never you know, they used it and that was that was that. So we must have done a great job. Maybe we just cut the rubbish out, I don't know, but uh pretty uh let's never do that again, anyway. That was exclusive. So uh without further ado, then let's get into it was meant to be a top five, this, but actually I've got six because I mean we've got a hundred, and there's loads and loads of uh episodes. So if those of you not listened before, we we do we interview people every other week, something like that, uh a guest, and then we'll ask them, we'll interview them about their expertise, what they know, and then also they'll tell us a bit about one or two mistakes that they've made in their career and what they've learned. Some of them are really, really shocking, some of them have been really enlightening, and some of them are a bit sad, some of them are a bit funny. So uh Will and I have gone through the the data, we've gone through the YouTube views and the uh listenership, and these are the top six. So we'll start at number six. So the numbers number six, we're gonna kick off uh countdown at number six. If you've ever felt a cold sweat after pressing send on an email campaign, Zohe Mustafa's story will give you nightmares. Thanks to a rogue software update, he accidentally spammed the he accidentally spammed his most high value VIP contacts, including major financial institutions and his own CEO, hundreds of times in just a few minutes.

Speaker 9: 6:53

So, Chris, let's watch the clip.

Will Ockenden: 6:55

HubSpot, you did an amazing nurtured campaign, but it went horribly wrong. Tell us all about it.

Speaker 7: 7:02

Yeah, so um I again I'm supposed to be a HubSpot expert, certified, etc., taking quite a few of the tests. Um and you know, I guess you you maybe become a little complacent when you've been using, I think that was uh that particular uh role, that was probably my eighth HubSpot build, so eighth time of using HubSpot with a different company. Um and launching a campaign, uh there was a thousand of uh thousand or so of our sort of high-value, high-powered contacts, yeah. Um major brands. Some of these were like personal uh contacts of the CEO of the organization I was at. Um and uh I was setting up a nurture campaign. We were launching a new service, I think, uh one of our uh sort of AI offerings and and stuff like that. And uh I set up this really intricate, I don't know if you ever use Hotspot, but there's this workflow section. Uh oh, you mentioned you use it, um, there's this workflow section where you can set up you know automated nurture campaigns and so on. Um, again, being too clever for my own good, I set up lots of complex uh branches and if-then statements, and if this person does this, then do that and etc. So it was already quite complex. And then uh uh HubSpot has this auto-enroll feature uh that uh will automatically enroll contracts into a campaign. Um I of course switched that off because I had subsequent multi-level branches of conditions of send this email if this happens and send this email if that happens. Um and I thought um fine, everything will be will be good. Um unfortunately, uh a HubSpot update went out, which meant that the software changed literally overnight, and there was an additional setting to unenroll people. Uh I didn't know about that, so I just left it on. Um, what ended up happening was uh 1,000 contacts received 450,000 emails in the space of about an hour. Um In how long? Full time for less than an hour. Um it literally went into a loop.

Speaker 2: 9:24

Yeah.

Speaker 7: 9:25

Luckily, I find out I got it in that hour, otherwise, it would have been higher. Um but yeah, I mean, this went out to major brands, and you're getting all these pissed-off emails coming back to me and my CEO, the ones who were like kind of, you know, and this again, I'm talking like major financial institutions in the city. Um and it was just mortifying. It was like the most horrible moment in my marketing career, I think, to date. And I've made tons of other cock-ups, but this one was really up there with uh screw-ups.

Will Ockenden: 9:59

I think if I received 450 emails in an hour from one person, I would be a bit pissed off. You're right. I don't even know how many that is a minute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need to do the maths on that. That's a lot.

Speaker 3: 10:11

I suppose the only saving grace. The only saving grace is there you could just potentially try and blame, totally blame the software.

Will Ockenden: 10:20

Oh, yeah, definitely blame the software.

Speaker 3: 10:21

It's like there is you know a little bit of an out. Look, I can see something to do with that.

Will Ockenden: 10:24

I can see an email going out saying, sorry, we've had a slight um software glitch. Because I received an email marketing piece last week and it said, Hi, first name.

Speaker 3: 10:35

Oh, we've all been there on our old media list.

Will Ockenden: 10:38

Everybody out there, everybody listening to this has done that. Hi, first name, or left, or hi company name. Everybody's done that. If you haven't, you're a liar, I think.

Speaker 7: 10:48

To be fair, they were uh to be fair, that my my boss then said, you know, you've got to send an apology email. And I was like, oh god, I don't want to send any any more emails. But I ended up sending the apology email. Um, and the majority, 99% who replied were very gracious and said, Look, it happens for all of us. Yeah, it does. And they felt my pain and empathized, but uh you know, I think an apology is worth a lot. Super embarrassed.

Will Ockenden: 11:13

A personal apology is is worth a lot because like, yeah, sometimes you just catch people at bad times, like we've all unsubscribed from stuff that we don't want because there's so much email crap out there. But everybody's done it in marketing. Everybody's done that in marketing. They've sent an an email to the wrong list or BCC'd the wrong person, or we've all done it.

Speaker 9: 11:30

I think when I heard that for the first time around, my blood ran code.

