Witnessed Trust: A PR Crisis, a Pop Star, and a Camera Walk Into a Stadium

I'm Nola Simon, and this is the Hope and Possibilities podcast. I wanted to talk today about trust, and I'm going to actually use pop study culture, which honestly is a work case study, to illustrate the point that I want to make about trust. And you'll be familiar with this. The issue with the Coldplay Kiss Cam went viral all around the world. And unless you're just a person who doesn't pay any attention to anything on the Internet, you likely know about this. So for those who don't happen to remember it, it was last year, a CEO and a HR representative went to the Coldplay concert and ended up canoodling on the kiss cam. And Chris Martin basically said, either they're having an affair or they're really shy. The CEO dropped the woman like she was a hot potato. His eyes were wide. He ducked out a frame like he was just afraid he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't. And the woman covered her face and then turned away from the camera and just tried to hide and look as small as she possibly could. Anyways, I'm sure you've seen the memes. There were millions of liters of ink spilled about it worldwide. And. And basically what ended up happening is the company involved, Astronomer hired Maximum Effort and Ryan Reynolds to really do an ad. And what they did was hire Chris Martin's ex wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, to talk about the incident and really, like, deflect the situation. Both parties left their employment and it settled down thereafter, but it got huge amounts of attention. But what's really fascinating at it is it's not the memes, it's not the media attention, it's the way that trust plays through the whole incident. Right? And so it's come up again because Kristin Cabot is the HR woman and she's written a book, and she was actually interviewed on Oprah. Now, whether you think that writing a book to draw attention to this again, when it all settled down is a good idea or not, that's irrelevant. What's interesting, though, is again, the trust aspect. So at the heart of this, whatever the situation between these two people was, whatever the truth is, whatever the reality is, the impression was they were having an affair that was inappropriate. So inappropriate in many different ways. Meaning that they were cheating on partners. Meaning that he was the CEO and she was the HR person, he was her boss, and she was responsible for administrating ethics and behavior in the company. Somewhat of a professional breach on both ends. How that accountability played out is a very different Thing in the media. So Chris Martin basically didn't say much after the fact. I think he made a few brief comments, really, to say, we're going to continue with the kiss cam. It's not intended to be catching anybody. We don't call it a kiss cam. And I send love to these people and hope they're doing well. Basically was the upshot of the brief comments that he made after the fact. He didn't leverage the moment. He didn't do interviews, he didn't book any press. He. He stayed away from it. The only blowback that he actually got was from Liam Gallagher, which was on Brand, because Liam is blunt and to the point and picked up on the fact that, honestly, the kiss cam, even though there might be disclosures on your ticket that you could be caught on camera, it's a surveillance thing. I mean, Liam said it in his own basically way, which was, we don't care. We're not catching you on camera anywhere. You can be with whoever you want. In the typical Liam Gallagher fashion, I'm trying to keep a clean rating on Apple, so I won't repeat it. So, honestly, Chris Martin comes out looking pretty good. Liam Gallagher has a really good point. So, again, from a pop culture point of view, they're accurate observers of what happened. The interesting thing is the way that Astronomer chose to handle the situation. They obviously got advice that all publicity is good publicity, and there was an opportunity to leverage their name and get brand recognition from the moment. And that's where Maximum Effort comes in. In Ryan Reynolds. He has reputation for seizing the moment and creating advertisement that leverages trends like Peloton was the first ad I remember having Ryan Reynolds and Maximum Effort involved. And it goes viral. Right. In part because he's got those celebrity connections, but in part because they're really sly, Timely observations of what's happening in the moment. It's really leveraging that TikTok sensibility of act fast. Right? So they hired Gwyneth Paltrow, who's Chris Martin of Coldplay's ex wife, to do the interview. Now, you have to wonder. And Kristin Cabot made this point when she was actually interviewed on Oprah. Neither one of those two people need the money now. They also have had a really rough year. Ryan Reynolds wife Blake Lively was involved in a lawsuit that had really negative consequences and pr, and he was dragged into that. And then Gwyneth Paltrow, the week that this happened, I think it was the week or the week before she was having an unauthorized biography published of her. So it's not that they needed the money per se. It's it served as a distraction to shift their own PR and online conversation that was happening around their own personal brands. Right. So it benefited Astronomer because they needed their conversation shifted, but it also benefited Ryan Reynolds and Gwyneth Paltrow to shift the attention and leverage that