07: Top Communication Wins that Made the Headlines in 2018

2018 was the year of incredible communication stories. From PR blunders to miss tweets and viral videos. But it wasn't all bad. There were a lot of examples of good communications that happened this year from people, brands, politicians and many more. Want to hear my list? Well then just keep listening because you're going to hear this list on this week's episode of the Confident Communication Podcast. Episode number seven. Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Confident Communications Podcast. I am your host, Molly McPherson. Before I jump into the list, I want to take a moment to thank my new listeners. And I know, let's face it, you're all new listeners. At this point I've heard feedback from an astounding number of people who are listening across the country and yep, the globe. Bonjour France and merci. I am so happy everyone is joining me on the POD as I call it and I hope you subscribe to join me each and every week. Now let's jump in and hear that list. The top 10 communication wins for 2018. This list is part of a two part episode. Next week is my top 10 list of bad communications from 2018. That list was way easier to write because it could have been the top 8,000 list because it's a lot easier to talk about the mistakes that people make as opposed to the good things. If someone has an amazing campaign right out of the gate, it can be great but not memorable. No one really notices the well executed communication plan or PR plan. But in the if it leaves it bleeds environment, the good stands out when it follows a bad or a big oops. I wanted to keep the list in no particular order because what is a scale in communications? There really isn't one. But where's the fun if everyone gets a trophy? That's not the mindset of the Gen X generation. But when I looked at this list I realized that there was a definite line of demarcation between the type of story. Some were silly, some were stem from more serious issues. So they are ranked and weighted in two areas. Ten through six are more marketing publicity focused and five through one are the page one New York Times stories. I think you get the idea. And on with the list. Number 10. I was reluctant to include this brand in the list because it wasn't really good communications, it was more of a good publicity stunt and I hate stunts frankly. However, this one worked because it was like the first of its kind. So that's the reason why it makes the list. Number 10 goes to IHOP, the International House of pancakes, which most people under the age of 40 probably didn't even know that's what IHOP stands for. But their ranking in this list comes from a quote unquote rebrand of swapping the pea and pancakes for the B in burger. Now this publicity stunt supposedly did not result in increased foot traffic and it was a fail on the sales front. But since this isn't a podcast on failed business stunts, I included it because it did get bang up publicity. Now here's the story. They were looking for an angle to promote the 60th birthday of IHOP. I was amazed at how many news outlets and social media users believe the news that IHOP switched the name of IHOP to ihob. As soon as I saw that online, I smelled a rat. As soon as I saw the headline, I think it was on USA Today. But there was a lot of online traffic and a lot of people were weighing in. So you know what, that's a win. By early July of this year, IHOP admitted it was a stunt. So again, it barely makes the list. But it did get a lot of publicity. And when is the last time it anyone ever spoke about IHOP? So there you have it, number 10, number 9 is in the same category. We're still in fast food, but number nine belongs to KFC for the time they told their customers to F off. Okay, not really, but pretty close for a fast food chain. Here's the story. KFC went through a rather bizarre crisis when it ran into a chicken shortage. This story happened cross the pond in the uk, but the response was definitely heard in the us. The shortage for several KFC locations in the UK to close. And I did read one report. It was a tweet that said police in London and Manchester, England, England had to remind angry KFC fans that KFC crisis wasn't a police matter. So look in the show notes for that tweet. Fast food, marketing, advertising and PR folks are now at the top of the food chain of creativity. As far as I'm concerned. You will find the funniest tweets following popular chains like Wendy's and Burger King. McDonald's isn't quite as funny, but if you start watching their tweets, they're very good at burning customers and burning the other fast food companies back to kfc. One dejected KFC fan tweeted, I had to go to Burger King because there wasn't any kfc. And Burger King replied with a year supply of King boxes. Now since that was in the uk, I have no Idea what King boxes are. Maybe it's the Happy Meal version, but it got it garnered publicity for Burger King and now I haven't even mentioned the best part yet. The crisis subsides, KFC restocks and they get back to work. But the next day there's a full page ad that appeared with a photograph of an empty bucket on a red, bright red background with chicken crumbs. And below the empty bucket is the caption we're sorry or we're sorry if it were a British accent or a good British accent. The KFC logo is replaced with F C K. Get it? Brilliant. Now, having revisited the fck crisis when I was researching this list it got me thinking again. I, as I mentioned, I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to publicity and the more that I researched it I was starting to think wait a minute, how were they able to come up with this, that type of creative in less than 24 hours and place a full page ad all over London? I wasn't buying it. So I'm thinking maybe the chicken shortage was all a big stunt and if it was or not, it was still a finger licking.

