Last week, we were mesmerized by the ongoing coverage of the PR snafu in which Ketchum PR invited food and mom bloggers to a restaurant meal, complete with a noted chef and guest speakers, at a restaurant in NY, then ticked off the bloggers when it was revealed that the lasagna and dessert were actually items from the Marie Callender’s frozen line marketed by ConAgra.
The brand/client/agency are, not surprisingly, taking a bit of heat about this – ie, everyone “should have known better.”
One could assume that all parties went into the event with 1) an awareness of the risk that food bloggers wouldn’t necessarily take kindly to being tricked into eating processed foods, 2) an agreement that it was a calculated risk that was worth taking, and 3) a crisis management plan that mitigated that risk.
Looking more closely, the team’s response reveals that the above assumption likely untrue, given the backlash seemed like a surprise and resulted in lots of backpedaling. And even if the risk/reward conversation did happen, the collective team missed a critical piece of the analysis. While they may have planned a response to the worst case scenario, what was overlooked is how the Marie Callender’s brand team would feel this week if the stunt went off the rails. Or how the Ketchum team would feel as the were asked “what would you have done differently?” during the inevitable, unenviable postmortem.
It’s our job as agencies to constantly raise the bar on delivering out of the box thinking. But missteps like these remind me it’s also our job to protect our clients and the brands in our mutual care – not to mention our own agency reputations – from a total mortification, short-lived though it may be.
Bottom line: when you’re asking yourselves “what’s the worst that can happen”, make sure your agency or brand is truly prepared to live with it. At least briefly. Hopefully the Sotto Terra event team is benefitting from the public’s collective distraction in the face of election season, “The Real Housewives of LA”, and they multitude of embarrassments that are sure to appear in this week’s news cycle.