Will Ockenden: 11:34

I mean, he was very, very honest to send to send 450,000 emails in under an hour to your most important customers for that amount of money. I mean, they were really high value customers, pretty shocking. And in fact, Zoe's entire um episode was full of stuff that he shared, including um they hired a PR agency um and they didn't get any coverage for I think it was six months. I was like, how did you not fire them? I said, if we don't get any coverage for the first eight weeks, I start to panic a little bit because the coverage is not guaranteed, obviously. But it can't go six months without any coverage. It was just a bit it was one of the big PR shots. At number five, we've all made typos and an email, but what if your one typo was printed in giant multicoloured letters on a six-figure exhibition stand right in the middle of London's Excel Arena? Rachel Massey, one of our clients, found herself in this exact nightmare on day one of a massive trade show. Her strategy for dealing with a missing T in the word software when she worked for a software business, while the company's chief executive walked around the show and was uh agonizing survival node. So shall we get into the clip and let's hear what she's got to say about it. This is more fun, I'm gonna take it easier. Um tell us about your at the time that you did an exhibition stand and what happened. Because you gave us a few.

Speaker 1: 12:54

Well, yeah, you see, you want marketing mistakes, and I mean there's been a lot, we've all had a lot, haven't we? Oh yeah. But this one particularly sticks out because it when I think about it now, I can still feel the anxiety and I can still feel the dread of watching what happened what unfolded. So we I was at we were at Excel in London, where I'd spent a lot of time over the years. And we it was quite early in my career at one particular organisation, and this was a big stand build. This is, I don't know, probably a hundred square meter stand, big.

Speaker 9: 13:25

And the investment is huge for those, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 13:28

Six with six figure stuff. Wow. And it's in the middle of XL four sides. What colour is that? It's multicoloured.

Will Ockenden: 13:37

Multicoloured.

Speaker 1: 13:38

And um we'd done all the messaging inside the stand. So we'd got uh we'd signed all that off, we'd got that down to down pat great. But I hadn't really thought about the signage. Oh no, I had really thought about it. It was standard signage around the edge of the stand. It was just our strapline brand. Maybe overlooked that slightly. So this is day one, opening the stand, it's all gr all going grey. And the the guy, um, someone came up to me and said, the guy at the stand opposite wants a chat. So I said, Oh, okay. So I went over to this stand, and he's got another big stand. He went, he said, I don't know how to tell you this. He said, but you've missed tea out of software all over your stand.

Speaker 9: 14:22

So not just one. No, it's all over.

Will Ockenden: 14:25

Well, someone couldn't spell software when they're someone.

Speaker 1: 14:29

I don't know who it was, but it was something that was overlooked because it wasn't this was just this is a standard method, this is standard software. So I never even thought it said software. So this was all over this stand and software. The second day. Usually if this happens and you get some sort of spelling mistake, you can send it to the printers, you have to throw money at it, and you can get it sorted. But this is day one. And this is in London, so chief exec's coming to see the stand, there's a lot of important guests coming to this stand. This is a big showpiece. So I had to make the decision. So I thought, right, this has been this has been around now for sort of all morning. No one said anything about a guy that's looking at this stand his whole time. Do I fet up telling what tell people what I've done? Or do I just think no one else has noticed it so far? I'm gonna stick with it, I'm gonna pretend I don't even know, and we're just gonna continue. And that's what I decided to do.

Will Ockenden: 15:27

What time of day was it that you heard that there was a spelling mistake and it was software everywhere?

Speaker 1: 15:32

It was probably about 11am. So the show had been open like a couple of hours.

Will Ockenden: 15:35

And how many people how many people do you think is in the show? Thousands, thousands, okay.

Speaker 1: 15:41

Plus the whole leadership team of the company. All the team that were I mean, there was I don't know how many stand staff, 20, 30. How long how long was the show? Three days. So for 72 hours, I just sweated. And I was just the anxiety was high because every time someone said my name, I just was like, What? Because I thought they were gonna say.

Will Ockenden: 16:03

Do you have bosses there as well?

Speaker 1: 16:04

Yeah.

Will Ockenden: 16:05

Right, okay.

Speaker 1: 16:06

But what you know I couldn't I couldn't do anything about it. So no one has noticed it. It was everywhere, I couldn't position them at all.

Will Ockenden: 16:16

Were they only using the stand once and then that was it? They were gonna bid it after that.

Speaker 1: 16:20

Unfortunately, uh that is what happens with stand builds, yeah. You just build them and then they take them down and unfortunately. But that at that point they might be a little more environmentally friendly these days, but that's what used to happen, yeah.

Will Ockenden: 16:31

I think the moral of this story is that nobody reads stands. Because that's a very technical.

Speaker 1: 16:38

Nobody reads them. What I did what I did know because I'd written that word a lot in my time at this point. Software that I had done it, it's a mistake that you do when you're typing a lot. So I thought this is a this is a mistake that people don't pick up on. I've not picked up on it before in other sorts of things. So I knew that it was a mistake that was common, and I just had to just yeah, just go with it.

Speaker 9: 17:00

So when it when the clock struck five o'clock on the last day, were you just incredibly relieved?

Speaker 1: 17:06

I've never do you know what this is, no one knows that. I've never ever told about it.

Will Ockenden: 17:10

I love it! I absolutely love it. We're clipping that bit. I mean, it's the fact that you've spent the whole time basically you did the the ostrich approach, which is you buried your head in the sand. I buried my head in the back. I just thought I'm just gonna grin and bear it.

