When Pinterest Strategist and Niche Marketing Expert Meagan Williamson joined the show for Episode 38, she opened up about a painful and expensive mistake that shaped the way she works today. Early in her business, she hired a Facebook ads expert to run paid traffic to a new funnel that had never been tested organically. Over a 90-day period she spent more than twenty-five thousand dollars on ad spend and fees with almost nothing to show for it. The only purchase was a sixty-seven-dolla...

Marshall Manson is a communications strategist with deep experience in both brand marketing and corporate reputation. In 2006, while working at Edelman, he played a central role in the infamous "Walmarting Across America" campaign, an early and much criticised attempt at influencer marketing that quickly unravelled due to a lack of transparency. Marshall joins us to reflect openly on what went wrong, what he learned, and why the lessons from that experience still matter today. The 2006...

A single soft line on The Body Shop catalogue haunted copywriter Vikki Ross for six months. Years later, another forgettable line slipped through and ended up across London on billboards. In this episode, I talk to Vikki about how those moments changed the way she presents copy and how she helps clients avoid drifting into the dull middle. We get into why stakeholders so often choose the safest option, how she now protects the creative process, and what it really takes to build a brand voice ...

Christopher McKay, Head of Brand Engagement at Hillarys shares his career-defining failure when working at Ministry of Sound, revealing how a creative idea bombed due to lack of audience research and testing. • Started career in journalism before moving to PR at CalPR in Leeds • Moved to Ministry of Sound in London • Created "French Lessons with Bob" featuring DJ Bob Sinclair teaching French phrases • Campaign received only 50 likes compared to the usual 800-1,000 engagement • After two fail...

What if the key to leading brilliant brand teams was already wired into your brain? Claire Koryczan, founder of Imagine Beyond, has helped FTSE 100 brands and creative agencies unlock smarter ways to lead, create and think. In this episode, she shares how neuroscience shapes everything from energy in meetings to decision-making under pressure. Expect practical tips, brain-friendly habits, and a few stories from the front lines of brand leadership. Is your strategy still ri...

Marketing mishaps from major brands reveal the critical importance of PR coordination with marketing efforts and careful forward planning to prevent campaign disasters. • Zara's campaign featuring mannequins with missing limbs was filmed before the Israel-Palestine conflict but released during war coverage, resulting in widespread criticism • Negative sentiment towards Zara surged from 13% to 76.4% following the incident • Nike initially refused to sell Mary Earps' England goalkeeper k...

What happens when you leave a top PR agency to launch your own business, only for the world to shut down weeks later? Darryl Sparey, co-founder of Hard Numbers and former Hotwire leader, shares how he built an agency focused on proving marketing impact through data. In this episode, Darryl explains how marketers can move beyond vanity metrics and start connecting PR and SEO performance to measurable ROI. You’ll learn why access to GA4, Looker Studio, Search Console and CRM data changes ...

Sam Benton, co-founder of Mad Masters, shares a career-shaping error many ambitious marketers will recognise: believing you know it all and avoiding help until reality proves otherwise. He explains why pricing is a feeling, not a number, how KFC’s box-meal flop only succeeded after they doubled the price, and the pitch-room mistake where an Experian logo appeared in an Expedia meeting but still led to a client win. Sam explores herd effects, talk-trigger moments like hotel cookies, and ...

Today we speak with Greg Matusky, CEO & Founder, Gregory FCA Public Relations. He talks about being a young PR professional. We learn how Auntie Anne Beiler, founder of the famous pretzel franchise, brilliantly managed a potential scandal by revealing her own past mistakes before they could be used against her. • Auntie Anne grew up connected to the Amish community in Pennsylvania • Her hand-rolled soft pretzel recipe allegedly came through divine inspiration, creating a wholesome ...

When Google rolled out AI Overviews, Prohibition PR’s founder Chris Norton and co-owner Will watched something shocking: their clients’ sites still ranked high, but traffic plummeted overnight. The cause? AI summaries stealing clicks before users ever reached their pages. In this episode, Chris and Will reveal how a 50% traffic crash exposed the myth that “rankings = revenue,” and how they pivoted to GEO, meaning Generative Engine Optimization. From an awkward AI hallucination that invented a...

