By Felicia Knight
As Super Bowl 50 approaches, we thought, “Who doesn’t love a good sports analogy?” (Hey, at least we didn’t go with Groundhog Day.)
In truth, Super Bowl season is a time of hype and hyperbole. Everyone has great expectations for their team, their favorite players, the commercials, even the food. People who don’t know Cam Newton from Cam Tucker at least are looking forward to some great seven-layer dip and Doritos.
As with all big events, however, there can be major blunders, dropped balls, and crisis-inducing screw-ups—some of them, painfully avoidable.
So, here’s our top five crisis management and PR lessons the Super Bowl has taught us:
5. Manage Expectations. Trash talk and hype emanating from the teams themselves are to be expected. But just as expectations for economic benefits to Super Bowl host cities should be properly managed, so should those of any public relations campaign. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: In public relations or in politics, it’s one thing to believe in the cause and exude confidence, but it’s quite another to lead a client down the garden path to expectations you know cannot be met.
4. Know When to Take a Knee. Actually, this is just an excuse to relive the thrilling final moments of Super Bowl XLIX.
3. Know What’s Out of Bounds. Half the hype surrounding the Super Bowl is for the commercials. Companies are spending upwards of $5 million for 30-second ads during the game. And that’s just for the airtime. It’s a sure bet these companies are not spending that kind of money so they can end up in a story titled When Super Bowl Ads Go Bad.
It’s hard for a marketing or PR campaign, on any level, to break from the pack. Many try to do it with humor and most fail. (Remember, dying is easy. Comedy is hard.) What’s funny to some is offensive to others. There’s a fine line between clever and snarky.
While you’re busy thinking outside the box, remember to step outside the box and ask some fresh sets of eyes and ears for an opinion. (A focus group or two might have saved Nationwide Insurance from one of the biggest Super Bowl ad blunders ever.)
2. Do Your Job. Okay, so our Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots are sitting this one out. That doesn’t mean that Bill Belichick’s signature admonition isn’t relevant.
When clients place their trust in you, when they pay you to look after their best interests, when they look to you for wise counsel and results, the only possible course is to do your job. Don’t assume, check and double check, anticipate and investigate, and “be there” for your clients. This is something we take quite seriously at The Knight Canney Group.
And the number one crisis management and PR lessons the Super Bowl has taught us:
1.Expect the Best. Prepare for the Worst. Both the Broncos and the Panthers will have champagne chilling, and Super Bowl 50 Champion ball caps waiting in the wings, but only one of those teams will get to wheel it all into the locker room.
Preparation is the key to avoiding or mitigating a crisis. The best laid plans of a well-thought out and well-planned PR campaign or special event can be blown to bits by an oversight, or a failure to anticipate where things can go wrong.
Do the legwork.
Gather the stakeholders.
Do the research.
Look for land mines.
Have answers ready.
You may not need any of it. But if you prepare for the worst, you have a better chance of delivering the best.
Go Pats! (Oh, wait…)