Speaker 1: 17:25

This wasn't this was quite early on in this. This was a big p. I just didn't, I couldn't do it. I just couldn't no if anybody else had noticed, I would have been I can't believe it. But no one did, and I got away with it. It would have been third. So it's me, me and the guy in the stand across, that's all that knew.

Speaker 8: 17:42

You're fake surprise. Really? How did nobody notice?

Speaker 1: 17:47

How did nobody notice? I mean, I've I've You'll be surprised that that word particularly, it when you just glance at it, you don't you just think, well, it said software because that's what you expect it to say.

Will Ockenden: 17:58

There's certain words, isn't there, when you see like um grammar books and things where they do it and they take a letter out and you can't notice it.

Speaker 1: 18:03

Oh, it's a lot that happens.

Speaker 9: 18:04

Well, that maybe that is, but let's think we need to do the research into that. Is there some retired chief exec listening to this now? I think we've um not to that degree. We've all done that.

Speaker 1: 18:13

And I'd say you must have in PR, you must have done you must have done uh spelling mistakes all the time.

Will Ockenden: 18:19

I've told this story before. So my f well, my second job actually in PR, I worked in London. And as an exec, uh starting out, we worked in tech PR. And um as an exec, part of the admin of the job was it um like basically printing all the press releases out, stapling them, and folding. There was this we actually got trained on how to fold them into three so they put fit perfectly in an envelope. Then we'd go down to the mail room and you'd get all like it was 250 of us. Exactly. You'd get like 15, 20 of us at all the same level, and we'd be like a chain, and you'd be folding up press releases and putting them into envelopes, then you'd run them through, get it? The Franken machine. Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember the Franken machine. They were quite fun because they'd fly through the Franken machine. Anyway, so I I remember being specifically like 83 press releases in of a press release that we'd written and the team had written, and on the second paragraph, sorry to all clients listening right now, second paragraph in, I saw typo. Like a small typo, and I was like, did exactly what you're you did. I was like, pretend it's not that. I'm gonna have to go upstairs. Because this wasn't the this wasn't the days of being able to just like it's not digital, is it? You've got to go upstairs, change everything, reprint it all out, come all the way back down, and I'm gonna miss the post. So we just I just went with it with a typo.

Speaker 9: 19:34

What was the typo?

Will Ockenden: 19:35

Um I can't remember, it was probably software.

Speaker 1: 19:38

Because we worked tech. Probably.

Speaker 9: 19:40

My first ever job in PR. This isn't the other story I told you earlier. I'm not gonna tell that story. Um I had to I had to mail out 5,000 companies, again, traditional mail out, um, asking for sponsorship, and it said dear colleague, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, and on the last batch that I was sorting out, um, I realised it didn't say dear colleague, it said dear college.

Speaker 1: 20:03

Oh no.

Speaker 9: 20:04

But again, head in the stand, carried on.

Speaker 1: 20:06

I think that might be a software one, though. I think people might just see that and not actually realise that one.

Speaker 9: 20:12

Yeah, and they get the gist, don't they? You get the gist.

Will Ockenden: 20:15

It's not management.

Speaker 9: 20:16

It's not maybe that's what I should have taught the chief exactly. You get the gist. Well, everyone knows what you're trying to say, don't they? You get the gist. It's not gonna work in a branding meeting. I must admit, I feel for Rachel there. Um, I've worked with Rachel for years, and she's an absolutely brilliant marketer, and that's just a mistake. And luckily, she got away with it. And I must admit, in when I started one of my early jobs in PR, I did something similar. Not again, not on the level of that, but um I I sent I had to do a a mail out to um potential um um prospects, and I and I I mailed out maybe a thousand people, old school, sticking letters in an envelope, and on the last letter, I realized the um instead of saying dear colleague, it said dear college. Um and um I didn't tell anyone and just got on with it. Which I think was was a little bit like what Rachel did.

Will Ockenden: 22:17

Yeah, but I mean it the fact that everybody could see at this trade show, and I don't even think anyone said anything. Software, maybe you just saw maybe people just want it, you know, like when you see a type, there's things that you see and you just don't see a typo because the what you just your your brain is guessing the rest of the work. Maybe that maybe that was it. Anyway, she managed to ride it through. I bet they never used that exhibition stand again, though. Um they cost a fortune as well, don't they?

Speaker 9: 22:42

Exhibition stands.

Will Ockenden: 22:44

Yeah, a lot. It was a lot, and a lot to place it as well. Um so coming in at number four, imagine securing a massive live TV interview for a wholesome religious business founder, only for the host to suddenly ask about her walking away from the devil. Greg Metuski, a friend of the show, watched in sheer horror as his PR plan disintegrated into a live national TV. Scandal. Let's watch the clip.

