271: 2023's Biggest Public Relations Fiascos: A Year in Review

In the next few weeks, you will see a ton of top 10 crisis lists of the year for 2023. But this list, this is your top 10 list. Welcome to the Indestructible PR podcast. I'm Molly McPherson, your crisis communication strategist and your guide through the world of breaking news and pop culture. Join me as we analyze the juiciest moments and extract valuable PR lessons to build an indestructible. Join me as we go behind the headlines this week. The top 10 PR fiascos of 2023. I'm chatting with my friends, Warren Weeks, John Paranac, two big names in crisis communication and media training to chat about this year's biggest PR messes. And we're not just talking about the headline grabbers either. We're diving into some of the lesser known situations that you may or may not have heard about to talk about some of the that come from that. So it's a mix of the obvious stuff and some surprises. So we're going to talk about how the crisis went down, who got hit the hardest, what it means for their rep and the bottom line. So trust me, this is a good conversation, particularly if you are interested in communication. Crisis communications issues, management. We are getting into the nitty gritty of pr. John and Warren. I thank two of my favorite crisis guys, at least my favorite crisis duo. Welcome to an end of the year wrap up. I couldn't think of two better people to talk about the top crises of the year. Hello.

Hey, how are you doing?

Molly? Thanks for having us.

Fantastic. I'm doing great. Okay, so Warren, can you just give a brief blurb? Before we started recording, you told me how busy you were doing your training. Give us the quick and easy. What do you do?

All media training all the time. A little bit of crisis stuff, but it's basically. Thank God, back in person. So a lot of traveling, but the in person sessions are so much better than Zoom. But helping people to do better interviews one boardroom at a time.

Oh, I love that. That sounds like a little bit of a slogan there. Warren made it up on the fly. Did you just make that up just now? Oh, you're the best. Hey Warren, I have a real quick question for you that relates to this. So when you're doing these media training sessions, are they hiring you because there is an EM crisis or they just want to be trained? It's, it's in their operating budget for the year to have training.

I'd say the vast majority is trying to get ready for the future. Not a Lot of. Sometimes it's a crisis or they've had one in the past, but it's usually they're trying to prep which is the best kind.

Okay, wonderful. Okay. John Pearnick, welcome back. Wait a minute, you guys have both been on this podcast before, haven't you? Or John, are you new to my listeners?

I'm new to the podcast.

Welcome. Welcome to America. Welcome to the podcast, John. Okay, so I've been a guest on War and John's Reputation Town podcast. I'm sure everyone's heard it, so I'm happy to bring John here. John, give us the quick blurb on you.

Oh, thank you. So I'm with a crisis firm called Strategy Corp in Toronto, and we help clients across Canada, in the US around the world, sometimes manage crises.

Fantastic. And why I love speaking with the two of you. You're both critical thinkers on this. You both have the experience, but you're coming from different areas. You know, I love. Because you two think alike. I mean, you're almost like two as one. But. But John, you're working at a firm. You know, Warren, you're out there on the street working with everyone. So this idea, so many people have the top 10 crisis listicle list of the year. Magazines, newsletters, firms, everybody does it. But I want our list to be the best list because we're not just gonna look at the same top 10 that everyone else is talking about. We want to delve into, yes, the crisis that happened, but we're gonna each probably bring. But we want to look into the why it happened or, you know, what made it an outlier. I'm looking for those damage markers. What was the damage for the crisis? Because it could be financial loss, it could be reputational loss, it could be something with employees, morale. Someone could have lost a job, whatever it is. So you all had the assignments, and we're all coming together and we're going to do a round robin to bring up our top 10. We each pick three, and then in the end, we're going to determine what we think is the biggest crisis of the year based on what we think the biggest damage marker was. Okay, so we're going to start with Warren. Give us your crisis, the crisis brief background and what happened.

So I'm going to start by attacking the House of the Mouse. I'm going after Disney. And this kind of hurts me because I love the Disney stories and watched them as a kid and read the stories to my daughters and. But from a business perspective, and a lot of people are like, oh, my God, what's the crisis? This isn't a moment in time, but to me, it's a bit of a process. And over the last several years, the Disney company has been in a bit of a downward spiral. And a lot of people are attributing it to the whole get woke, go broke kind of thing. And so their last eight movies have underperformed. And you can say that's for a whole bunch of different reasons. They've had a lot of executives coming in, a lot of the storytellers are gone. And we'll talk about some of the different characters and the different elements. Like they had the Buzz Lightyear movie, they had let's make one of the toys gay, right? And they have Snow White and the seven Dwarves. We're not going to have any dwarves anymore. So there's a lot of that stuff going on. Now, just looking at the metrics, Disney's stock price is at a nine year low. The company laid off 7,000 employees in the last year. And I know a lot of companies are laying people off, but the biggest one to me is if you look at. Well, there's two. If you look at their market cap, which in 2021 was $357 billion, today it is about half of that $168 billion, the market cap. So from a financial perspective, they've taken a bit of a beating. And then from a reputational perspective, there's a 2023 Axios Harris poll, reputational rankings. You might be familiar with this list. Every year they come out with the top 100 companies in terms of reputation in the United States. In 2019, Disney was number five of 100. Like that's about as high as you can get. Their score was 80, which is just excellent. Does anybody want to guess what number they are on that list this year? They were number five a couple years ago.

