I’m not a marketing expert, but naively these headlines don’t look great to me. “Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign” ″Former Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign—saying vegan dogma is ‘damaging’ to goal of reducing animal suffering”
I’d naively expect most readers to just read the headlines, and basically assume, “I guess there’s more reasons why meat is fine to eat.”
I tried asking Claude (note that it does have my own custom system prompt, which might bias it) if this campaign seemed like a good idea in the first place, and it was pretty skeptical. I’m curious if the FarmKind team did, and what their/your prompt was for this.
I appreciate this write-up, but overall feel pretty uncomfortable about this work. To me the issue was less about the team not properly discussing things with other stakeholders, than it was just the team doing a risky and seemingly poor intervention.
My read of their phase one plan is that they were intending to get these pretty low quality tabloid stories as a springboard to getting higher quality stuff. Maybe that was a bad plan, but the fact that the bad tabloid articles were in fact bad tabloid articles doesn’t seem to discredit that?
I think it partly does discredit that? Its a pretty low probability bet that bad tabloid articles will likely graduate to more serious articles. Especially given that this campaign actually did get quite a lot of media (maybe even more than expected?), and that still didn’t happen.
Hmm. I understood them to be saying they (semi-) voluntarily scaled back before phase 2 was complete, so we can’t read that much into the fact that phases 2⁄3 (where the high quality journalism happens) didn’t happen. Maybe I misunderstood?
Yep Ben is right. We did turn the tabloid coverage into further deeper coverage and were on our way to the North Star but leaned out of controversy to a degree that killed our momentum. Of course we don’t know what would have happened otherwise, and it should certainly be characterized as a “low probability bet” because trying to land media hits is inherently “hits-based”, but this was a reasonable PR strategy that our two staff who both have ample PR experience devised. I don’t think we should put much stock in our armchair PR intuitions
I’m not a marketing expert, but naively these headlines don’t look great to me.
“Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign”
″Former Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign—saying vegan dogma is ‘damaging’ to goal of reducing animal suffering”
I’d naively expect most readers to just read the headlines, and basically assume, “I guess there’s more reasons why meat is fine to eat.”
I tried asking Claude (note that it does have my own custom system prompt, which might bias it) if this campaign seemed like a good idea in the first place, and it was pretty skeptical. I’m curious if the FarmKind team did, and what their/your prompt was for this.
I appreciate this write-up, but overall feel pretty uncomfortable about this work. To me the issue was less about the team not properly discussing things with other stakeholders, than it was just the team doing a risky and seemingly poor intervention.
My read of their phase one plan is that they were intending to get these pretty low quality tabloid stories as a springboard to getting higher quality stuff. Maybe that was a bad plan, but the fact that the bad tabloid articles were in fact bad tabloid articles doesn’t seem to discredit that?
I think it partly does discredit that? Its a pretty low probability bet that bad tabloid articles will likely graduate to more serious articles. Especially given that this campaign actually did get quite a lot of media (maybe even more than expected?), and that still didn’t happen.
Hmm. I understood them to be saying they (semi-) voluntarily scaled back before phase 2 was complete, so we can’t read that much into the fact that phases 2⁄3 (where the high quality journalism happens) didn’t happen. Maybe I misunderstood?
Ah that’s entirely possible.
Yep Ben is right. We did turn the tabloid coverage into further deeper coverage and were on our way to the North Star but leaned out of controversy to a degree that killed our momentum. Of course we don’t know what would have happened otherwise, and it should certainly be characterized as a “low probability bet” because trying to land media hits is inherently “hits-based”, but this was a reasonable PR strategy that our two staff who both have ample PR experience devised. I don’t think we should put much stock in our armchair PR intuitions