Speaker: 23:09

Hear it in his own words, because this is brilliant. Enjoy. Years ago, as a young man, I get a call. There's a new business in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster, Pennsylvania is the epicenter of the Amish sect. And a business has found a recipe for a hand-rolled soft pretzel. And they need PR because they're franchising. So I get on my horse and I go out, and I meet with the marketing director, who is just tired. And I was joking about my horse, but I go and just get in your house. And Anne's story is simple. She's very religious. She's a former Amish person. She left, she didn't join the sect, right? Very connected to the community. And she's an evangelistic Christian, evangelist, right? And which is the path often for those who leave Amish. And she's going to meet with her. If she likes you, you're on board. So we go to the meeting. We talk a little bit, and you know, this is a whole different world because the Amish never want to come forward, right? They're not evangelistic. They don't want you to join them. They don't have uh any kind of propaganda. They're just a quiet people, confident in what they believe, and they don't really care about the rest of the world. And so she's explaining, you know, I really don't want this. I don't want to be, you know, they believe that the the nail that sticks up the highest is knocked down the hardest. So, you know, I'm a PR guy and I'm supposed to promote her. And I go, well, Anne, we'll be con we'll be sensitive to that. And she's like, great, great. So then she goes, All right, we have to go to lunch. So I figure we're gonna go to a restaurant somewhere. We get in our cars and she takes us down this country lane on a farm where her mother, who is Amish and still lives on the farm, has been making us what they call supper, is their lunch, all day long. And there's all these Amish, I mean, it was some of the heaviest food I ever I I could not consume all this. There were carrots and butter, and there was beef, and there was poultry, right? So I come on board and she calls me in and says, I got one, I have a favor to ask before we get started. And I go, sure, what? She goes, I would like to appear on the 700 Club. The 700 Club was run by a guy named Pat Robertson, who was a big-time Christian uh evangelist who ran for president of the United States, right? And this show was over the top. But it was her dream, and she was going to come out with her story. Her story is that she was working in a booth one day, and she got a flour delivery, and it was the wrong flour, and magically, spiritually, this was the perfect ingredient. It made the perfect pretzel, and there are lines out the door, and people wanting to franchise her business, and she was touched by God at this moment. That's her story, right? So and that's you know the the purpose of the 700 cost. That's another story as well. Well, that's great, Ann. It's a wholesome story, isn't it? So I go, yeah, I think I can do that. I mean, uh everything seems to align. That's what they cover. Pat Roberts is running for president. No one I I have no doubt he'd like to get into your checking account, so I think I can make this happen. So sure enough, we secure an appearance on Pat Robertson, and I go down and she she has her whole crew come down in a black van because the Amish drive well, the the those who've left the Amish uh don't even show chrome on their cars sometimes. We go down, I'm in the audience, and beforehand she goes, now, Greg, I have to tell you I'm gonna give testimony today. And I go, Testimony? We didn't talk about that in media training, but I figure that's her telling her story. I go, Well, you have a great story. She goes, No, I'm gonna give testimony. I have no idea what this means, right? So I'm sitting in the audience and I'm all excited. You know, this is a big score for me. I'm a young guy and I'm all full of myself. And so they come back to the show and Pat Robinson does a preview before the commercials. And he goes, Next up, a miraculous story of a woman who was given a recipe that has launched an empire and how she walked away from the devil. I'm like, the devil? What is what's the devil? There was no devil. I'm like, I'm looking around, like, what's the devil? Right? So they come back and they start the story. And she tells, you know, I've been very fortunate. God gave me this recipe for hand-rolled soft pretzels. I have a hundred franchises now. And he goes, that's a miraculous story. And now tell us about how you walked away from the temptation of the devil. And I'm like, the temptation of the devil has no place in this story, right? So Anne goes on to tell the story of how she had moved to Texas and become involved with a church. And that church uh had a pastor who she had an affair with when she was married, and he defrauded the entire parish of everything they had. And I'm sitting there like, I had this was my shot, and it's totally destroyed. Like, why? Why? You didn't know why. So she comes up after the fact and she goes, How'd it go? I go, Ann, I thought you did good, but the the whole uh backstory of the of the frauding parishioners and sleeping with the pastor. We didn't what? And she looks at me and she goes, Greg, I'm gonna tell you something. Five years from now, a publication like Forbes will be come to call on me. And that this is public record, and they will think they have something salacious. And I will say, Oh, that's an old story. I've already told that story. You should watch the Pat Robinson episode. So I learned that she took the air out of the balloon and protected herself, right? Where I was just, I couldn't even put it together at that point. So is that a fuck up? Uh it was on my part because I I didn't know what she was doing, and I didn't understand the value, right, of putting bad news out sometimes. And I think that's the takeaway that if you put bad news out, it can never be used against you in the future. Yeah, but and that's what I learned from Annie Ann's hand rolled soft pretzels.

Will Ockenden: 29:37

She s she sort of she sort of schooled you in how to do PR though. She sort of took the worst thing possible and shared it first. So nobody can ever come back and like you're saying together again.

Speaker 9: 29:48

Brilliant move. And and it's a hugely six- I mean, it's I was I was looking up the company, there's something like 1200 franchises now, isn't there, globally?

Will Ockenden: 29:54

We've had a couple of dodgy P uh PR interviews before where we've had clients that haven't listened to our but if despite the best media training we can provide, sometimes the a client just feels very comfortable and decides to go slightly rogue, but not as rogue as that. What did you make of Greg's story then?

Speaker 9: 30:10

Yeah, very, very entertaining. I mean, the whole the whole podcast with Greg was brilliant, wasn't it? He's such a great raconteur, and he had numerous other it's worth a list in that episode. He's got loads of other stories about stuff that has just gone horrifically wrong. But yeah, that that is uh sort of next level client going rogue on on the biggest possible stage, wasn't it? So yeah, brilliant story, um, and a and a great fuck up for sure.

Will Ockenden: 30:33

Yeah, and the fact that she just decided to share the fact that she was um to share that on national TV was just brilliant. I I can't imagine what and no prep. She and then in actual fact, he you know he said that um her strategy might have won the day, even though he was so scared of it at the time.