particular moment so that what was popping up in the media and the storytelling that was happening around all of them really meant that the public was not paying attention to everything else that's maybe going on in their lives and work. Reputation is everything, especially in Hollywood. Right. People who carefully manage their Personas pay a lot of attention to how this is done. Now, the interesting thing about Astronomer choosing to spend millions of dollars on celebrity ad placements is they never really talked about what they were doing to manage their staff and the concerns that might have been legitimate from staff members about how that type of power imbalance between a CEO and a chief people officer might have impacted daily operations at the company. Can you imagine being an employee who's in the middle of performance reviews and being told that you can't get a raise because they've just spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign and had to find a new CEO because of this lapse of judgment and leadership? Or if you had filed a complaint with hr, was that properly assessed? Or did this proximity and close relationship that wasn't properly disclosed and subject to ethics review, did that impact anything? I have no idea if any of these things were happening, but it's reasonable to think that possibly their employees were thinking that way. Because again, who holds leadership accountable? Who's aware of what's going on, and how does that play out? And what impact does that have for the company's trust in leadership going forward long term? Because, again, these people who are impacted and caught in the moment are gone. But there's a new CEO, presumably they hired a new chief people officer. How do they manage the impact to trust internally? And that was never disclosed. And that's what the interesting part of it is. Millions of people saw this. Like 70, 80,000 people, however much fits into that stadium, saw it in person. Now, did they have an accurate read on what was going on? It looked like it, but Chris Martin framed that either they're having an affair or they're really shy. So which one do you believe? He's got a lot of influence, and his framing of that maybe is what stuck with people, even though he chose to be silent after the fact. So getting back to the Oprah interview, which came up this week or last week. What was really interesting is Oprah basically shamed Kristin Cabot for not responding to Gwyneth Paltrow. So there were competing claims. Basically. Gwyneth apparently told Oprah that she thought that they had consent from both parties to really do the ad. But Gwyneth Paltrow has a reputation of being intentional, conscious uncoupling. Does anybody remember her divorce announcement from Chris Martin? She runs a business. She's a CEO. Like, she's an actress, of course, but she's also the CEO of a very large international comfy cool. Now, whether you respect her, whether you trust her brand, whether you. That's all incidental. But to think that she's actually out there signing contracts to represent companies and to collaborate in partnership with a company like Maximum Effort and Ryan Reynolds without doing due diligence and ensuring that she's got consent from the affected parties, that raises the question, for somebody who has a reputation built on intention, is that reasonable? And then Oprah surprising her guest with this fact that Gwyneth also complained that she never responded to her personal, private email and basically shaming her for not responding was fascinating. Like, Oprah is picking sides here, and it is her celebrity buddy who. Who's getting the support, not the person being interviewed in that particular moment. So what does this mean in terms of discernment? Because this is really what it comes down to. There's a lot of distraction in this story. You've got celebrity names, you've got pop stars, you've got 80,000 witnesses, you've got memes, you've got gossip, you've got the reality. Apparently they were separated. They weren't having an affair. That was inappropriate. Do you believe that? I don't know. I still don't know. Only their spouses and themselves really know the answer to that. There's a lot of distraction in this story. And then you add in the journalists, you add in the PR experts and the lawyers. There's a lot of filters and a lot of layers to this. So how do you discern? If you're in the stadium and you saw it with your own eyes, you had a physical reaction. You have a definite distinct opinion on what's happening. If you saw it online, how many filters did that go through before it actually got published? And you saw it. Where did you see it? Did you see it on TikTok? Did you see it on the New York Times? Did you see it on the London. What are the British papers anyways? Whatever. Reputable. Every paper in the world pretty much carried some version of it because it's the type of story that's going to drive clicks just because there's pop stars and celebrities involved. So how many filters and what trust signals are you picking up on when you read this story? Do you trust Oprah because she's been interviewing for 30 years and has a reputation of centering her guest and really being supportive of the person that she's interviewing in that particular moment? Or do you trust the HR person who lived the experience but isn't a recognizable name and has had the unfortunate luck to get caught and reacting badly? There's a lot of power asymmetry in this story as well, too, right? Who