Lead Balloon - Marketing, Public Relations and Strategic Communications Stories

On January 18, 2018, the entire State of Hawaii received an ear piercing alert on their cell phones. "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL." Those with a keen memory will recall that the Aloha State was NOT, in fact, wiped off the map by a missile strike. It was a false alarm. But what it revealed about the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system sh...

The robot revolution has arrived. And they're coming for your marketing or content creation job. The advent of generative artificial intelligence chatbots—most notably tools like Chat GPT and Midjourney—is poised to revolutionize creative industries. These tools use deep learning technology to generate new content based on prompts from human users. But will this be the end of creativity as we know...

Every professional communicator has had a day that seems like it came straight out of a TV sitcom. For Rob Davis and John R. Montgomery, working at the Chicago ad firm Leo Burnett in the early 2000’s, it was a regular occurrence. In fact, the stories from their time there were so singular, that when they shot a pilot and pitched it to Hollywood, it was picked up and run as a CBS sitcom starring Ro...

"How do you do, fellow marketers? We think it would be pretty 'on fleek' if you would stop trying to use slang terms to make yourself more relatable to young people." Certainly, brands swooping in and trying to leverage youth culture to drive sales is nothing new. But as bad as it was in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s, the advent of social media marketing made it 1000 times worse. The internet n...

Communicating during and about the Covid-19 pandemic is a topic we've discussed several times on this show, including in our most recent episode. And, as of today, May 11, 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services coronavirus Public Health Emergency is expiring. But just because Covid is "over" doesn’t mean we won’t still have to discuss it as strategic communicators. And so in this bonus...

When the unstoppable force of online dating met the immovable object of global pandemic social distancing, there was no road map for what would come next.  Michael Kaye is the director of brand and communications for the online dating app OkCupid. And, in the early days of the Covid lockdown, he and his team faced decisions that weighed on no less than the continued existence of the company. After...

It is now only a matter of time until someone attacks your reputation with a deepfake, according to the experts. So-called deepfake technology, which can synthesize audio and video of things that never happened, has arrived en masse. And, while these tools for generating potential disinformation were previously only available to trained experts and big institutions, recent advances in artificial i...

It has been called “The Greatest Speech Never Given.”  Drafted as a contingency plan for President Richard Nixon on the occasion of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the memo entitled "In Event of Moon Disaster" is inarguably a better piece of writing than any of the presidential remarks actually delivered on that day.  Penned by White House speechwriter William Safire, today it is hailed as a work of r...

There’s a disturbing new trend making waves in the world of online content creation.  Corporate blogs, mom-and-pop business websites, podcasts… Even stuff that you posted years ago to your personal website or social media. It’s now being examined, sifted through and screened by artificial intelligence bots, which are programmed to search for copyright violations. The practice has become known as “...

Now with 50% new footage! During Super Bowl LIII in 2019, Bud Light launched a new advertising strategy that was... unconventional, even for them. Instead of frogs or "wazzap" guys or silly superstitions, this campaign focused on attacking Bud Light's rivals for using corn syrup to brew their beers. Stranger still, outside observers noted that the beer giant borrowed other conventions from the wor...

It's been a busy year here at Podcamp Media. So busy, in fact, that we almost forgot to recognize a pretty significant milestone in Dusty's career. 20 years ago, Dusty got his first job behind a microphone. He was 17-years-old, working an after school gig at his local radio station in Monroe, Wisconsin, when he was afforded the opportunity to voice the overnight shift and eventually ride the news...

For the U.S. Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron, media relations is not a job that just happens on the ground.  Each year, dozens of media reps, influencers and VIPs are invited to take a ride in the back seat of one of the squadron's F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets. And, in order to help tell the story of the Blue Angels public affairs team, Lead Balloon was invited to be the first p...

The U.S. Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron is not only the world’s most well-known group of elite performing aviators.  It’s also—and people forget this—a group of elite public affairs and marketing practitioners.  From the pilots to the technicians turning wrenches on the planes, every Blue Angels team member is trained to uphold the unit's 76 years of tradition and legacy. As a bran...

