Embracing Marketing Mistakes

Ben Branson invented an entirely new drinks category from his kitchen. Then a £1 million hole nearly took it all away.
In this episode, Ben explains how Seedlip, the world's first non-alcoholic spirit, grew twice as fast as the industry standard, and how that growth hid a working capital gap that surfaced mid-flight to Australia. He breaks down how the team traded their way out of the crisis in six months through relationships rather than financial engineering, why he launched straight into Selfridges instead of starting small, and why he chose to publicly embrace a review that called his product "witch's piss."
You will learn how to spot the hidden financial risk behind fast growth, why polarizing feedback beats indifference when you're creating a new category, and why genuine relationships with customers and suppliers are the real safety net in a crisis.
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A growth lead at a fast-scaling startup admits the truth: his old company cut a 30-person marketing and sales team, and sales didn't change at all.
In this episode, Hector Hughes explains why a year of growth work, SEO, conversion rate optimization, and endless website testing achieved almost nothing, and how that failure led him to build Unplugged, a digital detox retreat business now serving thousands of guests across the UK and Spain. He breaks down why "tracking everything results in tracking nothing," why most companies never answer the one question that matters, and how stepping away from constant distraction became the foundation of his marketing philosophy.
You will learn how trackable tactics replace the harder work of positioning without anyone noticing, what happens to your mind and body after three days offline, and why authenticity beats competing on someone else's terms.
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Rand Fishkin built Moz into the biggest name in SEO. Then he raised $30 million in venture capital and watched it nearly break him.
In this episode, Rand explains why raising venture capital was his biggest mistake, how it led to a battle with depression and his resignation as CEO, and why he is happier, healthier, and making more money today running SparkToro, a company a twentieth the size of Moz. He also breaks down why traffic has always been a vanity metric, how to build a new analytics framework for the AI and zero-click era, and why your boss is wrong to give Google credit for your branded search traffic.
If you're interested on  how to track marketing influence beyond click-based analytics, why website traffic is dropping while revenue holds steady for many businesses, and why brand and positioning remain the most durable marketing assets in the AI era, then this episode is for you.
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A top YouTube strategist just revealed the single habit that cost him over 100 million views and then live-critiqued our own channel's titles on air.
Leroy te Braak works with creators and brands doing hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. In this episode, he breaks down why most businesses get YouTube wrong, reveals his IDEAL framework (Idea, Data, Execution, Analysis, Longevity), and explains exactly how a 70-year-old soil-products founder grew from 30,000 to 100,000 subscribers with revenue up 60% month-over-month in just a few months.

Chris and Will discuss why "packaging" (title + thumbnail) matters more than the video itself, why CTR and average view duration are misleading metrics, how to test thumbnails without wasting your best ideas, and why even videos with 100 million views still get revisited and improved.
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Behavioural science meets marketing mishaps back in episode 46 with Phill Agnew. As a specialist in testing what really works in ads, Phill exposes how well intentioned campaigns often push audiences in exactly the wrong direction. 
He unpacks the idea of negative social proof, where highlighting how many people binge drink, steal from parks or ignore donation prompts can actually signal that this behaviour is normal and acceptable. Phill shares stories from university alcohol campaigns, an American park full of disappearing petrified wood and even the familiar fundraising banner on Wikipedia to show how this plays out in the real world. He then explains how a small shift in wording, audience framing and local proof can dramatically change response rates. 
For marketers who love data but still rely on gut feel when choosing headlines, this conversation offers a smarter way to use social proof without accidentally encouraging the behaviour you are trying to reduce. 
Here's the link to the full episode 46.

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