Lead Balloon - Marketing, Public Relations and Strategic Communications Stories

The U.S. Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron is not only the world’s most well-known group of elite performing aviators. 

It’s also—and people forget this—a group of elite public affairs and marketing practitioners. 

From the pilots to the technicians turning wrenches on the planes, every Blue Angels team member is trained to uphold the unit's 76 years of tradition and legacy. As a brand management exercise, there is perhaps no other initiative in the world as rigorous and disciplined.

And at the heart of this publicity apparatus is a small but extraordinary group of public and media relations practitioners whose duties would literally make most strategic communicators pass out.

The Blue Angels public affairs team operates under grueling physical conditions, works brutal hours and is held to meticulous standards befitting one of the most storied aviation units in history, where the stakes are always life and death.

They populate social media accounts on behalf of the Blue Angels brand, coordinate ride-alongs with local media and VIPs, and are even called upon to fly photography missions with the squadron, experiencing the same adverse G-forces as the pilots themselves.

We wanted to tell the story... of the people who tell the Blue Angels' story, embedding with the Blue Angels Public Affairs team for the first segment in this two-part series.

So in this episode, we meet the team as they prepare for and fly at the Chicago Air and Water show, one of more than 60 air shows the Blue Angels headline across North America each year.

The Blue Angels are supported by a team of more than 150 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel, and we meet a number of them, including:

Special thanks as well to Blue Angels Public Affairs Officer Lt. Chelsea Dietlin for helping coordinate Lead Balloon's embed with the squadron, as well as Jim Schlueter, Paul Guse and Dave Oates.

Watch a video preview of next month's epic season finale with the Blue Angels.

Subscribe to the Podcamp Media e-newsletter to be notified when we post video of this extraordinary experience.

Special music for this episode was performed and recorded by Ty Christian and Brian Koenig of the metal act Lords of the Trident, which is touring this fall in the U.S., Canada and Japan.

Additional music by Michael Briguglio, the Revolution and the Realist.

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In 1993, the world watched as two bitter rivals shook hands on the South Lawn of the White House, presenting the best hope for peace in the Middle East seen in centuries of bloodshed.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chair Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords—and the handshake that followed, cajoled by U.S. President Bill Clinton—comprised an iconic snapshot in history.

In the moment, the world was awash in optimism, and Jewish Americans in particular were riveted by what was happening in the Middle East.

But in Eastern Europe, Jewish people living in former Soviet states faced a growing threat of persecution, and the problems went largely unreported.

And Operation Exodus, an effort by the United Jewish Appeal to repatriate one million Jewish refugees from failing states like Uzbekistan to Israel, would need a brilliant publicity campaign to motivate donors to support its ambitious goals.

So the UJA hired Dick Grove, the founder of Ink PR, for the job. And, together with a handpicked team of PR professionals and documentarians, he traveled into the Lion’s Den itself, documenting destitution firsthand in a failed Soviet State and building a massive fundraising publicity campaign for UJA.

In this episode, he's joined by Operation Exodus director Ron Friedman to rehash the tale of this extraordinary undertaking.

Visit our website for pictures from Dick's trip to Uzbekistan.

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Adweek's 2020 "Marketing Podcast of the Year."

Webby Award-nominated.

Profiled on Forbes.com.

On Lead Balloon, professional communicators share tales of the do-or-die situations that defined public relations and marketing careers--what went wrong, how unexpected obstacles were overcome, and what was learned in the process.

With immersive storytelling and a wry sense of humor, host Dusty Weis revisits epic PR disasters, intense communications scenarios, professional crises and half-baked marketing campaigns gone awry, and usually finds a reason to chuckle.

Because sometimes, there are important lessons to be learned from someone else's worst day. And sometimes, it's just more convenient than group therapy.

Tune in monthly for new episodes. Visit podcampmedia.com/leadballoon to learn more.

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On a busy evening in Boston's financial district in 1995, gunshots ring out. When the smoke clears, a prominent divorce attorney is dead and a police officer is wounded.

And Lee Caraher, then the Vice President of Corporate and Consumer Communications for the Sega Corporation, doesn't know it yet...

...but she's about to have a public relations crisis on her hands.

Police would eventually uncover evidence that shooter John T. Lin "trained" for his revenge rampage by spending hours playing Virtua Cop, an arcade-style video game that puts a plastic replica pistol directly in the player's hands as they blast bad guys on a screen.

And media coverage of the shooting would add fuel to the fire in the growing debate over video game violence that played out in the mid-90s.

So in this episode, we rehash the story with Lee and parse the PR takeaways.

And, since video games have been blamed for dozens of other heinous acts in the years since the shooting, we'll explore the relationship between violent media and violent behavior with two experts whose opposing views yield some surprising common ground.

Clinton "Paperthin" Bader is an Esports commentator in Seoul, South Korea who provides expert play-by-play on professional video game competitions, which is a major form of entertainment in Southeast Asia.

