Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S5E13- Bouncing Back: How Marketers Survive Debacles

Episode Date: April 1, 2016

This week, we look at how marketing companies bounce back from blunders and epic missteps. Yes, most apologize, but what happens after the apology? We find out by telling the story of an airline that mistakenly offered business class tickets to Europe for $39, the cautionary tale of a company that made fun of a very serious Twitter hashtag and paid the price, the way a major candy bar company was forced to pull a global campaign off the air but came back even stronger, and the odd story of how a mattress company offended almost everybody with an ad, then apologized, then took the apology back. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling. Subscribe now and don't miss a single beat. We'll see you next time. new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 5, 2016. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly.

When the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in June of 67, everything changed. The songwriting explored areas no band had ever ventured before. The masterful production was jaw-dropping, and even the album cover set a new standard. It was clear rock had just entered a brand new era. Sgt. Pepper would stay at the top of the charts for almost six months. It wasn't just the album of the year,

it was the album of the decade. But shortly after Pepper's release, Brian Epstein, the Beatles' beloved manager, was found dead. The band was devastated. Six days after Epstein's death, Paul McCartney called a meeting. He had an idea. The Beatles had enough money and independence to finance and direct their own film.

He pitched the idea as a way to stay in front of audiences now that the band wasn't touring anymore. As he saw it, a film could reach more people than a concert ever could. But more than anything, McCartney saw the film as a kind of therapy, something to keep the band busy as they mourned Epstein's passing. He already had a title in mind, Magical Mystery Tour. In England, British kids grew up taking mystery tours, which were chaperone bus tours to secret locations like historical sites or the seaside.

That's exactly what McCartney wanted to do, take a busload of interesting characters on a mystery tour and film the results. The plan was to have no plan, no script, no schedule, no plot, just laughs, locations, spontaneous dialogue, and some great songs. On September 11, 1967, 43 people boarded a yellow and blue bus and took off for the countryside. The cast would eventually include the band, a handful of professional actors, friends, staff, a half-dozen wrestlers, a dozen babies, a military marching band, and 160 dancers. Ten hours of film was shot over two weeks,

and it took six weeks to edit it down to 52 minutes. Final cost? 40,000 pounds, or just over $100,000. When the band showed a final cut of Magical Mystery Tour to close friends, the room was shocked. Their producer George Martin spoke for everyone

when he said it looked awful and was a disaster. The Beatles' inner circle all pleaded with the band to shelve the film. Better to lose 40,000 pounds than be embarrassed. But Paul McCartney strongly disagreed. He felt the public would embrace the madcap film. The BBC agreed to run Magical Mystery Tour on Boxing Day, which guaranteed the Beatles the biggest audience of the year.

Over 13 million people tuned in, which normally would have been fantastic. Beatles produce First Flop was the headline the next morning. That was the kind review. Other critics piled on calling it appalling, disconnected, formless and amateurish.

The reaction was so overwhelmingly negative that for the first time in memory, a band felt compelled to make a public apology for their work, which is what McCartney did the next day when he simply said, we goofed. The response was so excruciating, a multi-million dollar deal to show it on NBC in America was cancelled. On both sides of the ocean, Magical Mystery Tour

was simply a public embarrassment for the Beatles. Until that moment, as one writer said, they had been cultural mission control. But the debacle didn't keep the Beatles down.

One year later, they bounced back. The White Album would go on to become the biggest selling record of the 1960s, and the magical misstep was long forgotten. In the world of marketing, companies often make glaring mistakes or find themselves embroiled in scandals. What determines a company's fate is not just the apology, but what happens after the apology. Sometimes it means taking a huge financial hit,

sometimes it means groveling, and other times it means starting all over again with a clean slate. But one thing is certain. It's never easy to bounce back. You're under the influence. The Winter of 1979 was a snowmageddon in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Five-foot snowdrifts paralyzed the area and snow loads on roofs began exceeding

safe levels. But the Allied Roofing and Siding Company of Grand Rapids looked out at the snow and saw a revenue opportunity. So they hired teams out to shovel off roofs to prevent collapses. But while they were out on the jobs,