Good one.

Yuck. Yuck. Okay, on to number eight. We are still in the category of food and this happened in March of this year when two gentlemen, African American were waiting for a friend and didn't want to order anything until they showed up. When they were sitting in this restaurant because they were just sitting there and they hadn't bought anything yet, the manager asked them to leave. When they didn't, the manager called the police. The men were arrested and held for hours before they released, before they were released without being charged. And where did this event happen? Yep, another food chain, but this time it was Starbucks. The incident went public and as some would say it was a viral crisis. The story was everywhere. Now in the crisis communication world, for the people that work in it, there is a formula that companies need to follow when a crisis happens. The first thing they need to do is they need to acknowledge what happened. They need to tell the truth about what happened and then they need to explain it, apologize for it, show some form of empathy for what happened. And then the last part of it is you have to fix it. What are we going to do to change this so it doesn't happen again? Starbucks followed the formula. Immediately after it happened, the Starbucks leadership stepped in. Howard Schultz, he's the chairman of Starbucks, said, I'm embarrassed, ashamed. I think what occurred was reprehensible at every single level. I take it very personally, as everyone in our company does, and we're committed to making it right. They acknowledged it. They told the truth. He apologized, and then he said what he's going to do to fix it. And what they did is Starbucks held a simultaneous training session for over 175,000 employees. It was not mandatory, which I thought was a very interesting element of it, because if they made it mandatory, then some of those employees likely would have gone online and started complaining about it. Now, some definitely did, but the numbers were diminished because it wasn't mandatory. So that also was brilliant. Starbucks, on the day of the closing, were urging its workers and managers to discuss racial bias and respect following the arrest of these two men. That happened in a Philadelphia location. This was a communication win because something bad happened, but they went in and they fixed it right away. And we knew what was happening because leadership right at the top apologized for what happened and then immediately told all the customers, the press, everyone, were going to fix it. On to number seven. Number seven belongs to a politician and one that I worked for. I should say the only one that I did. Number seven belongs to John McCain. Now, Senator John McCain was running for president in 2000, around the time that I moved to Washington, D.C. and when we moved down there, we lived in Old Town, which is a part of Alexandria. It's right outside of Washington, D.C. and I didn't have a job going down there. And the McCain headquarters happened to be just a few blocks north to where we live. So I just walked up to the headquarters and started asking around for a job, and I was able to work in the office. And the McCain headquarters was buzzing like a lot of headquarters are buzzing at that time. But there was a definite feel in that headquarters. John McCain was known as a maverick, and you could feel it in the room. And it was. It was a really enjoyable time to be working, you know, around a lot of those young people during this campaign. And as a side note, I note that a lot of politicians have brothers, the brothers that are much different than a candidate. And John McCain had a brother, Joe, that would saunter in every day and tell just absolutely hilarious stories. But it all stems from the respect that I've. A longtime respect that I've had for Senator McCain. The reason why he is on this list, though, for 2018, Senator McCain, we know, passed away from brain cancer, which allowed him to plan for his funeral. And it is. It was well known that Senator McCain and President Trump were not friendly. And when Senator McCain was planning his funeral, he made a Very deliberate choice to have George Bush, who we discussed last week in the episodes, and Barack Obama to speak as eulogists. So it didn't come from a deep personal friendship