The Brand Guy

How to fuck up your brand in an instant

PwC is one of the biggest auditors around the world, and is a brand that has built its reputation on accuracy.

And so they have been trusted to handle the Oscar tabulation process for 83 years – the technically challenging task of counting the votes, writing the name of the winner on a card, and then handing the right card to the right person giving out the right award.

This week they fucked up royally. The two PwC accountants who were supposed to be taking care of the envelopes were instead backstage taking pics of celebrities and posting them on Twitter.

It led to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway telling millions of viewers that La La Land had won best picture – the top award of the night – rather than the actual winner Moonlight.

Instead of springing into action, the accountants froze backstage when things went wrong. And so the producers of La La Land got as far as giving their acceptance speeches before proceedings were corrected, and the cast and crew of Moonlight were invited to collect their Oscar.

It took a further three hours before PwC admitted their error, and took responsibility. No doubt they were trying to find a way to wrangle out of the mess. Five days later PwC are “still investigating” what went wrong and “how this could have happened”. And they have said nothing on their website to explain themselves either … yet.

The debacle is seen as the Academy’s worst blunder in its 89 year history. The two PwC accountants responsible have been banned from attending future ceremonies. And the Academy’s relationship with PwC is under review.

Brands go to extraordinary lengths to protect their image and reputation and to be seen as good corporate citizens. History is littered by examples when a hard-won reputation nosedives — from sporting legends Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong to business giants like BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and Volkswagen after its emissions cheating scandal.

In his remarks before the show, one of the PwC accountants had said PwC’s relationship with the Academy Awards is testament to the firm’s reputation in the market for being “a firm of integrity, of accuracy and confidentiality”.

When billions of dollars worth of financial auditing and legal-advisory services flow through your offices each year, it’s important to reassure clients that your firm is diligent, detail-oriented and accurate. So when a representative from PwC couldn’t keep a couple of envelopes straight at the Academy Awards, it’s way more than an embarrassing flub. It’s a symbolic hit to what the firm’s brand stands for.

Input versus Output. A modern workplace dilemma.

It’s been a long Tuesday morning at the office, and you’re hanging for lunch. Time has dragged, and it’s just one of those days when you’re feeling “meh”. You don’t have any meetings in the afternoon, you’ve spent the morning mooching around and not achieving much, and you keep thinking how you’d love to take the afternoon off and go see that new movie everyone is raving about.

Sadly your employment contract forbids this – you know, the bit on page 8 that says “office hours are 8.30 am to 5.30 pm with a one hour break for lunch”. Not that you are literally required to ‘clock-in’ and ‘clock-out’ of work like a factory worker – unless you are a factory worker. These days the 8.30-5.30pm rule is more self-policed, and should you have the audacity to take off at 4.45pm you’ll get incredulous looks from your co-workers as you make your way to the elevator with your bag over your shoulder. Plus a few “bring your sandwiches and make a full day of it tomorrow” comments.

My point is that the whole emphasis in workplaces is on input, quantity, and the number of hours worked. I get that in an industrial workplace that’s kind of important. People who work in a factory doing the same task over and over will get more done if they work 8 hours than if they work 4 hours. But what about thinkers? What about designers? What about creators? What about a person who’s output is in no way related to the number of hours they work? But they are still working in a place that has industrial rules, and that is both misplaced and restrictive.

Let’s focus for a moment on output. Output has nothing to do with time whatsoever because the goalposts have shifted. I don’t care how or where the people who work for me spend their time. I just care about their output. If their output is awesome, and it took them less time, then good on them. And if seeing a movie on a Tuesday afternoon gets your creative juices flowing a little more, and improve your output, then go see a movie.

The immediate problem that arises here is that of timesheets. Most service providers, especially companies who work in the advertising and marketing sector, charge their clients by the hour. That’s how they make money. And that’s the BIG problem. Clients need to pay thinkers and creators for the value of their ideas, not for their time – for their output, not their input.

The “Just Do It” campaign allowed Nike to increase its share of the North American domestic sport-shoe business from 18% to 43% from 1988 to 1998. In dollar terms their business grew from $877 million to $9.2 billion in worldwide sales. Now I don’t know who came up with the tagline, “Just Do It”, and I don’t know how long it took them either. But I bet Wieden+Kennedy didn’t charge Nike by the hour.