Speaker 9: 30:52

It was a master stroke in the end, wasn't it? It's a master stroke to for her to kind of clear the decks and get that out of the way. So yeah, it it was um yeah, it very interesting, but understandably very scary for him at the times to stood in the green room watching it happening.

Will Ockenden: 31:06

So in it number three, we have the waterboarding pitch from a friend called Andrew Block. We all know that pitching can be high stakes and standing out is crucial, but how far is too far? PR guru Andrew Block thought some pitch theatre would win over a video game client. So his idea was live So his idea was live waterboarding, a member of his own staff in the boardroom. Spoiler alert, they didn't win the business. Uh let's hear from Andrew about what they did to get a bit of pitch theatre to try and win a client. So, what's the biggest fuck-up you've made in a pitch? Because uh trust me, I've made a few.

Speaker 5: 31:44

I've made a lot. Um I've ch probably chosen to sort of throw them out the window. I mean, look, essentially any pitch you don't win is a fuck up. Um but sometimes you can put in your best effort and you get beaten by someone better, or culturally you weren't the right fit. I think, you know, where I've had disastrous pitches is really where we have probably not been prepared well enough and we've winged it a little bit, or where I mean I was I'm always a fan of like a combination of style and substance, so you have to have the substance, you can't just sort of brin on the flare and charisma without anything behind it. Um, but I always felt you know you want to do that thing to be memorable when a client's seeing four or five agencies, um you want them to remember you, and actually, from the very early days of Frank, with that in mind, we decided we'd always have memorable boardrooms because you know you go into a meeting room and it's the same as another one, same as another one. So, our very first office, we actually have an ambulance as our boardroom. It was a real ambulance that we bought from the Caledonian Road, stripped out, spray painted, put a boardroom table inside. That was good, but it was quite small, and I remember our first big, big pitch, sort of a year into the agency, and suddenly like 15 clients turned up, and it was a disaster. We didn't obviously didn't have aircon or anything there. We had this little rubbish sort of fan that didn't do anything, and there was like 15 people squashed in the back of an ambulance that well, it wasn't designed for that in the first place, but it certainly wasn't designed to hold that amount of people. And then when we moved offices, the next boardroom was a beach, and the thinking behind that was you know, you're you're most relaxed when you're on a beach on holiday with the sand between your toes, and that's where you're most creative when you're sort of switched off.

Will Ockenden: 33:43

Was there actual sand on the floor then?

Speaker 5: 33:45

Actual sand, yeah. I mean, I'd love to say we shipped it in from the Maldives. I think it was from a builder's yard at Witch or something. Um it's like industrial sand. But Graham and I, as guys, hadn't we thought through the fact that women don't really want to take their shoes off, and you know, as I said, this wasn't like that sort of beautiful white sand, this was a bit sort of yellow and stickers within about a month. It had endless staples, you know, all sorts of things you'd find in the sand. That was and then we sort of moved on. The next one was a bedroom, and again it was about this feeling of relaxation, massive room, beds, and we that was fine, actually, no major issues with that. There's a few stories that aren't suitable for this podcast that I could tell you about what went on in that room for another day. The last sort of one that we built, they were it was like a fairground with waltzers. Um, so you got into these waltzers and they actually spun round, they were proper fairground waltzers, and yeah, we did have a client who was a bit on the large side and didn't fit into the waltzer, and I think that was a pitch loss before we'd even opened our mouths. Um so that's all about the environment and being memorable, and you know, no one's gonna forget you were the agency with the waltz, or you were the agency with the bedroom, with the sound, with the ambulance. And that always really worked for us. It's about being memorable. Um, but in terms of the actual pictures, I mean, I remember even pre-Frank there was a pitch where I was it was actually my boss at the time, and she was so nervous she physically vomited on the table, um, which wasn't a good look. How do you recover from that? That's memorable though, Andrew. Yeah, that was memorable. It was memorable for all the wrong reasons. I mean, they normally are for the wrong reasons. We did one for a computer game client, and it was a war game we were pitching for. I can't actually remember what the game was, but we thought it'd be good pitch theatre to waterboard someone live in the pit. Um and that didn't go down particularly well. We didn't do a dress rehearsal and we we didn't kill an employee, that would have been really memorable, but we did probably cause him more suffering than we were intending to do with our pitch theatre, and I don't think any of us would forget that, and we lost that pitch. That was going above and beyond that.

Speaker 9: 36:07

That's going above and beyond a bit of torture. That's probably lifelong PTSD, isn't it, for that particular account exec who got waterboarded.

Speaker 5: 36:14

Yeah, I'm not particularly proud of that one. But we've done some crazy stuff. We bought an app to, I think it was for I can't believe it's not butter, and the whole campaign was about PRing, it was I can't really remember it used, they used look-alikes in their ads. So there was like an Aussie Osborne look-alike, and so we thought for the pitch, which was all about how you're gonna make this ad famous, we would put a fake PR person in the room, um, and then they were an actor, and they'd start getting increasingly weird and eccentric throughout the pitch, and then at the end we'd reveal, I can't believe I'm not actually a PR. But they ended up being quite good, and the clerk really liked them and wanted them to be on the account. So that was a strange one. I'm not sure what that said about the rest of the community. So I've done loads. I mean, I've probably pitched, I I wouldn't even want to count, but it's definitely got to be in the thousands in terms of pitches I've done. So there's been plenty of good ones, plenty of bad ones. Um, and I think you know, one of the things about working in this industry, you do become quite resilient. So you brush off a pitch win or a pitch loss relatively quickly and just move on to the next one.

