Evan Nierman On Surviving Cancel Culture, Handling PR Nightmares & Giving a Ted Talk | DSH #193

I've never had on a PR crisis person before on the show.

So Evan Nierman, walk me through how you got involved in this industry.

And so the first seven years, I was actually working in politics and advocacy.

You know, we live in a time where cancel culture is rampant.

Johnny Depp scenario, eventually, you know, he was canceled.

He lost his opportunity to star in certain films.

Welcome back to the show, guys.

Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

Got an interesting guest for you guys today, Evan Nierman.

Hello, Sean.

Yeah, I've never had on a PR crisis person before on the show, so I'm excited to dive into your world.

Happy to chat about it.

I'm glad you haven't had to rely on us for our services in the past.

Yeah, not yet and hopefully never, but you know, with the following, it comes problems like that, I think.

Indeed.

Yeah.

So

walk me through how you got involved in this industry.

Yeah, well, I spent the first 15 years of my career in Washington, D.C.

So that's a place that's pretty well known for having its fair share of crises.

And so the first seven years, I was actually working in politics and advocacy.

And I was working for a great organization, amazing people, fantastic culture.

All of a sudden, faced with a crisis situation.

And they brought in some outside experts who are crisis PR practitioners.

Since I was the in-house guy, I worked with them.

I saw the way that they managed the situation, that they guided the organization through.

And I said, you know what?

This is what I got to do next.

So shortly thereafter, I left that first job.

I went to work for a high-stakes and crisis PR firm that just did that.

And at the time, I knew that I loved the type of work.

I liked the clients, but I hated the way that we acted as a firm.

I wasn't one of the equity shareholders in the firm.

And I was thinking to myself at the time, one day I'm going to have my own firm.

We're going to do things the complete opposite of the way that firm was doing it.

And that's then what I've been doing for the past 12 years at Red Banyan.

Man, you think differently because most people would get anxious dealing with the stuff you deal with.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, it's hard to explain.

People ask me all the time: how do you live in a state where there's constant pressure, where the stakes are high, one wrong word could ruin someone's financial future?

right and I would describe it as almost a state of flow for me where the higher the stakes the more intense the more we have to be on target on point for the client the more my pulse kind of slows down wow and I just get super relaxed and so I feel like I'm I lose track of time and I'm at my best in the midst of the highest stakes situations.

So you're calm under pressure.

You're like MJ out there.

Well, I would never go so far as to compare myself to MJ in any any way, shape, or form, but it's a good aspiration to one day be the MJ of Crisis PR.

Nice.

Have you ever seen some PR nightmares where the client never recovered?

It was just so damaging that they just never made a comeback.

It happens, mostly when they didn't call us.

And so it's kind of their fault they got what they deserved.

Yeah.

Which instances I'm joking about that, by the way.

Partially, right?

Sometimes they

look, the worst kind of client to have is the one that doesn't want to listen to advice and that thinks that he or she knows better.

And so, you know, what I explained to my team is you can't want it more than the client.

And so if the client retains us, they're relying on us for our expertise.

We've done this before.

This is our world.

Our job is to provide the best possible counsel.

It's not to force them to take our advice.

So if they choose to take it and it works out great for them, wonderful.

But if unfortunately they decide they don't want to go along with what we're saying or they ignore us or

at the end of the day, it's their lives.

All we can do is all we can do to try to steer them straight and help them.

There's been some big brands under scrutiny lately.

What did you think of the recent events with Bud Light, with Balenciaga, with those companies?

Yeah, well,

every day there's a new scandal.

There's a new company under fire.

I think the Bud Light one was super interesting because, you know, we live in a time where cancel culture is rampant at the moment.

And cancel culture, for those listeners who aren't aware, I think most people are, it's this attempt to deplatform, to destroy, to take down someone whose views you don't agree with.

And what's interesting about Bud Light is in that situation, Bud Light, it's typically the people on the political right tend to call lots of things cancel culture.

On the political left, they like to pretend like cancel culture doesn't exist.

And with Bud Light, you know, Bud Light stepped right into it.

They did a marketing campaign.

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Headlong into one of the most contentious hot button issues in America, having to do with the trans rights, et cetera.

And they, I think they really lost sight of who their core customers are.

Kind of a, you know, Bud Light's been known for generations as a blue collar guys, beer.

And I think that they just weren't thinking about the implications of what they were doing.

And the biggest problem that they had, and this happens with crisis PR all the time, is

the initial crisis can be damaging.