I'm going to say like 20th.

I'm going to say more than that. Price is right.

I'm just 50 77. Number 77. I think a lot of this is, and this is something we saw with the Bud Light that may or may not come up later in the show. But to me it's not about diversity, it's not about equity, it's about pandering. Does it feel genuine? Does it feel like it belongs there? Or is this just something that you're slapping on the brand to try to cash in on a trend or to try to tick a box? And I think the ultimate story here is Americans or any public goers, because John And I are Canadian. They're not stupid. And I think this has been something transparent. And what you've seen is a very slow burn in Disney. And it's going to take, I would say a couple of years at least to turn this around. Because you know how long it takes to create these movies and these shows and these productions and multi million dollars. In some cases it takes two, three, four years. And so Disney is in the toilet and they will be, I think, for the next couple of years. That's my number one pick.

So, Warren, quick question. On that one, you talked about the pandering. How can someone. What is one person's pandering but another person having representation, like, what could they have done to do it better? Is there anything that you think in.

Your experience, you're asking a middle aged white guy. So this is probably a little bit.

But you like Disney though. But you like Disney. Disney files have an opinion.

Yeah, to me. And 10 different people could have 10 different answers. But if you look at all these metrics, financial reputation, staff, wise sentiment, it just seems that across the board on the whole, this is not really working with people. And to me it's something. You're watching the movie and it's a gut feeling. Is this done in a spirit of storytelling? Is this done in a spiritual, in a genuine, authentic way? Are they trying to do the right thing or are they trying to slap a sticker on something, trying to cash in? And I think that a lot of people based, again, based on these metrics, I think a lot of people think.

That, yeah, I like that. Sacrifice storytelling for trying to do the right thing. And if you've lost the story, you've lost everything.

At Disney, the three Musketeers are like, well, make one of them trans.

Okay, yes, that's great.

But why?

But why exactly. It's not about just doing it, but why are you doing it? Yeah, that's a really, really good. John, anything to add there?

No, I think it's well said. This is actually also pressure because Disney had a lot of pressure coming from employees to take political positions or other sort of socially notable positions that were very topical in the news and I'm sure amongst employees. And I think this may have been to the company's sort of march in that direction where they were leading the company down that road, following what employees were asking them to do. And I think that's also taking the eye off the ball. I think you can certainly be sensitive to those things without letting it drive the business in ways that may not be the best for it at the end of the day.

Yeah, okay. All right, John, what's your first one?

All right, so interestingly, I'm not a consumer of this, but there's a brand of clothes from a company in China called Shein. Shein uses social media quite a lot to sell their clothes. This is actually a huge company. I was doing some research on it ahead of us having this conversation, and the company went from a $5 billion company in 2019 to $66 billion in May. Super fast growth. A lot of that, as I said, has been through social media. However, the company has also saddled this US Congress has done a report that highlighted this and other human rights organizations have noted that the company is taking advantage of forced labor and in particular, groups of ethnic minorities in China that are being, you know, in the case of the Uyghurs being persecuted. And as a, I guess, a mechanism to try and combat this, they invited a number of Western influencers to China to visit one of the manufacturing facilities. And those influencers, as you can imagine, delivered what Shein was hoping for, which was a lot of social media content that made the company look like a really great place to work and people were having a good time in factories and whatnot. When all this content hit social media in the west, it was huge backlash. Comments like, you know, they showed you what you wanted to see. I love this one. Somebody wrote, I tip my hat to the marketing villain that came up with this idea or other things like, say, is it feels like they, they use you for damage control and it's disturbing. You know, others pointed out that a lot of the abuses this company is alleged to engage in are not at the factories, but other points in the distribution chain that it runs. At any rate, obviously not a good day from a reputation standpoint for the company. But it's an example I drew because from a textbook standpoint, you could have a conversation amongst us, amongst our peers about was this a big reputational fail or what was the impact of it? End of the day, it hasn't really impacted them selling clothes and they're on track to do a $90 billion IPO in the US probably early in 2024. And so while I would put it in the category of sort of a self manufactured crisis because their own tactic led to the backlash, it didn't actually address the thing they were trying to address. It also shows that sometimes, you know, what we see as a crisis ultimately doesn't turn into the thing that severely impacts the company or brings it down and they keep marching on.

Yes. Yeah. And John, I love that you picked this one because, yes, this is a great example of one of those crises that happen. And it happened like in one day. It was all over social media. It was on TikTok. I ended up making a post about it as well. I mean, because Sheen, fast fashion people have an issue with fast fashion anyway. But yes, utilizing influencers in that way. But what an interesting metric in the end that it did not hit them financially. I love that one. So my example for our first round I had to snag it is definitely Bud Light. The reason why I chose them, other than, you know, being the obvious one. But you can't have a list without having Bud Light because I think think their Spectacular fail in 2023 really set now the bar for crisis communication response, at least from a corporate point of view or a brand point of view. I had a call today, we know, with a national client. And that's one of the first things they said, we cannot be a Bud Light. And how they tried to recover from a partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which should have just not necessarily falling under the radar. But I think the whole thing happened not because of the partnership, but because the VP of marketing went on a podcast, unscripted recorded video audio, answering the question, well, why'd you do it? And she made a flippant, almost snarky remark how she didn't want to just only appeal to the bro culture and their typical brand. Well, once that got out, that is what started the negative momentum that they still have not recovered from. Now I think they've done some smart things. I do think pairing with UFC was brilliant. I really do. Their UFC is getting behind that. Dana White's getting behind it. And then also now they've just partnered with Peyton Manning, who seems like he's on every ad. I mean, he's had a partner deal with everyone. And Emmett Smith I think eventually will come around. But I think they now it's almost like they're the Kleenex of crisis community. They might be our new Tylenol, which that's the one silver lining. We don't have to hear about Tylenol anymore.

