Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to the world's number one podcast on Marketing Mistakes by Prohibition PR. This podcast is specifically for senior marketers determined to grow their brands by learning from real-world screw ups.
Each week, join hosts Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, seasoned PR professionals with over 45 years of combined experience, as they candidly explore the marketing failures most marketers would rather forget. Featuring insightful conversations with industry-leading marketing experts and value-packed solo episodes, the show tries to uncover the valuable lessons from genuine marketing disasters and, crucially, the tips and steps you need to take to avoid them.
Chris and Will bring practical experience from founding the award-winning PR agency Prohibition PR, where they have successfully guided top brands to significant growth through PR strategy, social media, media relations, content marketing, and strategic brand-building.
Tune in to turn f*ck ups into progress, mistakes into lessons, and challenges into real-life competitive advantages. Well, we hope so anyway.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
The Craigslist Sandwich Board Stunt That Misfired
When Director of Thinking and Creative PR Specialist Peter Freedman joined us for this episode 39, he unpacked the unusual marketing mistake he made while working with Craigslist.
Tasked with satirising the rise of in-your-face shirt sponsorships, Peter sponsored a women’s football team in Battersea Park and put them in full advertising sandwich boards. The stunt was pretty clever, photogenic and completely impractical, yet it barely registered with any journalists.
One even called it the most peculiar idea they had ever seen. Peter explains why the campaign fell flat, how it was simply too weird and not familiar enough, and what he learned from books like The Creative Curve and Contagious about the sweet spot between novelty and recognition.
Marketers will hear a candid breakdown of why some ideas stay niche, why moderate innovation works better than pure shock value, and how to judge whether your next PR concept is different in the right way.
Click on the link to listen to the full episode:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2206375/episodes/15568830
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This show is all about um mistakes. And you've put a mistake up in in your questionnaire when we asked you about what's your what's one of your biggest mistakes that you've made in marketing. And I've got here that it was it was to do with Craigslist. Do you want to walk us through that, Peter?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I feel a failure for not having a more dramatic or spectacular mistake. But uh yeah, I worked for Craigslist, the online classified site, uh, for 11 years as a as a contractor in the US and the UK. And Craigslist, you probably know, is a much bigger name, a bigger brand in the US than it is in the UK. But we were doing stuff for them in both countries. And at the time of this idea, um it seemed to me anyway that uh premiership and the top football clubs were doing more and more corporate sponsorship on the players' shirts and in the stadia and everywhere. It was kind of more prominent and ubiquitous and in your face. And so that seemed to be a kind of trend in the zeitgeist at the time. So what we did was we found a women's football team in Battersea Park in London. Uh I think they were called something like Battersea women's football team, and we sponsored them as their shirt sponsors. But instead of sponsoring that just their shirts, we got them to play their matches wearing advertising sandwich boards, um which um those kind of A boards you sometimes see people wearing on the street, even now, advertising grass. They were heavy and ridiculously ridiculously impractical, and they were very photogenic. We did a short video and we took photographs, and uh so the intention was to satirize this growing trend for more and more blatant and in-your-face and ubiquitous commercial sponsorship. Um and I thought it was very funny and it produced great pictures, but it got a disappointing amount of coverage. It didn't get as much coverage as we hoped. It didn't matter totally because the CEO of Craigslist thought it was hilarious and brilliant, and he really enjoyed it. But I realized afterwards that one of the reasons it had failed was that it was too wacky and too out there and too ridiculous. I I got an email from uh one journalist saying, Oh, this is one of the most peculiar ideas I've ever seen, which I took as a compliment, which I'm not I'm not sure I like that. I'm not sure he meant it as a compliment. No, I know what he meant.
SPEAKER_01:We know how jaded and cynical journalists are, don't we? I know you were a journalist, Peter, sorry.
SPEAKER_00:I know. I I suffer from high self-esteem, too much self-esteem, so I took it as a compliment. But I realized one of the reasons it had failed was it was too wacky and out there. And I remember reading later that they somebody had done a study of applications for scientific research projects, and they found the most successful applications were the ones that that were moderately innovative, that they were the right combination of being new and innovative and familiar. And then I also read uh an excellent book called The Creative Curve. And a big theme of that was that our human psychology is that we simultaneously crave things that are novel and things that are familiar, and the secret of a really good idea is to find the sweet spot um between being new and familiar, where it's both simultaneously new and familiar, both to exactly the right degree and the and the right extent. And this idea, sandwich boards for Craig's list, was just too novel and not familiar enough. It was too outlandish. And so uh yeah, and so I think that's one of the reasons uh it failed. Yeah, so the the I think the secret for creativity, Jonah Berger also talks about this in his book Contagious, about viral ideas. The secret of successful ideas are ideas that are simultaneously similar but different, and both things at the same time. And this was too different and not similar enough. So I think I learned a valuable lesson from it. Um