that he had with either one of them, but it was clearly, they were clearly chosen to send a message or their choice was intended to send a message. And the decision to choose them was pointed towards President Trump. Now, according to McCain's friends, as McCain was preparing for his funeral, he made it clear that President Trump was not welcome. But his friends also insisted that he didn't necessarily have a grudge against President Trump. He just didn't respect him. And the funeral, the funeral arrangements weren't meant to critique the president because Senator McCain was honored the office of the president, so he didn't want to insult the office, but he wanted to send a message about a call for civility and compromise at a time when he felt the sitting president was blatantly rejecting those values. So number seven goes to Senator John McCain for his ability to send such a powerful message from the grave. Number six is still in the same political arena. And this slot belongs to Christine Blasey Ford. I know you know the name. Even though she had a very short time in the zeitgeist of the Kavanaugh period, she made an incredible impact. So 2018 was still the year of the woman. 2017 kind of kicked off this idea of how women were being treated. And we heard it from Silicon Valley, we heard it from Google and from Uber. There was, there's already some fissures in the workplace how women were being treated. And it was just kind of setting us all up for what was going to come in 2018. Now, Ford, Dr. Ford, when she testified about what happened to her when she was a teenager, in attending a party in Maryland, she asserted that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her or tried to sexually assault her. Brett Kavanaugh was now Judge Kavanaugh and he was a nominee for the Supreme Court. There were a lot of machinations of why she suddenly became the person that needed to testify in from Congress, but here she is or does to testify to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But here she was testifying and here's her moment. And when she sat down to testify, she seemed incredibly nervous, she seemed distracted. She wasn't well kept in the sense that she wasn't too worried or preoccupied about her appearance. And I mean that in a very positive way. Many people likely would have taken that moment to be as put together or as pristine as possible. She didn't need to do that she was sending a message about not how she looked or how she acted, it was about what she was saying. And she started the testimony with this. I am terrified. And for the next four hours, she answered every single question. It was brief, her moment in the spotlight, but it was profound. And she accomplished what many people who testified before Congress in the spotlight, for people to believe them. Most people don't. They're defending behavior. But everyone believed her testimony. Even Judge Kavanaugh had to admit that her testimony was credible. And most people felt it was true. By the time the hearing ended, Ford had done more than proven herself to be a credible witness. And for millions of women and men, she had replaced Kavanaugh as the protagonist in this story. And women came out of the woodwork, and they created a new hashtag. Hashtag, whyidn't Report. That hashtag exploded on social media around the time of her testimony, and it became this rallying cry when she finished her testimony. The members of the Senate Judiciary Committee congratulated her on her bravery. President Trump rarely wanted to give any credence to claims of female accusers, called forward a very fine woman, a credible witness, and deemed her testimony compelling, which it was, we believe you, was a term that we heard from a lot of women online on broadcast television. After watching this testimony, I happened to watch this testimony. I was on a plane. Almost everyone on the plane was tuned in to the testimony. It was riveting. And that is the reason why she is on the list for the Top communication wins for 2018. Number five on the list may surprise you. The number five spot belongs to the person who testified after Ford, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Now, how can both of these people be on the list? Because of the outcome of the testimony. He is now a Supreme Court judge. So it worked.

Why?