Has there ever been a more expensive mistake in public relations? Because when you think about the lost sales from the brand and the dump truck loads of money they're having to fork out as a mix of metaphors for getting UFC on board and getting these other, other spokespeople on board. Like, I have trouble thinking of a bigger Self caused catastrophe.

Oh, absolutely, yeah. And they're still in a slump. They're reporting a 13 and a half you 16.5% slump in sales at the end of last quarter. So they haven't come around. Warren, do you have any thoughts on Buddy, since it's such a biggie?

Well, the UFC thing I thought was interesting, and John and I chatted about that a couple weeks ago on our podcast. I looked at the stock chart today, and I think that deal was announced like October 23rd or something around there. And if you look at the stock price, it starts going up dramatically on that day. So I don't know about beer drinkers. The market certainly liked it. In March of this year, their stock price was $66. In October it was 52. And now it is 62. So it's kind of coming back a little bit. And I think the UFC has the thing has something to do with it.

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a lot of money. That was a transactional crisis response move, definitely. Okay. All right, so now next round two. Let's start with John. Who do you have?

All right, so I'm going to go. I'm going to have a heavy one, and that is you take the government of Israel, because they had a terrorist attack, which we've all seen on the news on October 7th. I don't want to focus on that so much. I want to focus on how they've been very adept, the government has been, in using the news media, the earned media, and also social media to really define and provide themselves the permission space to act, to sort of respond to this terrorist attack. And so they've used Western spokespeople who've been very clear and deliberate in sharing information. They've had those spokespeople embedded in units right on the ground to bring the visuals right to the TV sets. And really the audience for that is in Europe and the west and the United States and Canada and other places. So people can see up front the reason why they're active the way they are. And I think this use of traditional and social media is buying them additional time to execute on their strategy to respond to the attack, which would otherwise be much shorter. If you look at the way that instances in the past where there's been conflict in the Middle East, Israel has usually a short period of sympathy people have for them, and then sentiment becomes clouded. And so this is. I think this is good use of social media. Otherwise, crisis management is providing them with more space and time to really respond to an attack. That is on par with 9, 11 in the U.S. there's a lot of obviously very emotional opinions about this topic around the world. But if you look at it from a sort of just a communications lens, I think that the tactics that Israel is using are very effective.

So junk. May I ask you, do you have in your work people asking you about responding or not responding? Are there any guidelines that you have about people chiming in on this war?

This is a great question. And I think, you know, we've even had that discussion as a leadership team ourselves at our own firm. You know, is this a thing we need to speak about? The focus has been not so much on the broader issue of what should happen in the Middle east, but more so around the very specific question of the terrorist attack that was launched against Israel on October 7th. And I think that's a very clear and easy thing to respond to. And so where people feel, or clients and others have. Feel like they need to respond to that, that's the place where we recommend focusing. And the other place is, frankly, as a student of history, it is actually quite alarming to see the level of anti Semitism that. That is very on par with 1930s Europe emerging in the West. That's been another topic where it's really easy to speak out on. Where things get tricky is when you start thinking that maybe this is a good time for us to comment on what should happen in the Middle east over the long term. That's probably not a place for companies to get involved in very lightly anyway.

Yeah. Warren, how about you?

Nothing to add on that one. John covered it great.

Yeah, he did. But do you hear anyone, like, when you're doing media training, does any client ask you?

Almost every session.

Okay, what do you say? What do you say again?

I think John covered it pretty well in most cases. I'm like, is this your issue to deal with? Just because something is in the news, do you need to have an opinion on it? I think everyone in this kind of culture, Twitter, x TikTok, everyone feels like they have to have a take on something. I don't necessarily think that's the case. A lot of people will end up sticking their foot in their mouth for no reason when, you know, you could just keep your head down, stick to your knitting, so to speak, and avoid anything like that.