guess which roof collapsed? That's right, the one on the Allied Roofing and Siding Company of Grand Rapids. That's a tough problem to bounce back from when you're in the roofing business. The key to bouncing back depends on the decisions a company makes in the heat of the problem. When Inc. magazine was founded back in 1979, it positioned itself as a smart business publication that reports on the growth of companies. Every year, for example, it publishes a list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in North America. In 1981, Inc. was the first major magazine to put Steve Jobs on its cover,

with the headline, This Man Has Changed Business Forever. Needless to say, Inc. Magazine is a widely read and trusted source for spotting emerging trends. Recently, Inc. Magazine sent out a tweet that said, Trade show and conference planning is expected to be a $15 industry by 2019. Sounds exciting.

Clearly, Inc. had omitted the word billion. It only took seconds for the Twitter and Facebook universe to pile on the snark. So, Inc. responded with a tweet that said, Oops, when it comes to proofreading today, it's Readers 15, Social Media Team, 0. Sorry about that, everyone. Now, because Facebook's algorithm rewards posts

that get high volumes of fast interaction, the sheer number of likes, replies, and clever comments to Ink's humorous post actually boosted the magazine's audience reach. The fact Ink had chose to respond with humor not only helped the magazine bounce back from a mistake, it actually attracted a large number of new readers. The 21st century has put enormous pressure on companies.

It's not just the cringeworthy effect of a glaring misstep or the scathing response from the public. It's the fact the Internet gives us all front-row seats to watch how the company deals with the mistake. Back in 2006, Alitalia Airlines typed itself right into a huge problem. The Italian airline advertised round-trip business class tickets from Toronto to Cyprus for $39 each, instead of $3,900. Travelsiteorbits.com saw the strange pricing and alerted Alitalia, but that was 12 hours after the price had been posted. In the meantime, gleeful travelers gobbled up the tickets.

One Toronto lawyer bought five round-trip business class tickets to Cyprus for under $1,000. At first, Alitalia tried to cancel the ticket purchases, which was understandable. But, at the end of the day, Alitalia did the upstanding thing. It decided to honor the price. What is even more remarkable about that decision was the fact Alitalia was struggling financially at the time. Yet, it still honored the $39 price.

2,000 tickets had been sold in those 12 hours. It cost Alitalia over $7 million. Most companies would have found a way to weasel out of that typo, and the web is full of stories about companies that did just that. But Alitalia's decision not to backtrack was a rare and courageous one. The company chose to take a huge financial hit to its bottom line in order to is a delicate process for most companies. Because once a mistake has happened, a brand still has to tiptoe through a field of emotional landmines

to get to the other side. When footage went public of Baltimore Raven player Ray Rice knocking his fiancée unconscious, then dragging her limp body out of an elevator, it created a massive media firestorm. Thousands of women took to Twitter to discuss their abusive relationships

and to fight victim-blaming in light of the fact Rice's fiancée chose to stand by him. They used the hashtag Why I stayed. Shortly after, frozen pizza maker DiGiorno saw the hashtag,

smelled an opportunity, and tweeted hashtag Why I stayed You had pizza. As you can imagine, the backlash was swift and merciless. Within minutes, DiGiorno Pizza realized it hadn't understood the context for the hashtag. No advertiser in their right mind would treat a serious issue like spousal assault lightly

or try to piggyback on the issue to sell merchandise. So DiGiorno quickly deleted the tweet. But the damage was done. Hundreds and hundreds of angry tweets, posts, and messages reigned in on the pizza company. A very embarrassed DiGiorno then sent out a tweet that said, A million apologies. Did not read what the hashtag was about before posting.

A short time later, DiGiorno made a formal apology, saying the tweet was a mistake and didn't reflect the company's values and that the entire company was sorry. It was a colossal blunder. But DiGiorno then made a decision to do something few companies would have considered. They replied personally to every single person who had responded negatively to their original tweet and apologized. It was a huge undertaking, but the pizza company wanted to prove it was genuinely and sincerely sorry. When it was all said and done, DiGiorno then went silent on social media for three weeks. Historically, the frozen pizza maker was a big social media user and had built a brand personality by tweeting snarky yet funny comments about trending topics over the years.