Brett Kavanaugh and his team had a strategy, and it worked. Now, before the testimony, Judge Kavanaugh sat down for an interview on Fox News with his wife. They wanted to seal the deal. Once the stories and accusations started to come out about his teenage years and how he acted inappropriately, not only to Dr. Ford, who was a teenager at the time, but some other women as well. When he was in college at Yale, that interview was supposed to show him as a mild mannered, calm, rational judge. And watching him, anyone would look at it and say, oh, how could this guy do this? You know, these accusations can't possibly be true. That didn't work. He came across a little too stiff, a little too stilted. He wasn't comfortable sitting in that interview, nor was his wife. So most people would agree, and his team and the White House agreed that it was an ineffective interview. So that strategy did not work, Humanizing him, treating him as a mild mannered victim. They needed a new strategy because no one was buying it. They needed him to be meaner. And days later, he was. The strategy for the testimony was to appear to be the complete opposite that he was in that Fox interview. The tactic, anger. He was very, very angry. When I started watching his testimony on the plane. Within moments, when I saw him sit down and slam the book down and quickly turn the pages and, and speak in that very abrupt, clipped voice, I thought, aha, here it is. Here's the strategy. And this might just work. And we listened to him talk about his family, talk about how the. How these accusations impacted his family, how his family was threatened, his wife, his two daughters, how the daughters prayed for the accuser, how they prayed for Dr. Ford. It was very compelling testimony. Another tactic. He didn't deny everything about his character. He said a number of times that he liked beer. He admitted to drinking beer. And again and again, he insisted that he never drank so much that he couldn't remember what happened. That was key. But that he did drink enough to make him a very likable social guy. He was a social drinker like most other guys in his high school. And the drinking was working fine. That strategy was working at least, or that tactic was working until he started to get questioned by Senator Amy Klobuchar from my home state of Minnesota. She started her questioning with a statement, more of a reflection on her life. And she revealed the story about her father, who was a longtime columnist for the Star Tribune in my hometown, again in Minneapolis, my hometown, St. Paul. But the papers started in Minneapolis, and he was a well known, beloved columnist. People really like Jim Klobuchar. But he was a longtime alcoholic. And Senator Klobuchar was sharing that and sharing how damaging it was to the family to have him be an alcoholic. So she started in a very vulnerable spot. And as he was listening, he wasn't paying attention as much to what she was saying because you could almost see it in his face. He was trying to figure out how he was going to respond to this. When she started to ask the questions about the drinking and did he black out, it started to annoy him.

Listen, I think you've probably had beers center. And so you're saying there's never been a case where you drank so much that you didn't remember what happened the night before or part of what happened that's. You're asking about blackout? I don't know. Have you. Could you answer the question, Judge? So you. That's not happened. Is that your answer? Yeah. And I'm curious if you have. I have no drinking problem, Judge. Nor do I. Okay, thank you.

Oi. That was not good. And if you were like me when you saw that, I thought, this is the moment that he's going to lose it. Now he's done. So after the break, he came back and he apologized for treating her that way, for speaking that way and asking that question, which leads me to believe that someone got to him. And I know that there was a female lawyer on his team, and I suspect she was probably the loudest voice in the back room. You need to go out there and you need to be very calm and rational, and you need to apologize for what you did. So that was another tactic. The final tactic was that he swore to God. Senator Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, ended the questions on Kavanaugh's word, and he wanted to establish that one, Kavanaugh believed in God. And he asked him a list, are any of these allegations true? And Kavanaugh said, no. No doubt in your mind? Zero. I'm 100% certain. Kennedy pressed again. Not even a scintilla? Not a scintilla. 100% certain. And then Kennedy concluded, do you swear to God? And Kavanaugh obliged by saying, I swear to God. When a Catholic swears to God, they mean it. Once the testimony ended, when you started to listen to the pundits and people start talking about how they felt the outcome of the testimony would be, a lot of people said, we believe both of them. A lot of people were in agreement that Kavanaugh went off the rails a little, but that everyone felt that they both had credible stories, and in the end, they both were credible. And that's the reason why, though Judge Kavanaugh was able to secure the nomination, so that's the reason why he is on the list. Now, number four ties in to six and five as well.

Now, I am usually an optimist. I'm a keg is half full kind of guy. But what I've seen from the monsters on this committee makes me want to puke. And not from beer.