Yeah, I'm noticing in the celebrity realm, that's where I think there's a lot of pressure and that's where you see a lot of. Lot of the backlash against them as well. But for my clients, it definitely came up. But what I'm telling them is, you know, look inward first, you know, before you have to externally communicate on it. Look at your staff, you know, what do they want you to do? I mean, are they suffering? Do you have people, Jewish or Palestinian people on your staff and maybe take it as an internal issue? But yeah, it's, it's definitely changed response for the social realm and social issues, I think, moving forward, you know, this incident. So that's a great one. Okay, so now in this, I'm going to take this one for our round two. And my crisis now, I don't know, but I'm going to call it a lingering crisis itch is Oprah Winfrey. And where that started is with the Maui fires in Hawaii that happened late summer. And Oprah Winfrey is one of many people, large landowners on the island. She lives in Maui, but she got dragged into it because she put herself in the spotlight, so to speak. There are other people you the scenes like, you know, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, other people definitely stayed out of it. Landowners there some donated money. But Oprah was seen at a shelter and she was being filmed by local television wearing an outfit and puffing, you know, just like pumping up pillows and passing things out. And she looked very awkward, like she had never been in there before. And coming away from that, she felt like what Oprah does, that she has to do something. The mistake I think that she made is I felt it was a distraction because she has received so much grief about land ownership in Hawaii. The land that she has, she has a road that actually leads up to her home in Maui that she had to open up for people to be able to flee in the fire. But the bigger misstep, and I had interviewed someone who worked in fundraising that what Oprah was doing by being filmed in the shelter, they call that like fundraising porn. You know, they want to be seen where they're helping people. But then she decided, or someone on her team decided to pair up with the Rock Dwayne Johnson and create the Maui's People Fund to raise money. And the other part of the misstep certainly was doing this big publicity push, social media, hitting the morning shows, going to her best friend Gail, CBS MORNING and talking about this People Fund. Two aspects to it. One, the branding, the colors, everything was nearly identical to a local Maui people's fund. And then also both the Rock and Oprah Winfrey, of course, donated money as a kind of a kickoff starter fund. But they were asking everyone else in a very tight market to contribute. And the reason why I say it starts with her, now that she has a stake in Weight Watchers. Oprah Winfrey has lost a lot of weight lately. And a couple weeks ago, she did kind of a push out there through Weight Watchers, talking about the shame that she had struggling with weight loss. And certainly when she was on television in the 90s, everybody talked about her weight. She was 100% dead on with what she was doing. If that was it, it would have been spectacular. But right around the corner is the weight loss drugs like Ozempic that Weight Watchers is going to affiliate with. And she's claiming now that her weight loss. I mean, this is a woman who struggled with weight her entire life. And we watched it for decades. All of a sudden, the weight has dropped naturally. And I'm just waiting for that shoe to drop. When it comes out, that someone, they'll put her on full blast, too. But for 2023, I have a on my big O card.

That's a good one.

Thank you. Well, Warren, you're a TV guy. Any thoughts on Oprah on that one?

I think she should just give everybody a car and just make the distraction go away.

You get a car, know what she's doing. You get Ozempic. You get Ozempic.

Weight Watchers teamed up with the Rock.

I found that interesting because they both did this video, and the Rock is this big, menacing guy. It was interesting because they've both been trying to backpedal from that publicly.

The Rock.

I'm not sure how many of your listeners listen to the Joe Rogan podcast, but the Rock was on there. I think it's probably the highest. Highest profile guest that's ever been on that show. And I think they talked for something like three hours and didn't bring it up once. So it was clear to me that that was ahead of time. These are the rules. You're not talking about this, this, this, or this. A lot of people were complaining, saying it was one of the most boring shows because they didn't talk about anything interesting. And I think he was told, you want to talk to the Rock. You're not talking about this. And so that shows me there's some sensitivity and some thin skin there.

Yeah, some. But he did do a. He did do an Instagram and TikTok post where he admitted that he was wrong. And I thought, but how did he do that with Ms. Oprah? How did he get that by her? So that was the other ding. John, did you have a thought on Oprah.

You know, it's funny, I forgot about Oprah because she's been on TV for so long and so ubiquitous that you forget when you don't see someone for a while. She still commands the media though, right? Like it's. It's amazing how much influence she has whenever she does something. And she has the power to draw attention and ire, maybe in equal measure.

Yes. Yeah, she still definitely has the power, but in the book sales, she gets swamped now by like Reese Witherspoon. I mean, so she's no longer quite as big as she was. So that's another reason why I chose Oprah. All right, ending up round two. Warren, what do you have?

Okay, I'm going for something a little niche and you said you wanted not the big headlines. And this is, this is a situation that I find this one just kind of confusing and I find it sad. There's no real resolution to it. It's just a bit of a weird one. And I think we're going to start seeing more of this kind of stuff. It's Buffy Saint Marie. So anyone of our vintage is going to be familiar with Sesame Street. And this is an individual. She's an indigenous. Well, I guess.

I don't know.

She said she's an indigenous singer and would come on the show and had a prolific career. She won an Oscar in 1983. Her songs were covered by people like Elvis and Barbra Streisand and Glen Campbell. A really amazing career. And now, 50 years after her first appearance on Sesame street, her family has come out, family members basically saying that she is not being truthful about her indigenous heritage and that she's actually of European descent. I think they said she's Italian. Their family name was Santa Maria. So there was a cbc, which is the kind of national broadcaster here, who just announced they're firing like 800 journalists. They came out with a story who is the real Buffy Saint Marie. And so this pretty scathing expose. And they're talking, they had birth certificates and interviews with people. Family members said that they had been sent cease and desist letters from her high powered lawyers. And so this story is just kind of up in the air and it just, it's a feel bad story. She issued a statement that I thought was quite well worded and I ended up feeling sorry for her. There were people from the indigenous community who were very offended by this if she is in fact misrepresenting herself. And I felt sorry for them. And now there are elders from the indigenous community I just saw a story today. They're coming out and asking her to take a DNA test. So that's the last that we've seen on this. And it's, you know, the reason I bring it up is from a reputational perspective. This is. She has arthritis. She had retired. I think she's 82 years old now, and she's supposed to be enjoying her retirement. And you have all this stuff getting dredged up. And if it's true, if it's not true, either way, this is a kind of tragic story, but just for kind of a different audience. And so we love to talk about the Bud Lights and the Chicago Blackhawks, but these little stories sometimes slip through the cracks. And so that's why I wanted to talk about that. A lot of people who are younger than us, who is this? You're going to have to go Google and look it up. But fascinating story.