do you trust and why? What's the context and how much time do you really spend on it and what do you think it really means? And this is where I think it's worthwhile examining these kind of things as a case study, because those are the bigger questions is whatever you think about what's going on with other people in your life, whether they happen to be celebrities, whether they happen to be your neighbors, your relatives, your cousins, your aunts, your uncles, nobody actually knows what's happening in somebody's life unless they tell you. And even then, they might not be telling you the whole truth. So there's a certain level of discernment where you trust and you decide the context in which you trust. For example. Right. I've been working in my husband's construction business since 2008. That's almost 18 years. I've known him three years longer than I've been married to him. So I've been married to him for 28 years, but I've known him for 31 years. I have an extensive understanding of construction and how home renovations work. I can talk a really good game about how things get done. I watch hgtv. I'm not the person that you really want to walk in your house with a jackhammer to move beams that might actually cause your home to fall down. Because I don't understand the structural load of how the roof is held up. You know, that beam doesn't look like it's load bearing. Let's take it out. Oops. In that context, you want to trust my husband, you don't want to trust me? Because again, I could sound really confident that I don't have the skills or the ability or the background or the liability insurance to really do that work that I'm talking about. That's an example. Right? So what are the trust signals that you pay attention to and this is where things are changing with AI. I recently built a website which I'd encourage you to check it out. It's www.everydayfuturism.com still roots through nolassimon.com that is the one that I'm moving towards. I'm connecting those brands so that you see that now. I did use Claude AI to build that website. I am not a programmer, I am not a coder. I am capable of learning what I need to in the moment. Do I feel like I understand how to build a website? No. Am I happy with the output? Yes. But I would not build it for somebody else. It was a test to myself about what I'm capable of achieving in the moment when I put my mind to it. I would not sell those services now for one, because honestly, I'm not sure what the future of that looks like for people in terms of building website for service. But also if it were to fail and break, I wouldn't be able to diagnose it. I don't have the expertise to back into it. And this is the challenge of how you trust when you trust what expertise you trust. I was able to actually build a website. I built my last website using Squarespace. I'm using tools to facilitate the outcomes that I'm trying to achieve. I would not consider myself, I would not label myself as a website builder. That's not an expertise I feel confident in selling. I have a university degree. It's only a Bachelor of Arts. I majored in math. I minored in history. I took it all in French. What I have is an extensive ability to learn. I took my certified financial planner course. I have taken courses in futurism and applied that. I have the ability to learn what I need to know and I have really broad domain knowledge and an ability to really achieve really good outcomes by being intentional, thoughtful and resourceful. That's what I sell. If you were going to ask me what my competitive edge is right now, it's not my certifications, it's not my past history, it's not who I worked for. What my competitive edge is my ability to actually take action, trusting that I have the skills and expertise to be able to adapt and adjust as situations are uncertain. And I can help people work through that as well too. And this is in part what my podcast does, is let's look at situations that don't necessarily have clear answers and see if we can think through it. And that's that discernment, right? What do you pay attention to? What is flux? What really matters and what is really going to build the future of life, of work? And what is the trend? What's the through line that's going to take us through to a better future of work that is going to be meaningful and rewarding? That's really what the goal is. And so I wrote a case study. It's on my new website. There's a writing section if you go there, it's called Witness Trust. And the subtitle on that, it's labeled as a case study. And I called it, what did I call it? A case study. A PR crisis. A pop star and a camera walk into a stadium. So sounds fun. A little bit like me. I like my pop culture, but at heart it's a work crisis. And that's why that example is a useful case study to look at for both the future of work, but also the stories that we build around work and how trust fuels it all. Anyways, I'd love to know what you think. Read the article, let me know what you think on the podcast. Rate review. And it's a lot more interesting conversation when you participate. That's the fun part. And I almost never get anybody coming to me about questions I ask on the podcast. I don't know if this medium, I don't know if it's hard to get a hold of me. Nobody's ever really giving me feedback. But I'd love to know the review and what you think. So it's nolaolasimon.com or you can write a review on any podcast platform that you listen to. Anyways, thanks. Finding yourself in orbit.