That was Matt Damon in his rehabilitation PR masterstroke portraying our number six judge, Brett Kavanaugh in a SNL cold open the Saturday after Kavanaugh's testimony. And Matt Damon nailed it. Now, I typically don't watch clips from SNL anymore, but I saw this online and I laughed out loud. The sniffing, the yelling and the abrupt page turning, the drinking and squee. I mean, that's really when I started laughing. Now, did they bring in Matt Damon because they knew he could nail down Kavanaugh? My guess is that his PR team was on speed dial with Saturday Night Live to bring him back on the air in a guest cameo as soon as the timing was right with a guest or some event that was happening out in public that could fit in the Matt Damon mold. And Brett Kavanaugh was just that event. Now why did Matt Damon need to do that? Well, the reason is that he. This is the reason why he is on this list. So Matt. Matt Damon was going through a little bit of a PR problem. And it started a few years back. The Matt Damon Persona started to show some cracks when. When he was out promoting his reality show called Project Green Light, if you remember that he did that with Ben Affleck. And he interrupted a African American female producer. And he wanted to imply that diversity behind the camera was unimportant. So this was the pontificating Matt Damon, which is never a good Persona for Matt Damon. And the Internet exploded, you know, with accusations of white splaining. And this is where we heard white splaining and mansplaining for the first time. And then two weeks later, Damon suggested that gay actors should stay in the closet to maintain a certain mystery. Now, Matt Damon, good guy on screen, good guy. People could see that Matt Damon Persona was a good one. But these were a little cracks that were starting to chip away at his reputation. Now, for the most part, he did recover, but it was shattered after the New York Times published that career ending investigation dealing with the allegations of Harvey Weinstein's long time or long rumored sexual misconduct. And this could have brought down Matt Damon's career because Harvey Weinstein was the one that gave Matt Damon and Ben Affleck their start with Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon was indebted to Harvey Weinstein, so it was very difficult for him to navigate. He was doing publicity for a new movie with George Clooney, Suburbicon. And the timing was horrendous for Damon because this story was breaking just when he needed to promote a movie. And everyone knows that these two were tight. And Harvey Weinstein was really the man behind the success for Damon and Affleck. When Matt Damon was asked about the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Matt Damon started to explain this spectrum of behavior with men. And as he started to do that, it kept getting worse. And Worse and worse. Now some people in retrospect thinks he if he just wordsmith it a little bit better, he could have gotten out of it. But once again he tried to mansplain something and the again almost career ending form there was a huge Matt Damon backlash. His film tanked, but I don't think it was very good anyway. And, and also he was kicked off the film Ocean's Eight. It was the female fronted Ocean's Eight version. And there after an online petition started circulating asking that he was removed. So he was not having a really good run reputation wise. So the reason why he's on this list was the masterstroke of that Brett Kavanaugh impression in the days following the testimony. So well done, Will Hunting. Well done. Number three on my top ten list of communication wins goes to Southwest Airlines. Now this is a very tragic story. Last April, if you remember, a passenger died after she was partially sucked out of a window of a Southwest Airlines plane that was flying New York to Dallas. Now the woman, if you remember anything about her, she felt like a lot of women that I know, she was an accomplished public relations person. She was a mom, a wife, a volunteer. It was just a gut wrenching story and I was on a trip when I had read it and it really hit close to home. But anyway, this is a classic above the fold crisis for a brand, in this case Southwest, Southwest Airlines. And the disaster turned out to be in the maintenance. It was Southwest Airlines fault. But here is where the lasting impact of the story changes. What do you remember about the story? You do remember that it was a malfunctioning engine that projected a piece of metal through the window that cracked open the window and that caused the woman to become partially sucked out of the window. So you remember the victim, you remember what happened and you remember the stories of the people who helped the this victim in the aftermath. But the real hero of this story, the person that saved the day, it was the pilot. When the headline in the New York Times the next day reads, southwest pilot of 1380 is a Navy veteran hailed for her nerves of