Well, I think a lot of people know because I base sometimes the level of a crisis on how many people tag me on the story. A lot of people tagged me on this story on social media. Maybe it was all the Gen Xers in the world watching Sesame street, but a lot of people were aware of it. John, what do you think?

Well, you know, there's a long history of people who have adopted indigenous Personas, and it's a complicated area. We actually acted for an author who was an indigenous author, but it ends up he maybe wasn't indigenous. And he was. He won multiple prizes in Canada. It's interesting because on one hand, he had spent an entire lifetime in and around Indigenous communities and had been adopted by indigenous community. But on the other hand, couldn't necessarily trace his ancestry directly to indigenous community. And I guess it becomes controversial because indigenous community, many indigenous people say, we've had a hard enough go as it is. It's tough when people from outside the community come and adopt our Persona and then become successful with it instead of actually one of our own. It's funny, there was a guy back, I'm going to say it was in the 1930s, and he was one of the first spokespeople in North America for animal preservation. And he went by the name of Gray Owl. And if you Google this guy, he's got Josef Karsh took his picture. He was like a very famous international celebrity. It ends up he was from like Yorkshire and his name was Archibald Stansfield or something like that, Archibald Belaney. And so there's a long history of people doing this. Now, I don't know what the Case is with Buffy Saint Marie. I have no idea what the news value was. And CBC deciding that it's time to do a takedown piece on an 80 year old woman who had a successful career. It certainly is a messy, messy area. And it's not easy to manage a crisis in this kind of situation where you're intersecting with all these controversial and emotional elements.

Yeah, that's a great one. Okay, so now we're coming up to round three, the last three choices for our 2023 crisis of the year. So I'll start this one. Mine is again, not a. Not a big one, but it's adjacent to a lot of other people. But I'll Start here. In August 2023, Michael Orr filed a lawsuit alleging that Leanne and Sean Tuohy never actually adopted him, but instead created a conservative ship that led them to quite a prosperous relationship or, you know, building off of that relationship. Of course, there's the movie the Blind side, starring Sandra Bullock. She won an Oscar for it. And everybody had, you know, all these warm fuzzies about the Blind side Story, the story written by Michael Lewis as well, who is Moneyball. He's also, you know, writing a story now about Sam Bankman Fried. But what was interesting when this story came out out is one, the polarization of it. Leanne Tuohy, a born again Christian. So they had a lot of support in the deep conservative south, you know, the Ole Miss South. But Michael Orr, he's tied into that movie, also played on super bowl team. But what I found interesting was the strategy of the Tuohys to hire Marty Singer, who is a bulldog of a lawyer. He's worked with a lot of people in entertainment who've really been in challenging situations. Bill Cosby, Charlie Sheen, but also Lizzo, who would definitely be on this list. But I find these more the outlier because the Tuohys hired this pit bull to fight against someone who they were claiming was really their adopted son. So it was this kind of discordance that was happening in this crisis that I thought made it quite unique. And they're still trying to come out of it even today. There's claiming, it came out in the news today that Michael Orr tried to extort them. But if you look at any of the social media and the news articles, the Tuohys have absolutely enjoyed quite a ride by adopting a football player who's already an all American player when he was, I believe, 17, 18 years old and certainly run with it. So that would be my 2023 crisis. All right. Yes, go ahead, John. What are you going to say about that?

I was going to say that's a fascinating one and just another example of, you know what all those feel good stories. There's another dimension to them quite often.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Warren, how about you? You're a sports guy.

All credibility was lost when you said three words. Bill Cosby's lawyer. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. But Marty Singer, you know, I talk about him a lot because he's using a playbook that worked for decades where you threaten, you threaten people and you go to editors and say, no, you got to kill this story and you got to pick up, I'll give you this story instead. That playbook doesn't, you know, the denial playbook puts you in a corner, which is exactly what's happening, happening to Lizzo. Okay, Warren, what's your number? Three?

