Molly McPherson breaks down Ed Sheeran's tour cancellations, showing how the venue owner, artist, promoter, and crisis manager all failed to publish clear policies beforehand. When controversy hit, they had to invent rules on the fly instead of enforcing ones that already existed. The lesson: write your policies during calm times, not during a crisis.
Ed Sheeran. Now, that's the question I got on the live, and I only answered halfway, and it's been sitting with me since. And that question is, what should Ed Sheeran have done? And here's my real answer. Every single party in this story was writing policy in public, likely at night and under fire, in the throes of it all. Robert Kraft had no published venue standard to point at, which a lot of privately owned arenas don't, which is why he had to describe his line instead of cite it. Also, there have been a number of questions online about publicly owned arenas versus one that, that are privately owned as well. So it certainly goes into a bigger area there as it even sits with this story. But Robert Kraft made a decision based on Gillette Stadium, which he owns. Now, Ed Sheeran had no political expression terms for his support acts, you know, so nobody knew the rules until they had already been broken. Messina, they likely had no process, so it announced an outcome and attached no reasoning to it at all. So what I'm saying as a crisis manager here, if you are in a position where you need to understand, well, how do we respond to it? It's not just how you respond, it's also when you respond, but when you decide what your opinion is. Now, one of the people in the story made their decision in peacetime. That's the answer. Decide before you're forced to. Write down what you will do, what you will host, what you will say, or what you'll stand behind. Publish it when nothing is on fire. Then when it lands, you are enforcing a standard instead of inventing one. And you can name the act because you already named the line. That's the bucket already full of water. This story, in my opinion, is 4 people running for the hose.