Speaker 9: 37:25

So Andrew's pitch stories were just brilliant, weren't they? He had so many amazing stories, and um I feel like that's he didn't win the business, did he, in the end? Um, I'm I think he's probably quite lucky for that not to become an HR issue as well. But you know, different time. The uh hedonistic world of uh late 90s PR agencies, but yeah, amazing. And some of the other stuff he did in pitches as well was just amazing, and what what an agency um he ran at the uh back in the day.

Will Ockenden: 37:52

Oh yeah, definitely. Um Andrew's uh um Sir Alan Sugar's PR man, and he's done some amazing, they were pitching in a waltzer, pitching in an ambulance. And we had a guy the other day on the show um who won a lot of pitches, and he his idea was which we which isn't doesn't hasn't made the top five, but this is this was brilliant. Uh he brought along a magician to do him a load of magic in the middle of a pitch, and everyone just looked at him and just it went if he was pretending to be a member of staff, and and he just said, Yeah, pitch theatre and that no, it didn't, no. The client just thought it wasn't good at all, so it didn't go down well. And sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, you won't be creative.

Speaker 9: 38:32

And we're actually looking at a kind of a sub-strand of the show about pitch nightmares, aren't we? So we half probably half of our guests have a pitch nightmare story, either from the point of view of the agency or the point of view of the client, and there's uh all sorts of amazing stories, and again, a lot of them ring true from uh from our own experience.

Will Ockenden: 38:50

Uh so our runner up at number two. Have you ever wondered what the most expensive customer acquisition cost in history looks like? Futurist Tom Goodwin was part of a massive brand campaign that was so complex it resulted in a cost per acquisition of over 400,000 per person. As he points out, they could have paid Kylie Minogue to sing in everyone's living room for this. So let's get into this clip and hear what Tom's got to say. So our show is all about well, fuck-ups and failures. Um we we basically get people to come to the right place. Well, we've had enough. Um, and um people share this is like where you can get it off your chest of about something you've made a mistake and what you learned from it. So do you do you have any that you that you've made in my what you do?

Speaker 4: 39:35

I've got millions. I mean uh people worry a lot, you know. Like um I I've been fired like a lot of times. Maybe four or five times. Um and it it no, normally it's nothing like as personal as people think. Um, probably one of my biggest failings. Um, I was working on a campaign for Nokia um to launch a music service. So this was probably 2007. Um, and we'd sort of procured the rights to like Heidi Minogue's new album that was going to be exclusively available. Um, and we spent probably 15 million pounds on on media and uh you know technology and IP. And I think 37 people um downloaded um the particular app that we were trying to push at the time. So on a sort of on a sort of uh what's it called? CPO, on a sort of cost per acquisition basis, you know, we could have sort of arranged like a private, you know, living room performance of Kylie Minogue for every single person that that wanted it. I I would say, like, I'm very I'm very happy to accept when I've been an idiot. In this particular case, I wasn't an idiot. I actually did tell the client quite a lot of times, look, you know, this isn't really how it's gonna work. Um, you know, most people who see this TV ad are not gonna be able to download this because they don't have the right type of Nokia answer. Um but it's a good example, really, I think, of understanding quite how big companies work and how their finance works. And you know, someone had made the business case and they couldn't they couldn't sort of accept it wasn't gonna work. Um but yeah, I I make make mistakes all the time, all the time. The most important thing is to not do the same mistake twice. Um the most important thing is to kind of really, you know, understand what you learn about yourself and the world every time you do it. Um but yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm quite idiotic um and I make quite a lot of mistakes.

Will Ockenden: 41:30

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when you had to have that um ROI discussion about uh 15 million for 37 downloads.

Speaker 8: 41:38

You'd have been better off with bags of 10,000 pounds just giving them to people walking in the street and asking them to download the app and you'd have got a better return on that activity.

Speaker 4: 41:48

I mean it's completely true, and yeah, it it just goes to show um you know accountability is a good thing.

Will Ockenden: 41:55

It reminds me of the era when the internet first came out, like in well, not the right when it first came out, but when people started to use it and um there was the the dot com boom and it was going into pictures and it was w r right at the beginning of my career, and people were saying, So what we're gonna do is we're gonna build a website and potentially 60 billion or however many billion people can come and land on it, and I kept thinking this is all all this money is going to this. This just doesn't make any sense. And they're gonna have to find it first, which sounds very similar to your scenario.

Speaker 4: 42:25

I think um like we we do not have simple jobs by by any means, but I think quite often we make them a lot more complicated than they need to be. And I think you're sort of thinking where you're saying, you know, only this many people might actually see it, so it's unrealistic to expect that. Or, you know, if you were a normal human being, how would you respond to this? I actually think taking a bit of a step back, um, you know, relaxing a little bit and and and trying to approach these things from a common sense perspective um is is quite often the you know the best way to succeed. I'm doing a lot of work with a car company at the moment where they're figuring out that almost all of their search spend is going on terms that probably people would have ended up on the website without clicking. You know, so all you're doing is taking people that are already very interested and sort of taking credit for making them, you know, become interested, even though clearly clear they they already were. And and often you have these cultures of specialisms um and sort of expertise and and spreadsheets, and and people can sit in meetings and talk about numbers um and ratios, and everyone has the goal of making that number as big as it can be. And I think it's really important to just take a step back, you know. Maybe uh maybe that doesn't matter. You know, maybe there's something much more fundamental that we can solve instead.