Okay, my last one is kind of late breaking this is in the last Little While Sports Illustrated, the AI scandal. So this is not new. Like, organizations have been writing AI stories for years. Like AP has been doing. A lot of their baseball stories have been written by computers. That's not really the big issue here. The issue is Sports Illustrated was publishing stories with AI, but they had actually come up with fake Personas for the reporters. So at the bottom of story, you would see a little photo and you'd see a little bio. And you know, Chad likes playing Frisbee and playing with his dog on the weekends. And they had these names, like one of the guys I wrote down, Drew Ortiz, this is one of their guys. And they had, if you could look it up, and he has. And it's one of these artificial intelligence images you can just go and buy online. And I think the descriptor is like, you know, average looking male with blonde hair and blue eyes. And that's what like this guy. And so Sports Illustrated, someone blew the whistle on this. I, you know, someone some good journalists saw happening blew the whistle, one of the ones that are left, and immediately Sports Illustrated deleted all the articles that had those little things on. So they pulled them off and then they went on to blame a third party supplier. So there's a company called Advon that they had hired and again talks about the how far Sports Illustrated has fallen from what it used to be to what it is today. Third party suppliers making up fake stories with fake people and, you know, finger pointing and blame. Again, another sad one, because I'm a huge sports fan and I used to love that magazine, but there's a whole bunch of stuff going on here, to me, it's not about the AI that's not going anywhere. Everything's going to be written by AI shortly. It was the deception. It was taking these Personas and whether they knew about it or they didn't, that will come out in the wash. But it was about the deception. That extra level, like if I'm reading a story and there's no byline, I'm just going to assume it's kind of written by AI these days. But to have the little face and the little bio and his little hobbies, that was a little dirty. So people will forgive anything. As we've seen in our business, the Tylenol scandal, Maple Leaf Foods, all these different issues. When it's handled properly, the one thing people won't forgive is being deceived by a company. And that's what happened here.

Yes, but Warren, I did tell you to never bring up Tylenol again. We're okay. We're putting tylenol away in 2023. Okay. No, you're absolutely right because not just. Not only do you lose the trust of readers, it's the ethics and journalism. So likely the mole likely had to have been another journalist or someone who was let go. Yeah. John, what about you? Do you have any thoughts on that one?

I thought the same thing as warranted. It's really. You don't need to trick people into thinking some person's actually writing it. It's good enough. There are a lot of magazines that have no bylines and so just provide the content. It don't make up a big story around it. It just was a unnecessary and foolish thing to do.

Yes. Okay, that's a good one. I like that one. I like that one. Okay, John, round us out.

All right, last one I'll bring. I had a lot of like very heavy things I brought to the table anyway, whatever it is. So earlier this year there was an international embarrassment as a Canadian and massive controversy when President Zelenskyy of Ukraine made a tour to Canada and he was going to speak to Parliament, kind of the equivalent of speaking in, you know, House of Representatives to a combined session of Congress. And one of the people they invited in the gallery of the legislature was a 98 year old Ukrainian guy. And they called him out just ahead of the President's speech and noted that he was originally from Ukraine and fought in World War II. And everyone applauded him and sort of feted him as a hero, except that he fought for the Germans and he was actually fought for the. He was in A Division, the 14th Waffen SS Division. So that was highly embarrassing on a number of levels, politically, personally. Canadians, you know, thought like, good God, can't we even put together an event where we don't invite Nazis? And on top of that, it started just completely aligns with the narrative that Russia is trying to use for a pretext for attacking Ukraine, that they're fighting Nazis in Ukraine. And here we go. Canada is serving one. I'll be an old one. The speaker of Parliament had to resign because of it. The Prime Minister had to issue an apology. And it was kind of like one of those things where they didn't actually act initially. Very quickly, they kind of demurred and tried to find a way out of the issue without apologizing. And that, of course, just made it worse because it dragged on and on and on. So they eventually did a bit of an apology tour, and of course, it was global headlines. Very embarrassing. And I guess, you know, rule number one is don't invite Nazis. Rule number two is if you do invite one, you apologize right away. You don't wait a long time.

Seems like a simple vetting would have figured that one out. But, you know, he looks nice enough.

That's the thing.

Maybe that's what they just went, how he looks.

He was an old. An old dude who knows what his real story is. But in this world, people don't take time to dig into the facts and understand a lot of detail. It seemed like the surface story was enough to go on in this case.

That's a great example. And I love the fact. I mean, because both of you are Canadian. So, Warren, what do you think of this story?

Well, if you look at that in the larger lens of Justin Trudeau, over the past year, he's had a really bad year. There are people with bumper stickers F Trudeau all over the place. I think that was the same couple of weeks where he announced that he was separating with his wife, which is, you know, very, very tough on a personal level. And he's got the Nazi in Parliament thing. So he's had a bit of a bad run. He's probably due for some good luck. And then they did a poll of, shortly after that of Canadians, and They said nearly one in two Canadians, almost 50% of them, thought that that incident had a major impact on Canada's reputation abroad. In the negative, that's a pretty high number, almost half of people. So it's turned out to be, at the end of the year, one of those unfortunate little stories. There's about 14 people whose job it is to vet stuff like this. And it's amazing to think that that actually ended up happening. Or is it that people were too young, not enough staff, they just oh, war hero, we'll take any war hero. Or they just ass which side he was on. But this is again under the category of completely preventable.