steel. There's a plan behind that messaging that doesn't just happen. There is a crisis team that needed to reframe the story away from the faulty engine and replace it with an ace pilot in the cockpit. Now it was just a good human resources story. Who was the co pilot on the plane? Who knows? I know it was a guy, but that's about it. But the female pilot, I remembered her name, it was Tammy Jo. I didn't remember the last name, but I remember Tammy Jo. Her name was Tammy Joel Schultz, and she was one of the first female fighter pilots in the Navy. So number three goes to Southwest Airlines for taking a very, very tragic story. And in the end, showcasing the heroics of the passengers. But most importantly, the Southwest pilot, number two on the list goes to the survivors of the Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School shooting. Seventeen people died during that shooting. And sadly, I'm sure when I say it, some of you are think, now which one was that? Where was that located? That was in Florida. And this shooting is the one that sparked a national wide movement demanding stricter gun control laws because two of the survivors did something with that platform. Their names were Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg. They were teenagers and they were teenagers out to make a difference. They now became the new faces of gun reform. What did they do? They successfully pressured organizations to end their relationships with the nra. Fox News host Laura Ingraham got caught up in it as well, and she was forced to apologize for comments that she made. So now the NRA had a target on their back and that spun off other brands discontinuing their relationships, also known as discounts, with the nra. Dick's Sporting Goods, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, Enterprise Rental Car. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. This was the first time that there was such a public blowback against the nra. Now, the NRA fought, fought against it, of course, but in the PR battle, they lost because how can you fight against two survivors of a high school shooting? So that was our number two. The number one communication win on the list goes to all of the people that help promote the hashtag MeToo movement. Now, the MeToo movement started with a woman named Tarana Burke, and she runs a youth organization called Just Be. And she came up with the phrase MeToo more than a decade ago. She founded the organization to help young survivors of sexual assault. And that was part of her slogan and her marketing to help promote this organization. Years later, Alyssa Milano helped bring the hashtag to a larger audience when she asked people to reply to a tweet with the words me too if they have been sexually harassed or assaulted. Now, Alyssa Milano gets half credit for this because one, yes, she did start the movement again by, you know, asking people to write me too. She did not have that social element of adding the hashtag. That came naturally and organically just from more social savvy people. But also, Alyssa Milano, her husband allegedly worked with Harvey Weinstein. So it gets a little murky there. But Alyssa Milano is someone that brought it, you know, out of the vernacular of MeToo from a decade ago and she brought it into social. Now, another voice from the MeToo moment was from Ronan Farrow, of course. So we're going to include him in this list. He's the former NBC MSNBC correspondent. And again, he wasn't someone I wasn't particularly fond of on the air, his, his voice, but he was someone that was meant to write and write well. And he created a story that was going to shake up almost. It touches almost every single in industry. The backstory here is he wanted to do a story about starting with Harvey Weinstein. And what Ronan Farrow did, unlike many other reporters, is that Ronan Farrow was able to get people to go on the record against Harvey Weinstein. There have been a lot of whispers about him, a lot of blind gossip items about Harvey Weinstein, but no one, no woman ever went on the record until Ronan Farrow spoke with them. At the time, there were a lot of questions for NBC as to why they sat on the story and they wouldn't allow Ronan Farrow to air it. We all know now that NBC had their share of MeToo problems with Tom Brokaw, though that wasn't proven, but The Matt Lauer MeToo problem certainly was. So that could be partial reason why they did not run the story with Ronan Farrell. But the number one communication win for 2018 does belong to this MeToo movement because we are at the end of 2018 and MeToo isn't going anywhere. And there it is, the top communication wins for the year 2018. Let me know if you agreed with the list. Thanks again for tuning in. And remember, next week we are going to Discuss the top 10 communication fails for 2018. Before I let you go, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play and Radio Public or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Ciao.