But that one tweet had completely derailed them. Three weeks later, DiGiorno went back on Twitter with a more muted tone. The usual spicy attitude was softened, but it continued to post comments. After a length of time, DiGiorno returned to snark when it posted funny and biting comments about NBC's live production of Peter Pan. Then, an interesting thing happened. Other big brands joined DiGiorno in tweeting funny potshots at NBC. And not long after that, singer Iggy Azalea called out pizza company Papa John's on Twitter,

because the company's delivery guy had shared Azalea's private phone number with his family, which prompted various family members to start texting the singing star. Nice. So DiGiorno, whose slogan is, It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno, pounced on the opportunity by responding to Azalea's tweet saying, Delivery. Shaking my head.

To which Azalea responded, I know, right? That response got 18,000 retweets and 30,000 likes. What all of this showed was that DiGiorno had been forgiven. When other brands joined DiGiorno to make fun of NBC's Peter Pan broadcast, and when Iggy Azalea tweeted back, it was a sign that it was safe to engage with DiGiorno again. Because the frozen pizza maker made a big effort to apologize personally to hundreds of people, instead of just delivering the usual cut-and-paste corporate apology,

it was able to contain the controversy. But it came at a price. Competitors took advantage of the three-week silence and stole a healthy chunk of DiGiorno's followers. But one year later, DiGiorno's social media presence was bigger and better than ever. Its bounce-back strategy had worked. It was a plan built of sincere apologies,

a suitable amount of groveling, a calming period of silence, and the acceptance that a temporary loss of customers was inevitable. We'll be right back to our show, but first, a quick word from a sponsor who supports our podcast. While some companies take very careful steps to bounce back from debacles, other companies seem to bounce right into them. Not long ago, advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather India created a print campaign for the Curl-On Mattress Company. The central idea was to bounce back on their spring mattresses.

One ad showed a cartoon Steve Jobs being fired and pushed out the door of Apple, then falling, bouncing off a curl-on mattress, then rising back up to show off a MacBook computer to the press. The headline? Bounce Back. The second ad in the campaign showed Mahatma Gandhi being pushed off a train, then falling onto a spring mattress, then bouncing back to become the Indian independence leader. But it was the third ad in the campaign that was a flashpoint.

It showed 15-year-old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai being shot in the head by the Taliban, then falling with bloodstained clothes onto the mattress, then bouncing back up to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The ad ignited instant outrage. As it turned out,

only the Steve Jobs ad had been placed into paid media, and the other two were part of a speculative pitch to win the account. The work, however, was posted to a popular online advertising archive and entered into an award show, suggesting it must have been approved by someone at Ogilvy India and Curlon Mattress.

Once the media firestorm started, Ogilvy India made a personal apology to Malala and her family, and stated it would investigate how its internal standards and approval process had been compromised, and promised to never let it happen again. But later, according to the India Times, an anonymous Ogilvy executive

was quoted saying his agency thought the work was brilliant. Then, the chairman of Ogilvy India stepped forward to defend the work, going on record saying the campaign was legitimate, that it had been approved not only by a long list of creative directors, but by the client itself. He also said there would be no punishment or corrective measures taken within Ogilvy, because no wrong had been done.

It was a stunning reversal of the agency's original apology statement. Curl-On Mattress itself was conspicuously quiet through the controversy, either letting Ogilvy flail in the wind or enjoying the attention it brought to their product. It was hard to say. Either way, it was a spectacular lapse in taste and sensitivity and an abject lesson in how not to bounce back from controversy. Since snicker bars were first marketed back in 1930,

the advertising message has always focused on two things. A stomach-filling snack loaded with peanuts. Its long-time slogan, Snickers Really Satisfies, summed that up. Back in 2008, Snickers launched a new television campaign in the UK featuring Mr. T. In the commercial, Mr. T ridicules a male speedwalker and pelts him with Snickers bars shot out of a Gatling gun. Speedwalking? I pity you, fool! You a disgrace to the man race!