Yeah, and talk about bringing an old school villain in. It's like, you know, straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Okay, so now for our last round, we are each going to throw one in for our who will take our final slot. We've all bounced around a couple different ones so I thought I would start out and then we'll go with John and then we'll end with Warren. Okay, so my argument for this last slot involves the strike. Of course we all know about the WGA strike. You know, they're the ones who won it. But it was the AMPTP that I felt, you know, had the struggle with that crisis. The alliance of motion picture and television producers and alliance already sounds like a villainous organization. But why I picked them is because one of the markers I felt that caused the this reputational downfall happened when Bob Iger, the head of Warren's aforementioned Disney was doing an interview with CNNC. Backdrop the mountains, 3/4 Zip, I believe. You know, pull over when he's at the billionaires summer camp talking about the greedy, disruptive writers into a viewing audience of people who are just like him, you know, wealthy males. I thought it was was so out of step with 2023 and at that point it was almost a guarantee that it was going to fail. So that is my entry into the last slot. John, what say you?

You know, they say when you're at crisis, you find the endpoint of the crisis and get to it as quickly as possible. And in this case Disney decided to find the thick mud that was going to get them in deeper and wade it through it and actually just gave fodder to the union. I found it also curious that when you look at the kind of techniques that the studios were using, you know, their website looks like it's from 1995. It's very, very conservative, difficult to read and like not at all aimed at the way that the unions were delivering messages in short sound bites, you know, very accessible information, good use of social media, a lot of video. So it was like night and day. Even though it was David and Goliath sort of fighting here, the union certainly had an upper hand in the way they were approaching it from a comm.

Standpoint yeah, Excellent point of view there. John, who is your entry for the last slot of our top crises of 2023?

Well, the one that I think and Warren and I have talked about this one a bunch is just mind boggling. It's got to be OpenAI in terms of how does a board blow itself up and not think through such an important decision as that. It just blows my mind that they didn't think through even the next step beyond what was going to happen once they terminated their CEO. There's a lot. We could talk about it at length, all the things they did wrong. But it's just one of those things where you just can't believe it's happening. It was like a slow motion car accident. And I have to say now mind you, they sort of rescued themselves thanks to Microsoft coming in and saying this is going to be fixed and fixing it for them. But I would put that sort of right up there with the things that were just mind boggling communications disaster and self created it again.

Yeah, that was a good one. A late entry that a lot of people were talking about. Definitely. Warren, what is your entry?

My last one. I have to go with the Chicago Blackhawks situation. I know you've covered this on your show recently. John and I both talked way too much about hockey that people are complaining about it.

Wait, are they really? Has someone complained that you talk about hockey too much?

Yeah.

Okay.

In the comments.

Okay. I will say that I think every episode I've been on, we've talked, it's devolved into hockey at some point.

Canadians like, there's six months of terrible weather. What else is there to talk about?

Exactly.

And this has been for the reason. And you know, if you don't know about it, I'm not going to bring it up because it's a horrible, horrible story about rumor and speculation. You can go and Google it. Although I, I would say that there's probably no one listening to this that isn't aware of it. So if you think back to a little over a year ago, Chicago Blackhawks were in this situation with Kyle Be and sexual allegations. It was a really ugly story. And again it was deception, cover up, old school, old white boys club kind of trying to deflect and deny. And so I think in a way what they were trying to do here was trying to correct that where they said, look, we're going to take decisive action and this guy's off our team. So the action is part of it. But the lack of transparency was the Achilles heel here. And I Know, it's easy to play Monday morning quarterback, although the football analogy. So I'm not sure what the right hockey analogy is, but they took swift action, which in some cases, and we don't really know what happened, so they maybe should be applauded for that. But they left this gaping hole for rumor and speculation. And it was like three or four days before they closed that hole up. And all that stuff could have been done ahead of time. And he ends up sending out this note and I'm sickened by this and I apologize, and I'm going into rehab for alcohol. They could have said that at the beginning and then all of this bullshit would have gone away and not happened. Because I feel so bad for Connor bedard. This kid's 18 years old. I have a kid who's 18 years old. You're not a fully formed person. And to be dealing with this kind of bs, his family, Corey Perry's family, the team. And you know, I have this guy in my hockey pool. I need him to perform. We need him to get his head right. The Blackhawks, I feel in a way they tried to do the right thing, but. But this is, it's mind boggling to me because they could have gone to OpenAI ChatGPT. How do you handle a crisis? And whatever was spat out of that thing would have been better than what they did.

Oh, my gosh, I totally agree with you. Yes. I mean, to put their franchise player at risk like that. But who I my head goes to is Connor Bedard's mother. And my big sticking point with their response was Kyle from Chicago. I'm sure you remember the man on the street interview, you know, at NHL draft. He's doing the job. He's. He's telegenic. He was the perfect spokesperson to handle it. And what he did is that I think they buffed it. You know, they got the statement out there, but in that press conference, he had an opportunity and a presser to really sell it. But there he is, he's reading it. You're watching him read it. And the worst part of it for me is, yes, you're right. Corey, you know, came out, Perry came out with the statement, but Conor Bedard is going to be harassed for the rest of his life even though it's not true. But his poor mother. I felt they did not do a good enough job to wipe that clean. I mean, the rumor and speculation started with something happening with Corey Perry and the mother, Melanie Bedard. And that's the part, you know, so this will stick with her forever and mothers. I mean, I'm a hockey mom. I have a son the same age. That's where. And you know, and she's so beautiful. I'm like, that's where the comparisons stop right there. We have sons or hockey players. But she is just such, you could tell, like a really genuine hockey mom that just absolutely loves her son. And she has to carry this forever because I think they did such a poor job. Okay, Canadian John, you must have 2 cents on this one.