We explore marketing mishaps and professional blunders that offer valuable life lessons with a bit of humour. Our guest today is Gerry White, SEO, Growth and Product Led Marketing Expert he talks about costly decimal point errors right through to accidentally breaking the BBC homepage himself. • How a decimal point error (£50 instead of 50p) in a pay-per-click campaign led to dismissal • Setting a lifetime budget as a daily budget over a weekend – and how the client actually loved the result...

What do you do when your big pitch idea quite literally vanishes in front of the client? For James Tomlinson, it involved a magician, a torn-up Financial Times, and the most awkward silence of his career. In this episode of Embracing Marketing Mistakes, James reveals the pitch fails that taught him more than any win ever could from sanding a CEO’s boardroom table to dealing with AI-written briefs that make no sense. With two decades in agency leadership, he now helps brands and agencies avoid...

Andrew Bloch shares the challenging story of opening Frank PR's New York office after successful expansion to Manchester, Glasgow, and Sydney. What started as a promising venture with moderate success ultimately became a significant business lesson about knowing when to walk away. • American business culture proved vastly different despite sharing the same language • US clients expected much larger account teams - one "small boutique agency" had 35 people on a single account • American execu...

Forget chasing subscribers and viral videos. It’s time to turn YouTube into a serious lead generation engine. In this episode of Embracing Marketing Mistakes, hosts Chris Norton and Will Ockenden sit down with David Greiner, co-founder of David & Luana Co., to explore how businesses can use YouTube not for vanity metrics, but as a predictable client acquisition channel. David shares the hard truths behind what most marketers get wrong on YouTube and why traditional engagement metrics like...

Marketing professionals aren't immune to making classic business mistakes, especially when personal projects cloud professional judgment. Our guest Katie Tucker, a Customer Insight Strategist, and Author of Do Penguins Eat Peaches, shares how her family gap year adventure led her to create a course without proper market validation, only to be unexpectedly saved by the COVID pandemic's timely intervention. World tour with family generated Instagram following and many questions about how to p...

Careers rarely implode on schedule, but what you do next can change everything. When Alice Ter Haar was demoted at Deliveroo, right as the rocket ship was taking off she refused to hide. Instead, she told the truth, turned a career low into an origin story, and built Badass Unicorn to help high-growth teams find confidence, resilience, and psychological safety without the buzzwords or the fluff. We dig into how to reframe shame into signal, why morale rises when people spend more time in the...

Shaheen Samavati, Co-founder and CEO of Vera Content, explores career mistakes through a cautionary tale of a webinar gone wrong during severe storms in Spain. 😱 Shaheen a committed marketing agency owner, shares how forgetting to hit record on a high-profile influencer webinar with 1,000 registrants and 350 live attendees created an expensive problem requiring a completely new recording session. • Decision to collaborate with a major industry influencer through a joint webinar requir...

Think your LinkedIn profile is just a digital CV? Think again. In this eye‐opening conversation with Louise Brogan (Founder, Brogan Partners; LinkedIn: Louise Brogan Ltd. – Video Content Marketing) LinkedIn UK, author of Raise your Visibility on LinkedIn, we uncover the strategic approach that transformed her business from a failing craft shop to a thriving LinkedIn consultancy serving global clients. Louise breaks down her four‐stage system for LinkedIn success that goes far beyond basic pro...

In this mini series where we take a look back to our guest's mistakes they have shared, we have Patrick Collister's marketing mistake. Everyone makes mistakes in their marketing careers, but few are willing to discuss them openly. In this refreshingly candid conversation, our guest reveals how a seemingly catastrophic career move - joining a French-owned direct marketing agency as creative director – became an unexpected turning point in their professional journey. The position seemed promis...

Alexandra Galviz, better known as Authentic Alex, is a LinkedIn Top Voice and the co-creator of the global LinkedIn Local movement. At just 24, she was leading training for 350 people across 21 offices, while secretly battling imposter syndrome, burnout and the pressure of living a life that didn’t feel like her own. Her viral LinkedIn post about leaving the “pointy-top building by the river” marked the start of her mission to build a career rooted in authenticity. In this episode, Alexandra ...