Endeavour fuck-up stories: How do you almost ‘wreck’ a campaign?

“Oh wow, we fucked up big time!” It’s a phrase most companies would rather not say out loud. Although making mistakes is something completely normal, we generally don’t like to talk about it. This is a great pity, because making mistakes (flatly put: fucking up) is the best way to learn. That is why, in this blog series, we share our fuck-ups with you. And yes, of course, we also tell you what we learned from them so you might avoid these mistakes. This time, a fuck-up with a hefty price tag attached.

Fuck up: Demolishing the most important (and expensive) part of a campaign.

Lesson: Don’t think in problems but in solutions. And whatever you do; never, ever give up!

This is what happened: Our campaigns are often characterized by their ‘going all-out’ approach. But sometimes we fly of the handle just a little bit. 

Colleague ‘Derek’ (real name is known to our editor) says: “For a campaign in the car industry, we let a number of influencers drive on the circuit with a racing driver in a couple of very fast and especially very expensive cars. We had borrowed them especially for this job, confident that nothing could go wrong.” However, the unthinkable happened; even before a single shot of the racing cars was made, a driver drove one of the cars full speed into a wall! Fortunately with no influencer in it and no injuries, but the €125,000 car was totaled in one fell swoop. Derek: “I thought I was going to lose my mind! How on earth are you going to tell this to the owner! Also the driver was completly frantic. It was a mess!”

After the initial panic, Derek showed what he is good at: creative thinking. He saw that the owner of the racetrack was behind the wheel of a car a little further down the track, pulling all sorts of impressive manoeuvres. After a lengthy discussion, he convinced the good man to get behind the wheel of the remaining car. “That man turned out to be a really amazing stuntman. He tore, skidded and drifted like it was nothing. Our cameras were working overtime.” 

With this footage and the footage of the influencers’ inside the cars, he managed to turn the end result into a more than awesome campaign.  “Later we found out that the cars we borrowed were insured, but not against damage caused by racing on a circuit track. That kept me awake for a few nights, but in the end we solved it properly. I still love the fact that we managed to turn a disastrous situation into something that actually turned out to be even more awesome than we initially intended. When something goes wrong, you can give up, but you can also just think outside the box and solve it.”