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.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Marketing FAIL: How I made 120,000 Anglers Angry
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Andy Green shares his biggest professional mistake from his time as deputy head of PR at Yorkshire Water, when he inadvertently angered 120,000 anglers by running a competition featuring a photo that violated pike fishing ethics. 😱
• Angling Times (circulation 120,000) ran a front-page headline: "Anglers in fury over YW competition"
• The fundamental rule in pike fishing is to catch, photograph, and then release the fish
Key lesson:
When dealing with specialist subjects you're unfamiliar with, always consult an expert who knows the audience and subject matter. While a tad embarrassing, Andy notes his mistake was relatively minor compared to Government mistakes that can impact financial markets
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Andy's Professional Mistake
Speaker 1Andy, what's the biggest fuck up in your professional career and what have you learned from it? Well, someone's putting me up here saying I will, but I disagree with that. Now I don't know what we've got, but I once got on the front page. I was once an editor of a fishing magazine. So I used to be deputy head of PR at the old Yorkshire Water Authority. So pre-privatisation, they were responsible up for fishing licenses and stuff. And I ran a competition, uh, that inadvertently used a photograph of a young angler with a giant pike tucking into it, not realizing that the worst thing that any pike fishing can do is not to throw the thing back. And so the front page of angling times, which those days had a circulation of 120 000, had a big like head 96 point headline anglers in fury over yw. Uh, competition, a fishy one, and I've been the. Can I just add that?
Understanding Angler Ethics
Speaker 1A lesson from anything always in life. So if you're dealing with a specialist subject, particularly when you've got no knowledge of, always have, like an expert, someone who knows the audience, someone knows the product service you know close at hand there. So you know, yeah, so anyway, but uh, we live and earn but we grow from. That is it. Is it sorry just to go back through that, just to deconstruct that? Is it that the fact that they were eating the pike, that was annoying the anglers, right? Uh, well, it was the fact that there's a fundamental if you catch a pike, yeah, take a photo of it then throw it back, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the fact that he was eating it, right, well, the fact it was wasn't thrown back, that you know it was like dead and uh, not not put back in the waters for other anglers to have a go at and respect the pike perhaps on it, okay, wow, I mean, you gotta make careful when you're fishing. Kids, way to go, guys, yeah. But you see some of these cock ups about uh government, uh spokespeople who say something wrong and then they knock millions off the stock market and stuff, so, uh, you know, relatively like, maybe in grand scheme of things,
