Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Every marketing expert has a "greatest hits" reel, but their biggest wins are usually built on the back of failure. Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate bullshit.
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 screw-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past the vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes 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. 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 disasters into your unfair market advantage.
It's time to stop pretending everything is perfect and start learning from the biggest mistakes from the world's best.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
I Forgot to Book the Entire Afternoon Session of my Event.
Former marketing manager at Prolific North, Natalie Davidson, once accidentally invited 100 people to the wrong day of an event due to a rogue automatic reminder. She discovered the mistake while in the middle of briefing a speaker and was unable to access her laptop for an hour, causing major stress. Miraculously, no one showed up early. Either attendees remembered the correct date or no one had read the email. I did my best to reassure her it was probably the former.
In this episode, we explore professional mistakes and failures that marketing professionals can learn from, offering listeners real-world examples of blunders and recoveries. Natalie shares two honest and revealing stories from her career in events management, showing how even the most organised professionals can make serious errors and still recover with integrity and resilience.
• Forgetting to book an afternoon session for 30 people during a nationwide roadshow of events
• Successfully recovering from the booking error by being honest with the venue and leveraging a good professional relationship
• Setting up automatic event reminders for the wrong day, sending incorrect information to around 100 attendees
• Managing crisis situations while actively engaged in other critical tasks
• Finding humor in professional mistakes and using them as learning opportunities
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The point of the show is to discuss things that have gone wrong, that you've done and you've learned from, Because people out there you know all the imposter syndrome, people like you say, who are working in brands, whether they're in agency or client side, they're all making mistakes and they're there to hear what other people have made. So come on, let's hear a few of yours.
Natalie Davidson:Oh gosh, I've got plenty in the vault, so I've got well. The first one, which was quite funny, is in a previous life, when I was still working in London. I was working as an event manager and every year we had this roadshow of events like across the country and, bearing in mind I was based in London, so there's about 30-odd events across the country in the space of about three weeks and one event manager, which was me, booking them all, organizing all the logistics, catering, getting the content ready, getting the sales team ready, making sure like brochures and merch got delivered on time and a lot of them. We had two sessions, so a morning and an afternoon, and I was speaking to the venue and I was like, yeah, so for the afternoon session, they were like what afternoon session? And I realized I'd actually forgotten, completely forgotten, to book the afternoon session and there were 30 people signed up to come to this like right table and I just not booked it with the venue.
Natalie Davidson:Um, yeah, that was not.
Chris Norton:That was not a fun art that's giving me anxiety just hearing about it was the way it was like super organized.
Natalie Davidson:I was like how the fuck have I done this?
Chris Norton:and how did you get out of it, or did you not?
Natalie Davidson:thankfully, the venue were really really nice. We had a long standing relationship with them and I was like I just had to be really honest and I was like, guys, I've fucked up. I actually need the room for the afternoon and god love them, me and the event manager on site. We were like going back and forth for like an hour and, bless her, she worked so hard to kind of move other people out of different rooms so I could like cover it up and they didn't have, I think, the full catering staff on for the afternoon, so she had to like work out a special, a special schedule to like get me some sandwiches trip to prep, yeah exactly like literally almost, that was what we were looking at.
Natalie Davidson:And then I just like, quietly, was briefing the sales director and I was like yeah, so the afternoon session is all taken care of as well, and I just never told anyone that I've forgotten to do it. Until today that was a very close call.
Chris Norton:And then there's another one when you set up an automatic reminder. Wasn't there that?
Natalie Davidson:was a good one, yeah, so this was at my current job, where I was on site.
Chris Norton:Are you listing readers of Prolific North?
Natalie Davidson:Not that I ever make mistakes. I was on site last year at Digital City Festival, which is one of our biggest events which will be happening again this year and we had again. It was one of those things where it was like an event at least one event every day and at the time I was actually on my own so I didn't have a coordinator. So I was doing everything and also helping the event manager and I'd set up in my foresight, thinking I was going to make my life easier, set up automatic reminders like for the whole week for different events, and I'd set the automatic reminder for the wrong day, so everybody who was coming to our event tomorrow got a reminder going we'll see you today. I was like and while I got notified of this, I was actually like running around- how many people is that that got that?
Chris Norton:About a hundred, yeah, so I hate it. It's usually just as you're pressing, send that. You spot something like that.
Natalie Davidson:Oh yeah, terrible, it had gone automatically and I was on site briefing speakers who were about to get on stage and someone had like showed me this and I was like oh dear God, and I couldn't stop briefing the speakers, so I actually couldn't physically get to my laptop for an hour to like do anything about it. Thank God nobody turned up on the wrong day because they'd had a previous reminder from me already Right, which you know. Maybe that's a good thing. Nobody's clearly reading my comms, so maybe that is a good thing.