And Dr. Myriam Miedzian is a prominent critic of video games who served on President Bill Clinton’s Violence Prevention Task Force and worked on faculty at Rutgers and Barnard. She also wrote a 1991 book called Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence.

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Sexist advertising that objectifies women reached its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But, in that era, it was very seldom that any company actually faced backlash or consequences for its ad practices.

That began to change, however, when National Airlines deployed a racy new ad campaign in which alluring young stewardesses invited travelers to "Fly Me" on their next business trip.

National Airlines may have sold more tickets as a result of the ads.

But, for a workforce of stewardesses who were fed up with sexist standards and unfair working conditions, the campaign proved to be a tipping point that sent them into the streets to protest, organize, and agitate for the respect they deserved—both in the workplace and in the media.

In this episode, Nell McShane Wulfhart—author of The Great Stewardess Rebellion—charts a course through the aviation, advertising and labor history of this story.

Plus, we're joined by Philippa Roberts and Jane Cunningham to explore the sexist tropes at play in 1970s advertising, and how sexism is just as pernicious in today's media, even if it's less blatant. Philippa and Jane are co-authors of Brandsplaining: Why Marketing is Still Sexist and How to Fix It, and are also co-founders of the agency PLH, the UK’s leading research consultancy specializing in female audiences.

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As the world’s most valuable automotive manufacturer, electric car giant Tesla is the largest company in the world that operates without any kind of public relations personnel.

That means no media relations arm. No crisis comms plan. No PIO. 

In fact, the entire PR team was purged just a couple years ago in 2020, and CEO Elon Musk has defended the move, saying the company doesn't believe in "manipulating public opinion."

Not only does this reflect a very unsophisticated understanding of what public relations practitioners do, but it also makes Elon Musk the sole public authority authorized to comment on Tesla's wheelings and dealings... and he doesn't exactly have a history of exuding stability.

So in this episode, we revisit that history with Forbes Senior Editor Alan Ohnsman and San Diego-based crisis communications consultant David Oates.

We discuss how Tesla is now struggling to control its own narrative, what risks it's courting, and how Elon Musk's leadership model might be setting up the company... and its shareholders... for their biggest disaster yet.

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The strategy at the heart of the Snapple brand's precipitous rise... and its cataclysmic fall... is simple:

Embrace your roots. Celebrate authenticity.

It's a lesson that's been served up again and again in the brands and marketing ecosystem. But it never seems to sink in.

So in this episode, we'll pop the top on a Snapple double feature.

First, Jane Cavalier tells us about pitching Snapple's iconic slogan, "Made From the Best Stuff on Earth," and watching it flop with the company's original owners.

And then, Richard Kirshenbaum outlines the genesis of the iconic "Snapple Lady" ad campaign, which catapulted Snapple into a multi-billion dollar brand--that is, until new owners changed course and sunk $1.4 billion in mismanaged brand value.

Together, Jane and Richard will parse lessons hard-earned in the hustle of Madison Avenue and retell a tale as old as the Golden Goose itself: "If you've got a good thing going, but you don't understand how it works, for the love of God don't tinker with it."

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On January 3, Pabst Blue Ribbon lit the internet on fire with one obscene tweet:

“Not drinking this January? Try eating ass.”

The uproar was swift and loud. And PBR deleted the tweets and apologized publicly, even as some writers blamed a “rogue employee” for the tweets.

That was NOT the case. The offending Tweeter was actually an established social media manager by the name of Corey Smale, a creative enigma whose free-wheeling, hands-on approach had really resonated with the brand’s fans.

So what went wrong for PBR? What safeguards did they have in place? Who’s REALLY to blame for the ass-eating Twitter incident, and what can we learn from it?

On this episode, we pick through the wreckage with Kyle Brown, our go-to beer marketing correspondent, and with David Griner, Adweek’s International editor, who scored an exclusive interview with former PBR social media manager Corey Smale.

Plus, we examine an interview that Corey gave on the In Defense of Ska Podcast—mere weeks before his dismissal—to learn more about the process that had been established for running PBR's social media.

*Please note, this episode is NOT SAFE FOR WORK*

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For Ukrainian ad agencies and freelance creatives, "business-as-usual" stopped on the day that Russian forces launched their unprovoked war three weeks ago.

Now, they need your help to pierce the veil of Russian propaganda and fight for their homeland in their own way--by waging a global information war to win the hearts and minds of the world.

In this episode, we talk to three Kyiv-based creatives who are organizing this loose coalition of Ukraine's creative community:

They discuss how the war has disrupted their lives and their agency's future, how they're fighting back against Russian disinformation, and the imperative for creatives around the world to get involved.

Additionally, you can support these causes:

Prevent World War 3 Brief:

https://preventww3.in.ua/

How to support Ukrainian army:

https://bank.gov.ua/ua/about/support-the-armed-forces

Ukrainian relatives asking ex us military to donate that protective gear:

https://www.gearforukraine.com

Project aiming to show Russians all their military loses. Also asking for donations:

Russian-crimes.com will start in a few days (carpentry only in Russian: www.Marta-mira.com)

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