Speaker 9: 43:49

So that's a yeah, that's I did I did the maths while we were watching that clip, it's 405,000 for 400 and sorry, I did the math, I can't even such a big number, I can't even read it. It's 405,000 pounds per lead. So can you imagine being in the the kind of the campaign wrap-up meeting, Chris, and presenting that to the client? Good news is we've got 37 leads, uh, cost per acquisition of just over 400,000 pounds a lead.

Will Ockenden: 44:19

Well, and to to the client, I'd have to go, and and that's not even leads, that's just downloads. Just leads, that's terrible. It's like the worst campaign of all time. Fair play to him for sharing that. Um I read a lot of Tom's stuff online, so I yeah, I really appreciate him coming on and talking about that. Um, yeah, I don't think I've had ever had a campaign as bad an ROI as that. And we we did become a little everyone became a little bit obsessed with ROI, but I think you probably could been the ROI of that campaign. So then, in at number one, we have the diplomatic imposter incident with Ant Cousins, friend of the show, and we'll be coming on the show again very soon to tell more stories because he's full of them. Um, but this one that takes number one quite easily for me. I this also it's the most watched video on YouTube of ours. Um so and the most popular um Uh podcast that we've had downloaded as well. So taking the spot at number one, what would you do if you were working in an actual war zone and suddenly found yourself shoved in front of the world's media, live on air, because everyone thinks you're the Prime Minister of Britain. Aunt Cousins didn't have time to think. He just had to pretend that he was David Cameron. And this is what happened.

Speaker 6: 45:30

At the time, right? I was everyone asked me, What do you do for a living? And I was like, I work for the Ministry of Defence. Oh, so you're James Bond. It's like, no. Like one, he works for the Foreign Office. But two, um, I'm closer to Johnny English than James Bond. Like, none of my stories are cool.

Speaker 9: 45:43

James Bond wasn't a PR man anyway, was he?

Speaker 6: 45:45

No, no, not really.

Speaker 9: 45:47

James Bond PR.

Speaker 6: 45:49

In Huntington, yeah. So uh so one of the things was we had David Cameron coming out for a visit to Afghanistan, uh, and we'd booked a live satellite link up, and we've got a load of journalists in from Kabul down to uh Lash Kagar in Hellman Province, which is where I was based, um, which is a long and arduous journey, a risky journey for those journalists to take. Um we had them coming down for uh for a member of British Parliament. So this was just before his Prime Minister, right? So he's still a member of Parliament at the time. Um so he comes out and we booked the slot, we got the tent, all the journalists are in there, they're ready to go. The satellite link up's booked for live broadcast across across Afghanistan. Um and I'm walking with David Cameron to the tent and uh about to brief him on like the lines just to make sure he members. It's all it was all about civilian casualties, it was a really serious topic.

Speaker 2: 46:31

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 46:31

Um and then on the way to the tent, he's like, ah, you know what, I haven't got time for this, I've got to do these other things instead. And I was like, um, okay. So what's a git? So we're like, Whoa, okay, how do I deal with that? How do I deal with that? So I walked into the tent on a call across the interpreter, uh, and I and I bring her across. I said, like, David Cameron isn't coming. Um and he's like looking at fear in my eyes, because he's been dealing with a journalist this whole time. Yeah. And then I just because Afghan journalists they just rush from from the stations they're at, grab the cameras, grab the mics, they come to the flap of the tent, right? Um and they're just cameras are in my face, red lights are on, mics are in my face, and and I'm like, oh, they think I'm David Cameron. Um so I tell the interpreter, tell them I'm not David Cameron. And he's like just no, just zero. Like he just starts interpreting their questions. I'm like, so I've got two choices now, right? I either empty Cheris and walk away, and the headline is David Cameron walks away and and blanks a bunch of journalists asking difficult questions.

Will Ockenden: 47:29

Which is what he did, just to be clear.

Speaker 6: 47:31

Which it which is what I didn't do. Um so uh so so what I made up for is is just did the interview. Like, and I think I knew the lines. You know.

Will Ockenden: 47:40

So did they quote you as David Cameron says?

Speaker 6: 47:42

Um so when I got back to my desk, there were a few red lines on the phone. Um so yeah, the the the ticker David Cameron was there. Um And how did you get you?

Speaker 9: 47:52

Did you just say terrible misunderstanding? I didn't explain myself.

Speaker 6: 47:55

I I think I just left it. You know, because I think we all kind of to Afghans is kind of like the reason they thought I was even though I had a beard and a shaved head, they still thought I was David Cameron. I'm like, they're not gonna matter. That's that's the David. I d I delivered the lines.

Speaker 9: 48:09

I mean his new role as foreign secretary next time he goes out there, he's gonna be there's gonna be a lot of confusion. There's gonna be he's gonna do an interview and everyone's gonna say this isn't David Cameron. You've aged badly, David.

