HOW TO SURF CONTROVERSY

 

 

I’ve often heard people quote the expression “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”.

Obviously this is bollocks.

Ask Gerald Ratner, he used to own the largest chain of jewellers in the UK until he gave a speech at which some journalists were present.

One of them asked how he could sell his jewellery so cheaply, some earrings cost no more than a prawn sandwich?

Ratner went for the laugh: “Because they’re total crap”.

It did get the laugh he wanted, but next day the headline on the front page of the Sun was: RATNER SAYS HIS JEWELLERY IS CRAP.

Unfortunately, Ratner’s customers read the Sun and they didn’t want to be seen spending their money on crap, so they stopped shopping at Ratner’s.

Gerald Ratner had to resign and the value of the company fell by £500 million.

So, clearly not all publicity is good publicity.

On the other hand, bad publicity, when handled properly, can become good publicity.

In the early days the Beatles were the biggest band in the world and were very family friendly, they were nice boys.

The Rolling Stones were just another group until a newspaper printed photos of them urinating up the side of a petrol station.

For most bands this would have been terrible, but the Stones decided to surf it.

In order to take market share they didn’t copy the Beatles, they decided to cultivate the opposite image, bad boys.

As stories came out about drug arrests and orgies they didn’t hide it, they used it to add to their brand: the bad boys of rock and roll.

So bad publicity drowned Ratner’s business, but the Stones surfed it and it made them bigger than ever.

The lesson is, it’s not the publicity that’s bad or good, it’s how we respond to it.

The two most recent examples are American Eagle and Astronomy.

American Eagle ran a campaign featuring a young blonde ‘opinion former’ and the line: ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’.

Obviously that’s just a naff pun, but woke keyboard warriors decided the pun on ‘genes’ was meant to be promoting white supremacy.

So how could American Eagle have responded in order to surf that controversy?

They could continue the campaign with attractive black, Latino, and Asian celebrities wearing American Eagle and the line: “I’ve got good jeans, too”.

You flip the whole thing so that instead of being something to be embarrassed about it becomes cool and two fingers up to white supremacy.

A great example of the right way to handle bad publicity was tech company Astronomy.

On a kiss-cam video at a Coldplay concert, the CEO of Astronomy and the head of HR were shown cuddling, then hiding as soon as they were seen.

The clip went viral as it was funny, but both of them were married to other people and had to leave the company.

It could have been embarrassing for Astronomy, but they decided to surf it instead.

The concert was Coldplay, so they got Gwynneth Paltrow (who used to be married to  lead singer Chris Martin) to be a ‘temporary spokesperson’.

She says to camera: “I know you’ve all got questions and I’m going to answer them.”

The questions pop up as captions, the first one reads:

“OMG! WHAT THE ACTUAL F?”.

Gwynneth Paltrow smiles and says:

“Why yes, Astronomy is the best place to run Apache Airflow. We’re thrilled so many people have a new found interest in data workflow automation.”

The video carries on like that, deadpan, and it’s very funny.

It got 27 million views and Astronomy got a 15,000% spike in website visits.

Imagine how much it would have cost to generate that in paid-for media.

So that’s the thing about controversy, you can drown in it or you can surf it.

You can spend all your time worrying about it, avoiding it, you can make your advertising so bland you can guarantee no one will notice it or talk about it.

In which case you have to ask yourself, why don’t you just save your money and don’t do any advertising at all?

That way you can guarantee your brand won’t be talked about or noticed.

Just like 89% of the safe, bland advertising that’s out there.