It's time to run like a real man! Take that, speedwalker! The tagline? Get some nuts. The response to the commercial was interesting. Total number of complaints reported to the UK Advertising Standards Authority? Two. But it created a storm of controversy in the US,

which is interesting because it never aired in the US. But it could be found online. The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the largest national LGBT civil rights organization in the US, criticized Snickers parent company Mars for supporting the notion that the LGBT community was a group of second-class citizens and that violence against them was not only acceptable, but humorous. Mars responded by saying the Mr. T ads were meant to be fun

and had been positively received in the UK. But Mars also said it understood that humor was highly subjective and the company never meant to offend. As a result, they pulled the Mr. T Get Some Nuts campaign globally. The Human Rights Campaign Foundation applauded Mars for taking swift and appropriate action. In case nobody's told you, weight loss goes beyond the old just eat less and move more narrative. And that's where Felix comes in. Felix is redefining weight loss for Canadians with a smarter, more personalized approach

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Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just Thank you. When something like this happens to a marketing company, the next campaign, as a rule, is usually softer, toned down, and less bold creatively. A brand tends to lose some momentum as both the advertiser and the advertising agency are smarting from the negative response, the public admonishment, and the huge loss of money spent on the now shelved commercials, which in this case included the Mr. T endorsement money.

But Snickers not only bounced back from that misstep. The forced reboot actually resulted in one of the best candy bar campaigns of the last 25 years. The new commercial launched during Super Bowl XLIV. It began with a pick-up football game between some regular guys. Then the quarterback throws the football, but the other team tackles the intended receiver. Only, it's 88 year old Betty White. Moments later in the huddle, the teammates

aren't happy. Then someone offers Betty a Snickers bar. Suddenly, Betty White transforms into a regular guy. He was just playing like Betty White because he was hungry. We see one last play, and this time the quarterback gets sacked. Except, the quarterback has turned into 88-year-old Abe Vigoda.

That hurt. Then, came the new theme line. You're not you when you're hungry. According to a day after polled in USA Today, viewers voted that commercial the most popular ad of Super Bowl XLIV.

The new tagline, You're not you when you're hungry, became the foundation for many more hilarious Snickers commercials starring a bevy of celebrities, including Roseanne Barr,

Aretha Franklin, Liza Minnelli, and Joan Collins. The latest installment features Willem Dafoe as a frustrated Marilyn Monroe. This is a disaster! Who's the genius who puts a girl in heels on a subway grate? Miss Monroe, eat a Snickers. Why?

You get a little cranky when you're hungry. Better? Much better. Snickers had not only bounced back from its get-some-nuts misstep, but its marketing was now better than it was before. However, I noticed the British campaign didn't abandon the old line completely. You're not you when you're hungry. Snickers, get some nuts. But that's the nutty world of advertising.

No person is perfect and no company is perfect. But in this digital world, mistakes are amplified like never before, and there are consequences. The first step is to make a genuine apology, rather than one squeezed through a legal team. But what happens after the apology is the more revealing story. Alitalia Airlines could have unleashed its lawyers to find a loophole to cancel those $39 tickets, but chose instead to take a massive financial hit in order to honor the price, proving that a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money. Snickers acted quickly and shelved a hugely expensive global campaign,

yet picked up the pieces by bouncing back with a much stronger idea. DiGiorno Pizza jumped on a hashtag too quickly and scalded itself on the heat of a very serious issue, but chose to make, not one, but hundreds of apologies, then tiptoed back with a strategy of humbleness and appropriate tone. Whereas Curl-On Mattress and its ad agency employed the least attractive options, a recanted apology combined with thundering silence. As Advertising Age magazine noted recently,

smart marketers know there might be one judge in a court of law, but there are millions of judges in the court of public opinion. It's not rocket science. It just takes a little humanity. And when you take that mystery out of a comeback, it can be pretty magical when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode of the Zip, zip. This episode brought to you by... Comfort Wipe, the sanitary paper extension arm and holder.

Be careful how you use it. Under the Influence was recorded at Pirate Toronto. Series producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Oman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Research, Jillian Gora. Um, do you wear clothes when you listen to our show? If so, have we got a t-shirt for you.

Go to terryoreilly.ca slash shop. See you next week.