Swimming With Dolphins Almost Killed My Business
The dangers of advertising in a cancel culture society and the three mistakes that almost cost me my business.
Over the past few years, as some of my businesses have ramped up their marketing efforts and thus, our global footprint, I’ve gotten a whole lot better at dealing with inbound “hate” online. When your company sees tens of thousands of organic website visitors per month and builds a lead list pushing one million prospects (900k+), you open the door to a variety of colorful messages, emails, texts, and phone calls.
To clarify, these angry — or should I say “colorful” — messages don’t come from actual customers. Instead, they come from social media trolls, disgruntled leads who love free things but hate the idea of putting a price tag on a digital product or service, and randos who have an ax to grind with marketers in general and choose my company as their prey of the day.
Point being, once you’re reaching tens of thousands of people or more with your marketing — or almost anything — negative responses come with the territory. However, my business and marketing efforts weren’t always this large and far-reaching. Years ago, in the early days of one of my prior companies, I was just dipping my toe into digital marketing and advertising. Blindly accepting guidance from my trusty $3k/month marketing team, I decided to follow their request and put a little more “me” in my marketing. Boy,was that a mistake.
The Dolphin That Almost Killed My Business
If you bask in attention, don’t mind confrontation, and love the idea of parading around your fabulous life for all the world to see, my marketing team’s requests might not have been too much of a burden. They wanted me to be more candid with my audience and were hell-bent on putting me “front and center” of the company and all our marketing. That presented a bit of a challenge, there are three things I hate:
- Dishonesty
- Being on camera
- Getting too personal
My marketing team — and the team I’d hired before them — seemed to have quite the opposite sentiment towards those three pet peeves of mine.
They urged me to provide a barrage of intimate, vulnerable, aspirational personal content, allowing the audience to step into my world. The goal wasn’t relatability; it was evoking jealousy. They wanted my company’s audience to see my fabulous life, assume that buying our products would grant them a similar life, and swipe the credit card right then and there.
The problem? I didn’t want that at all — and I didn’t think it was true. We sold business services and digital products for women building brands. Having already built multiple companies (and with my hands concurrently in even more), I knew exactly what my day-to-day life looked like, and it wasn’t sipping mojitos on some island.
I knew our offerings were innovative, robust, and more effective than anything else on the market — and that’s what I would have preferred to focus on. However, this marketing team had a supposed track record of success in my industry, so I complied with their request.
My fiance and I took a weekend trip down to San Diego and used the mini-vacation as a photo op. When we returned, I handed over the photos to the marketing team to weave into their next campaign. I expected they’d run some A/B ads for a few days or weeks, come to me with the results, and we’d conclude this new angle of more “personal” marketing had either failed or succeeded. Not quite.
I woke up to a concerned message from the head of the agency letting me know we needed to discuss the new ads. It didn’t sound good.
When we hopped on our ad review call, the agency owner explained her concerns: “The reaction to the new ads is very… big.”
Of course, I needed more clarification than “big”. Big as in good, or big as in bad?
Here’s what she said: “Big as in inflammatory. Divisive. Some people love it and some people hate it.”
It wasn’t until I pried further and looked into our ad manager that I grasped what she meant. This marketing team had been busy keeping up with — as in blocking, hiding, and deleting — a relentless flood of angry comments that all stemmed back to one picture: me with a dolphin at Sea World. Among the negative comments, there were a few nice ones, but they were by far the minority.
This was years ago, and I wasn’t fully aware of the controversy surrounding Sea World and the treatment of their animals. My ignorance, in this case, wasn’t bliss, but a giant reputational risk bringing down my burgeoning company when we were just picking up steam. As someone who lived a pretty private life prior and largely stayed off social media, this was the first time I’d received hate from strangers online. What made it even worse was that while it was directed at me personally, it was reflecting upon my entire business.
