In marketing, as in life, things don’t always go to plan. Many of us have marketing horror stories to tell. Plus, Christmas is the perfect time for scary tales. Think of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, or A Ghost Story for Christmas on the TV.

We thought we’d add to this air of festive chill with some scary stories of our own, dragged kicking and screaming from our Chester-based marketing agency team’s memories.

On a positive note, It’s worth remembering that it can be useful, if painful, to reflect on things that haven’t gone as well as they could – our fallibility and flaws make us human and relatable.

1. Wrong Place, Right Times

One interview question I like to ask candidates for account management positions is, “What’s the biggest mistake you ever made?” Typically, they have to think on their feet because they don’t want to come across as incompetent, but they do want to appear honest.

In this instance, the answer was both revealing and unexpectedly positive:

“I once placed an advertisement in the wrong national newspaper. It was supposed to go in the Daily Telegraph but instead, I chose The Times. I thought the client would go nuts. However, the ad ended up with more responses than it would have normally. The client switched all their advertising to the Times. Result.”

That’s how you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

2. Effing and Blinding Ts & Cs

I worked at an agency producing lots of direct mail for a bank, mainly promoting credit cards aimed at sports enthusiasts.

It was a Friday afternoon when I took a panicked phone call from the bank. The caller demanded to know whether we’d designed the latest pack up to the pre-print stage. I asked him carefully if there was some sort of issue.

It turns out that this pack included a whole sentence of the most vulgar swear words printed in the terms and conditions. The bank had to contact thousands of customers to apologise*. Obviously, they wanted to know who was responsible for this act of sabotage.

I explained that the Ts and Cs would have been added after we had designed the pack. The investigations went on for months, finally revealing that a disgruntled freelancer in the in-house studio had inserted the offending words and no one at the bank had proofread the final copy.

*People tend not to read the small print, so it must have been awkward for the bank to first draw their attention to it and then have to apologise for it.

3. Lost in Translation

In my early days, I worked for a small local advertising agency where we designed and placed ads in local newspapers for shops, small businesses and restaurants.

There was a restaurant famous for being in an historic Tudor building where Charles I hid from the marauding roundhead army. The story was that he’d jumped from a top-floor window into a waiting hay-wain that had spirited him away to safety.

This was perfect to highlight in an advertisement. The copy was written and handed over to the designer to create the ad. The ad went to the newspaper. So far, so good.

Except… On the day, the ad had this bizarre headline:

Them say, King England, him jump out top window. But you no need go such heights.

Somewhere, the proofreading process had failed miserably. Something got lost badly in translation.

4. An Excel Nightmare

When you’re planning a direct mail campaign, the password-protected Excel spreadsheet is an indispensable tool. Or it should be.

Seeking perfection, one of the team was busy sorting through one such spreadsheet, tidying up the names listed in the column. The trouble is, they were ONLY sorting the names – they hadn’t included the addresses.

The result was a database where the names and addresses no longer matched! Big problem, especially as the spreadsheet was the source of the address labels for the mailout.

Luckily for us, the mailing house picked up on our error and we avoided making a more expensive mistake.

Once bitten, twice shy – we were quick to apply watertight training and processes to prevent it from ever happening again.

5. Not So Sweet

Here’s another direct mail derailment. We wanted to target specific businesses and we included a packet of a well-known brand of sweets as part of the message. We felt the potential impact was worth the additional cost.

The initial results were positive, which confirmed our assumptions about including the sweets in the promotion. But then one of the recipients got in touch. Or rather, their lawyers did. They asked whether we’d got approval to use their sweets this way. It turned out we hadn’t.

We did reach a settlement, after some focused discussions, that added to the overall cost of the campaign. The good news was that the promotion still earned a good ROI and we learned a valuable lesson.

What’s Your Scariest Marketing Story?

We’re a marketing agency in Chester. These are our scary marketing stories for Christmas. Why not tell us yours? Just remember to change the names to protect the innocent.