Will Ockenden: 48:22

Anyway, okay, so thanks for that. Great, great story, great story. Right, well, I don't even know where to go with this because the the the actually off camera, when he was telling us how many media were there, it was it wasn't just it was the world's media that thought he was David Cameron. Fair play to him, but I mean I don't know, I don't even know whether he should he have said he wasn't David Cameron.

Speaker 9: 48:45

I think like all good PR people, he found a way and he styled it out, didn't he? Like a true pro. And I don't think there was actually any consequences of it, was there? I don't think he I don't think there was I think it was um it was accepted by the majority of the people in the room, wasn't it? And he got away with it. Must have given him a few sleepless nights after that.

Will Ockenden: 49:04

Oh, I mean, I don't even know how he had the balls to do that. Fair play to him. Like uh great, great, great mistake. And but I mean I felt a bit bad for him. Like David Cameron just went, no, I'm not doing it and walked off. And obviously David Cameron worked in PR, allegedly. Um walked off, allegedly, close brackets. Um yeah, and he worked in PR before he was in uh in as Prime Minister, so he obviously knew the amount of pressure that Ant would be under, but shocking, truly shocking, well deserved to be number one. Um yeah, uh any others that didn't make the cut that you can think of, Will, that you would have liked to you that you thought that would need a um a bit of recognition in the top seven or eight?

Speaker 9: 49:47

Well, there's been a few, hasn't there? I mean, um some of the stories about people that are brave enough to start businesses um and catastrophically went wrong, you know, plowed a lot of their own money into it. I think somebody actually remortgaged their house to try and save their business. They were certainly interesting stories, but then on the other side of it, I think some of the some of the funniest stories, particularly about the some of the wild and crazy PR stunts people have pulled over the years have have been pretty entertaining. I'm trying to think of some specifics actually.

Will Ockenden: 50:16

What about Mark Cherry Lush who uh decided accidentally flew uh a plane on his after he'd just passed his pilot's license into a uh into the Top Gun airzone? That was quite a good one. That's actually our most popular um short on YouTube.

Speaker 9: 50:30

That that was a good one. And we we were trying to push him on some of the stories of behind the kind of the hedonistic 90s London PR scene, weren't we? And um what it was like working on the lads mags and things, and he certainly had a few more stories in the locker, didn't he?

Will Ockenden: 50:42

Yeah, he did, but I don't think the I don't think they could have made the podcast.

Speaker 9: 50:45

So another one, Chris, that uh uh grabbed my attention was um Jerry White, who came on the show a few months ago, and he was um involved in the kind of digital web industry, wasn't he? And he actually admitted to to breaking the entire BBC homepage for about two or three minutes, didn't he? Which again, BBC homepage being it must be the most visited website or one of the most visited websites in the UK, and he basically broke it, didn't he?

Will Ockenden: 51:13

Yeah, he got the he got the clown on fire, didn't he to come on the screen that used to be on the play school standby sign? He actually he actually did that, which I thought was brilliant, and then I found I found the graphic and sent it to him, and he's like, Yeah, that's it, that's it. Because he he always called it the clown on fire. Just to trigger him. The play school clown. There's another one that's just I've just remembered as well that was brilliant, which was um Neville Hobson came on the show and talked about when he was um doing some work and he accidentally clicked publish with some financial results and published them on the London Stock Exchange, which can affect share prices. Oh my god, that one that one really did scare the living shit out of me.

Speaker 9: 51:53

Yes, some of these actually give give me anxiety because I I could you can see how easily some of these could be done, couldn't you? And when you're talking when you're talking about um yeah, affecting potential global stock pri uh share prices, it's it's absolutely wild.

Will Ockenden: 52:09

Yeah, um, yeah, so not bad. We've I mean we've we have got so many, there's so many, and what we do is every Thursday we publish a segment which is uh the mistake from each show, and we've got enough at the moment to carry on all the way till I think they're going until October, because we produce a mistake every every Thursday. So Tuesday's our main episode day, Thursday's our uh mistake day. If you've got a mistake that you would like to share on the next in within the next hundred episodes of Embracing Market Your Mistakes, drop us a line to podcast at Prohibitionpr.co.uk and we will see if we can get you on the show because we'd love to hear uh any mistakes that you've got. Just be open and honest, everybody else is. It's really useful. Um so thanks for listening, everybody. Um, have you got any final words, Will, to our listeners who've stayed with us for a while.

Speaker 9: 52:53

Well, it's um I think there's I think there's real value in sharing mistakes, isn't there? I think you know, yeah, yeah, they're entertaining and they make us laugh sometimes, but the whole point of mistakes is if you're not making mistakes, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. And making mistakes and being able to learn from them is incredibly important, isn't it? And we hope that by sharing other people's mistakes, of course, we want to entertain people, but people can also learn from them as well. So yeah, fantastically useful, and it's just so great that people are sharing their stories with us like this.

Will Ockenden: 53:22

Yeah, mistakes breed creativity. I believe that's what people say. If you made a mistake, it shows that you're pushing the brand. If you don't make any mistakes, if you're the lucky listener that out there that's listening to this thinking, I've never made any, well then you're wrong, because everybody has, everybody has, and and there's nothing wrong with being honest, I think. It's actually refreshing. So if you have, feel free to send them in. If you don't want us to name you, then that's fine. Let us know. We can do anonymous mistakes, that'd be great. Or share someone else's mistakes. We're well up for a laugh. Um, anyway, right, we'll we'll see you uh on the other side. So uh thanks for a hundred episodes, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.