In 1993, the world watched as two bitter rivals shook hands on the South Lawn of the White House, presenting the best hope for peace in the Middle East seen in centuries of bloodshed. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chair Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords—and the handshake that followed, cajoled by U.S. President Bill Clinton—comprised an iconic...

Adweek's 2020 "Marketing Podcast of the Year." Webby Award-nominated. Profiled on Forbes.com. On Lead Balloon, professional communicators share tales of the do-or-die situations that defined public relations and marketing careers--what went wrong, how unexpected obstacles were overcome, and what was learned in the process. With immersive storytelling and a wry sense of humor, host Dusty Weis revis...

On a busy evening in Boston's financial district in 1995, gunshots ring out. When the smoke clears, a prominent divorce attorney is dead and a police officer is wounded. And Lee Caraher, then the Vice President of Corporate and Consumer Communications for the Sega Corporation, doesn't know it yet... ...but she's about to have a public relations crisis on her hands. Police would eventually uncover...

Sexist advertising that objectifies women reached its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But, in that era, it was very seldom that any company actually faced backlash or consequences for its ad practices. That began to change, however, when National Airlines deployed a racy new ad campaign in which alluring young stewardesses invited travelers to "Fly Me" on their next business trip. Nation...

As the world’s most valuable automotive manufacturer, electric car giant Tesla is the largest company in the world that operates without any kind of public relations personnel. That means no media relations arm. No crisis comms plan. No PIO.  In fact, the entire PR team was purged just a couple years ago in 2020, and CEO Elon Musk has defended the move, saying the company doesn't believe in "manip...

The strategy at the heart of the Snapple brand's precipitous rise... and its cataclysmic fall... is simple: Embrace your roots. Celebrate authenticity. It's a lesson that's been served up again and again in the brands and marketing ecosystem. But it never seems to sink in. So in this episode, we'll pop the top on a Snapple double feature. First, Jane Cavalier tells us about pitching Snapple's icon...

On January 3, Pabst Blue Ribbon lit the internet on fire with one obscene tweet: “Not drinking this January? Try eating ass.” The uproar was swift and loud. And PBR deleted the tweets and apologized publicly, even as some writers blamed a “rogue employee” for the tweets. That was NOT the case. The offending Tweeter was actually an established social media manager by the name of Corey Smale, a crea...

For Ukrainian ad agencies and freelance creatives, "business-as-usual" stopped on the day that Russian forces launched their unprovoked war three weeks ago. Now, they need your help to pierce the veil of Russian propaganda and fight for their homeland in their own way--by waging a global information war to win the hearts and minds of the world. In this episode, we talk to three Kyiv-based creative...

Wendy’s, the burger chain, is infamous for its punchy, no-holds-barred Twitter account.  And social media manager Amy Brown was the creative instigator of that success. Many internet historians even point to her epic 2017 tweet-roast as the viral moment that launched an entire genre of Snarky Brand Twitter. It certainly made her a hero to social media managers the world over. So why, within just a...

Tony Piloseno really likes paint. And as a junior studying marketing at Ohio University, he channeled his passion for a part-time job at a Sherwin-Williams paint store into a wildly successful TikTok channel. His weirdly entertaining videos of mixing paint colors amassed hundreds of thousands of social media followers and tens of millions of views. Inspired by his meteoric success, Tony pitched th...

This month on the show, we talked to Alex Lasry, the Senior Vice President of the Milwaukee Bucks, about the team’s dramatic stand for social justice last year during the NBA Playoffs. It’s a really important story and a great case study for how organizations can and should navigate some of these situations we face as a nation. But Alex has a lot of other irons in the fire, too. And so in this bon...

With a shot at an NBA title on the line, an entire basketball team refuses to take the court. They won’t even come out of the locker room. It’s a sports marketing nightmare. And just last year, it came true for the management of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. Alex Lasry is the Senior Vice President of the Bucks. And even though he was shocked just like the rest of us when the 2020 walk-out h...