Lead Balloon - Marketing, Public Relations and Strategic Communications Stories

Right or wrong, there are some products that most PR and marketing professionals want nothing to do with.

The Squatty Potty, a plastic platform that purports to alleviate constipation, is certainly not any conventional marketer's dream client.

But under the guidance of the Harmon Brothers agency, this ignoble brand launched the most successful viral marketing video of all-time, landing hundreds of millions of video views and millions of dollars in sales. And they owe it all to an animatronic unicorn who poops rainbow ice cream.

Harmon Brothers' social media success was even recognized with a 2016 Webby Award, and other notable campaigns have included the OraBrush, Poo-Pourri toilet spray and Chatbooks.

In this episode, Harmon Brothers CEO Benton Crane tells the story of the agency's origin and trajectory, explaining the fusion of science and art that powers their reliable viral successes. It turns out that there is no such thing as a "bad client" for an agency willing to embrace data-driven outlandish creativity, irreverence and poop jokes.

Plus, Boeing's retired VP of Communications Jim Schlueter weighs in. Learn more about his family's project alextheartist.com.

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Not everyone in marketing set out from Day One to become a marketer.

And for outside creatives transitioning into the corporate world, there are tough lessons to master, dangerous pitfalls to avoid and unwritten rules to learn.

Before he was brand strategist, David Allen Moss was an industrial designer, an artist and a musician. His impressive and meandering career as a marketer has touched brands like Best Buy, Wynn Las Vegas, Gateway Computers, Costco and Red Lobster. And the time he spent working for American Greetings and EDR Media in Ohio is littered with war stories of high-profile clients, high-pressure business meetings and high-strung personalities.

These days, David is the Chief Creative Officer at Evergreen Podcasts in Cleveland. But he says his experience in the trenches made him the professional he is today, even if, as an idealistic creative in the corporate world, it was an especially vexing puzzle to navigate.

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With great marketing tools comes great responsibility--and marketing automation, email marketing and customer relationship management are no exception.

Use them correctly, and you can tap into the efficiencies inherent in automation, with a demonstrable return on investment. Use them incorrectly, and you can crater your customer relationships with the touch of a button.

Misty Dykema and Abby Bell from Simantel Group have watched these dramas play out, over and over, as they try to coach different businesses through the marketing automation learning curve. They've seen the worst-case scenarios, and often been called in to clean up the mess when marketing technology adoption goes wrong.

In this episode, they share cautionary tales from the front lines, and outline the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Plus, Dusty surprises Abby with a podcast karaoke session. Yeah, that really happened.

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In the corporate world, unspoken rules about what constitutes appropriate workplace conversation provide white employees with a safe, comfortable space free from discussion about controversial topics like race and police brutality.

But for people of color, there's no escaping these conversations--they shape the reality that Black people live every day in America. They can't turn it off or "take a break from it," and that's a form of white privilege right there.

Everyone has a part to play in building a better society, and it starts with knowing how to have uncomfortable conversations. So in this episode of Lead Balloon, three people of color who work as professional communicators discuss their experiences with racism, privilege and the corporate world.

Randy Crump from Prism Technical Management and Marketing Services, Dr. Monique Liston from Ubuntu Research and Evaluation, and Kennita Hickman from Catera Omnivision also share tips for how their white colleagues can help the cause instead of contributing to the problem.

Because if you haven't been uncomfortable lately, you're part of the problem.

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The Hail Mary: a last-chance, desperation plan with a high risk of failure, turned to as a last resort when all other options have failed.

It's not just a football play; it's a mindset that professional communicators must adopt from time-to-time.

Beth Tomkiw is the Chief Content Officer at Trusted Media Brands, the publisher of Taste of Home, Reader's Digest and many other recognizable publications. Previously an editor at Playboy, she also worked in custom publishing and content marketing for more than a decade.

In this episode, Beth Tomkiw tells the tale of the Hail Mary play she drew up as a content strategist at McMurry to save the agency's contract with the Ritz-Carlton brand.

(Original photo by WiNG, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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There's no need to sugarcoat it: things looks grim. The COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic has exacted a brutal price in lives, public health and global economic activity, and there's little respite in sight.

But with a likely recession setting in, those of us fortunate enough to still have jobs in marketing and communications are looking for ways to do more with less.

Enter Joe Pulizzi. In the midst of the last recession, his fledgling company changed marketing forever, rebranding the notion of "Content Marketing" and forging a media empire. From the ashes of the Great Recession, he raised the Content Marketing Institute, three best-selling books and “This Old Marketing” the Podcast.

In this edition of Lead Balloon, Pulizzi shares his tale, as well as advice for communications professionals hoping to weather the storm.

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Communicating with the public during a crisis is as critical as it is difficult. And if it's seemed to you like President Donald Trump has been hitting many of the wrong notes during his daily media briefings, you're not alone.

"They threw the plan out, and started to make up a new one, and they didn't need to," says Bill Pierce, who served as a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush Administration. "There are some basic fundamentals that they should have adhered to and didn't, unfortunately."

In this episode, Pierce taps into his deep expertise in crisis communication and pandemic response planning to critique the federal comms response to the COVID-19 Coronavirus so far--what they've done right and what they've done wrong.

Plus, Dr. Maria Sundaram, an epidemiologist at the Emory Rollins School of Public Health, takes calls from listeners to bust some myths about the pandemic which have been circulating on social media. Watch video of Dr. Sundaram's Q&A session here.

Special thanks to Daniel Matarazzo for sharing his clever, uplifting Coronavirus musical parodies with the world. Check him out on Twitter or YouTube.

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Everybody remembers the McDonald's Monopoly sweepstakes.

But until HBO's McMillion$ came out, most folks didn't realize that the reason it suddenly vanished in 2001 was because it was rigged from the start.

In the hit series, directors James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte tell the fantastic story with panache and aplomb of how McDonald's was scammed for $24 million.

And in this episode of Lead Balloon, they examine the story through a PR and marketing lens, explaining how McDonald's and the FBI tried to save face in the midst of disastrous circumstances. And, PR agency owner John Boyanoski shares his tale from the day when the FBI visited his newspaper office to avert a McMillion$ PR disaster.

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It might be tough to imagine these days, but public relations work still got done in the era before cell phones and broadband.

Somehow.

But like the show Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms from the '90s, the slow speed of information back then could cause challenges and miscommunications during high-stakes PR events--which might otherwise have been solved with a quick phone call.

In this episode of Lead Balloon, Pittsburgh-based PR consultant Tim O'Brien shares a tale from his days at the Ketchum agency, where insane pressure, bad luck, poor timing and colorful characters all came together to create a situation worthy of its own Seinfeld episode.

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Patrick McSweeney is a cliché warrior. If it's a hackneyed, over-worn marketing and PR trope, he’s gone to battle against it.

But when you choose creativity and innovation over familiarity and stagnation, there can be hidden dangers. They might result in a sticky mess and hundreds of dollars in damage, but ultimately, isn't that a lesser risk than failing as a storyteller?

In this episode, Patrick re-lives a couple of embarrassing moments from his career, along with his former colleague Katrine Strickland. News editor Jason Maddux explains why he never runs ribbon cutting photos in the newspapers he manages. And with Patrick, we explore the importance of authenticity in PR and media relations, and how to be prepared for anything in a field where everything can happen.

(Includes music by Alavedra, McColl & Levine / CC BY 4.0)

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