Why don't I talk about it? Like, I agree with you that the mom is definitely going to bear the brunt of this and Connor Bedard himself as well. But it could have been avoided, as Warren said right at the very beginning. And I think it was because there's this bias towards, especially in sports, bias towards really say nothing comments. Like, we've seen them all the time. Athletes use them all the time. And they used a throwaway say nothing comment the first time, which just let the rumor, like Warren said the vacuum was there and it let the rumor continue to grow. And then the second time they used a statement, it actually, actually validated the rumor. If you read it. Yeah, you read it one way and it validates the rumor. And it wasn't until the third statement when they finally inserted the line, this had nothing to do with a player or their family.

Yeah.

Like. Well, if you'd said that in the first place.

Yes.

You would have cut this right off at the beginning. So it was a completely cell phone. And the one thing I would say is that when Kyle Breach gave that news conference, he kind of gave this self righteous. This is disgusting, these rumors, which they are. Sorry, what's that horn?

Kyle Davidson.

Yeah. Understandable.

I'm getting my cows mixed up. I think he would have been much better to be a bit more contrite, a bit more recognizing that this is. I'm trying to solve this unfortunate situation, not sort of have righteous, sort of righteous attitude. And I just felt like they're getting bad advice there. Obviously, I think they got to the right place eventually, but when it takes you two weeks and three attempts to get to the right answer, you could probably do better.

Yeah. You know who they should hire?

Who?

Bill Cosby's lawyer.

They probably did, based on that response. Okay, so who do we think? Which one should be in that last slot or do we have an outlier? What do we think?

I don't know. What do you guys think?

If I had to pick the sort of the one from all the ones we've Talked about that stands out the most.

Yes.

I'm going to say 2. The fight between the actors and the studios because it got so much media attention, I think was one that was like a marquee kind of crisis throughout the year. Like it's no shock that actors in TV studios fighting or movie studios fighting and TV studios fighting is going to get a lot of media attention. And then I think it's kind of cliche, but I think Bud Light certainly stands out as probably a case study that will be in textbooks for an awful long time as we go forward.

Yes, I'm with you. I mean it is the contrarian Tylenol response. Right. We are always going to hear the horrible response. It wasn't a well thought out plan and the response was just as poorly thought out. So, yeah, I agree with you. My top slot definitely for 2023 is Bud Light. Warren, what do you think?

All right, we'll go Bud Light across the board. I think 10 years from now this will be the only one that when we think 2023 branding crisis, I think that's going to be the only one that stands out.

Yeah.

Unless you're Connor Bedard's mom.

I know, but I will. I'm going to feel for this woman.

You just said like, hopefully people again, it shouldn't have happened happened. That's unfortunate. But I think on a grand scale, like you think of New Coke, that was a big debacle, the Tylenol thing, obviously. But this one is. This is a legendary screw up. Billions of dollars of market cap, hundreds of millions of dollars lost. Again, this is going to be a defining one for the year.

And how much digital media will be preserved for decades to come. That was spawned from the Bud Light. We're in an environment where and all those other things, when they happened, we don't have all the record of that was available, yes, for reaction. But now we have scores of people's responses and people shooting things and Kid.

Rock shooting the can.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. That's the meme that will last forever. Warren and John, well, one, it's so great to speak with to both of you again. It's been a long time and I'm glad I could wrap up my year with the two of you to really, I think create the listicle of all listicles. When we all look at those end of the year roundups of the top 10 crises, I tell you, I think our list is going to be the best. So thank you so much.

This is where we tell you that we're Actually AI avatars you've been talking to for the last hour.

You're Drew Ortiz. Is that it?

I cannot comment.

All right, you guys, any. Any last words?

No, just thanks for having us on. I love seeing the way you're blowing up on TikTok. I've been talking it up to everybody. It's a case study, I think, in that people should always be tinkering and trying new things, things. You're a legit celebrity. I am super pumped every time I see you on a new show or on some interview and just very heartwarm to see that.

Oh, that's so kind of you to say that. But, yeah, it's dicey out there. It's a dicey, dicey place to be. But as I said to a client prior to that, it's not about the visibility. It's about the knowledge and the research and learning about public opinion and learning. You know, where it all starts and certainly starts there. But thank you so much, Warren. I mean, you're all over the place. You're constantly bouncing around. And John, I love your thinking in terms of how you and your firm approaches, you know, crisis management and strategy. You do an excellent job. You two are really one of the best. And that's why I'm so happy that you're here, because I wanted you to be here to be a part of this list. So thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Molly.

My thanks to Warren Weeks and John Paranack for joining me in this episode, this year ending episode. I want to thank all you of of you for listening to the indestructible PR podcast this year and the previous four years. This has been a five year project for me. There's been a lot of episodes, a lot of iterations of the episode. I'm going to tell you the beginning of the year. I'm going to change up the format a bit. We're going to do a tweak. I will still highlight the top, top PR comms trending culture media story, but I am also going to do a weekly news dump where I will touch on the other stories. There are so many other stories out there happening. I know people love the deep dives and that's why I have this podcast so I can do that. However, I'm missing so many other juicy stories that we can all learn something from or at least be entertained by. So that's it for this week on the podcast. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.