I have been to a lot of PR and marketing events. After 25 years in the industry, speaking at CIPR conferences, sitting on panels, teaching at university, and hosting 15 events at Prohibition this year alone, you start to think you have seen it all. Then you walk into The Outernet near Tottenham Court Road and realise you absolutely have not.
The Calling was hosted by Jon Evans, the brilliant force behind the Uncensored CMO podcast, in partnership with Little Dot Studios. I headed down to London the night before, met up with my old mate Rax Lakhani for a couple of beers near Oxford Circus, and got an early night because I had a feeling the next day was going to be a big one.
I was right.
Sharing your screw ups at work
Sarah Ellis, co-founder of Squiggly Careers, opened her session with about twenty minutes on mistakes. For obvious reasons, that is a subject close to my heart. She read out real “mistake moments” from her own team’s Slack channel, completely unfiltered and very funny. It was a brilliant demonstration of what psychological safety actually looks like in practice rather than on a corporate values poster. The fact her team openly shares their screw ups at work is both refreshing and a little bit terrifying. I loved it.
Bees, honey and the highlight of the day
Nils Leonard from Uncommon was the standout for me. I never thought I would meet anyone who could swear more than me, but Nils managed it. A few things he said that I am still thinking about days later:
“Bees don’t waste time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.” Stop trying to convert the people who do not get it. Go and find the bees.
He also delivered a piece called Our Uninvited Guest, a beautifully written reflection on AI in the creative process. How it sleeps with our greatest poets, sits in every writer’s room, every edit suite, every jury, and hides in your blinking cursor. Possibly the best framing of AI in creative work I have heard all year, and he delivered it with a shrug.
His advice to become a collector of beautiful, unusual, old and new things, of mannerisms, of headlines, and crucially of evidence of your own success for the days when things get boring, is something I will be carrying with me for a while.
Credit where it is due
The whole thing was a credit to Jon and Kerry and the rest of the team behind it. The production quality, the speaker lineup, and even the swag bag, which included a Tony’s Chocolonely bar I devoured the next morning, were all genuinely top class.
I have been in PR for a quarter of a century, and this is the first wider marketing event that made me think: I wish I had been going to these for years. If The Calling comes back in 2027, I will be there. And I might even manage to speak to more than five people next time. 🤣
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