You’d expect the marketer to suggest we take it down and perhaps issue a swift and sincere apology, right? Wrong. Instead, she was encouraged by the high levels of engagement this ad invoked and suggested we keep it up, but have her team monitor the comments diligently. Apparently, she fell into the camp of “all publicity is good publicity”. That attitude may be fine for a big company with the funds for damage control in the form of a crisis PR team, but for a small early stage business still cementing its reputation and credibility? Not so much.
Mistake #1: Assuming Their Way Was The Way
I fell into the trap of believing there’s “one right way” to market in each industry and to each audience. Since this marketing team had experience and expertise promoting similar products to similar audiences, I assumed it was their way or the highway.
In retrospect, that industry is full of fake influencers, aspirational fluff (also known as false narratives meant to incite FOMO and guilt audiences into a purchase), and a lack of authenticity that lends to its 30% average refund rates. Perhaps a more effective way to stand out would have been a direct approach, highlighting the comparative advantages of our product’s effectiveness rather than focusing on “influencer-centric” marketing. Just FYI, you don’t have to become an influencer or get “personal” with strangers online to sell a product. I’m living proof.
Mistake #2: Believing We Needed a Face
In case I didn’t mention it, I don’t love being on camera. I can probably get a decent picture after 30 or so selfie attempts, but it’s not how I choose to spend my time. I overthink pictures, as in:
- Do I look too young (or old) for this target audience’s preference?
- Would they prefer a male or a female?
- Would they better relate with a different race or ethnicity?
Those might seem like strange questions since I can’t so easily change things like my age, gender, or ethnic appearance — nor do I want to — but they’re valid considerations that pop into most marketers’ (and entrepreneurs’) minds when trying to sell a product. If I’m the face of my business, I’m inherently limited because I’m only one person. I’m never going to be, look like, relate to, or appeal to every single potential customer in my target market.
I can either plaster my face all over my company’s marketing and alienate those who don’t relate, or I could just…not. And guess what? So can you!
You absolutely do not need to be the face of your company or marketing if you don’t want to. I know more than a handful of entrepreneurs running, founding, or co-founding companies for which you’d never know their involvement. And that’s no accident — they like it that way.
I’ve learned that it’s a lot more effective to allow our diverse pool of former clients and customers to represent my companies and be relatable to new prospects than to allow my one likeness to determine which customers do and don’t identify with our brand.
Mistake #3: Letting The Backlash Surprise Me
These days, it seems like you can sneeze and get canceled. That shouldn't surprise anyone. What also shouldn’t surprise anyone is the fact that once you start posting content or ads on public platforms for all the world to see, negative reactions are par for the course.
As this was one of my first forays into digital marketing, I was caught off guard by the incensed responses. In fact, I was downright scared. I feared the angry audience would report our ads, get us banned from the platform, and spread a viral smear campaign to burn my company to the metaphorical ground when we were just blasting off.
I wasn’t wrong to be worried. People were mad. I was, however, wrong to be caught off guard. A better marketer would have foreseen the potential reputational risks associated with the dolphin post and factored the likely backlash into the decision to post the campaign or can it. In some cases, moving forward with a purposefully inflammatory marketing campaign can make a lot of sense — but it shouldn’t be accidental.
The Permission Versus Forgiveness Dilemma
If you’ve ever heard the saying “ask forgiveness, not permission”, you may have already toyed with the idea of making a risky move in spite of its potential consequences. In some cases, this can work. However, as an entrepreneur or marketer for a startup or small, lesser-known, early stage, or burgeoning company, your reputation is very tenuous. The last thing you want to do is burn a bridge before you’re done building it.
My company was small enough that the dolphin debacle didn’t ruin us forever. However, had that been a larger-scale campaign spanning more than a few thousand people on one platform, it could have been disastrous, especially at that early stage in my business’s online presence.
Entrepreneurship is risky; you don’t need to make it riskier with potentially inflammatory marketing that’s likely to cause more upset than sales. Sure, it might get you in front of a bigger crowd, but in my experience having marketed to over a million people, the bigger the crowd, the harder to please.