But if you don't manage it properly, in fact, if you botch it, you can make things infinitely worse.

And that's exactly what Bud Light did.

So rather than deal with the crisis head on at the at the moment when it was happening, when it was still perhaps within their grasp,

they blew it.

So, you know, they'd already pissed off one

core group of people.

And then when they gave this kind of mealy mouth corporate speak statement after the fact, they didn't win over anybody else.

And then they ended up alienating the people who were with them.

So it ended up being a lose-lose.

Right.

Now, do you think it's necessary after a crisis to make a statement?

Or do you sometimes think silence is better?

It all depends on the situation.

In most cases, you're better off saying something.

There's a concept that we talk about at Red Banion a lot called press the truth.

And the basic idea is it used to be we lived in a world where you could afford to say nothing.

You could keep your head down and wait for the storm to pass.

Think about it.

People got their news from network television, newspapers.

If someone didn't happen to catch it in the news, it's gone.

But this is the age of the internet.

So the internet never sleeps.

The internet never forgets.

Someone's going to find what you've done, what you've said.

And so it's going to live forever.

So it's incumbent on both brands, corporate clients, nonprofits, individuals to fight for your reputation and to engage.

So if you end up in a crisis situation, you can't afford to just go quiet and to say nothing.

Because by the time you finally decide you're going to say something, you may have already seen your livelihood demolished.

Yeah.

What was that actor, Johnny Depp?

What did you think of that whole situation?

Because he had to stay silent for a long time, right?

And then he finally got through court, got his message out there.

Yeah, Johnny Depp is an example that it's actually, we're having this conversation at a time where there's been what I think is a perfect follow-on to Johnny Depp, and that's Kevin Spacey.

So in the

Johnny Depp scenario, eventually, you know, he was canceled.

He lost his opportunity to star in certain films, and he was destroyed reputationally for a time by these allegations from his former partner.

Now, in the end, Johnny Depp was cleared in court, and he's been able to catapult right back into his career.

Similarly, Kevin Spacey, who literally today was cleared on nine counts of assault in a court in London, for six years, Kevin Spacey's been persona non grata in Hollywood.

Wow.

His show got canceled.

He wasn't getting parts.

His reputation destroyed.

Nobody wanted to work with him.

He was forced to wait until he was exonerated.

Six years?

Jeez.

That's crazy.

That's a long time.

He lost a lot of money.

He did.

And, you know, what price can you put on your reputation?

And so the opportunity costs that he missed out on.

And so what people need to understand is in the era of cancel culture, the allegation alone can be enough to destroy someone.

Wow.

Yeah, Jonah Hill.

Okay, Jonah Hill.

That's one where he's, this is the rare white whale situation where I actually think he's doing the right thing by not saying anything right now.

Yeah, Yeah, because I think this is largely a manufactured crisis.

Okay.

He's not in a real crisis right now.

I mean, the biggest crisis is that he has really poor judgment when it comes to his love partners because his former girlfriend took all of their intimate conversations and their texts, put them out on the internet for all the world to see.

Are people allowed to do that?

It's, I mean, legally, did she cross any lines?

I don't think so.

I'm not an attorney.

Okay.

But certainly it's bad form.

I don't think any of us, if we were in a relationship over an extended period, would want to see all the text messages aired, you know, for the whole, all the world to see on this.

It's not even like it's bad.

It's just kind of embarrassing.

You know, there's a private part of your life that you want to keep private for the most part.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And so that's why Jonah Hill, I don't buy that he's in crisis at the moment.

I don't think so.

If you actually read what he said in his texts to her, I don't think it paints him as this misogynistic, controlling guy that that was the case that she was making.

And this is what people have to understand:

the facts are often very different from how the media portrays a scenario.

So you have to be willing to dig a little deeper.

Don't just read the article that says Jonah Hill is in trouble because he had all these tweets that have finally come to light.

Go read the tweets yourself, and maybe you'll find that your take is not at all what the reporter thought.

What are the most common common things you see that lead to clients or companies to get canceled?

Well, for people, it's to do or say stupid things on social media.

So there's actually two very simple things that you can do to prevent about 90% of crises, and that is to share with care and post with purpose on social media.

If you do that and you don't rush to just, without a filter, air your thoughts to the entire world.

If you think about how's this tweet going to age?

What am I saying here?

Does this

put me in the light in which I want to be viewed by society?

Does this advance my goals, my business, my organization?

If the answer is no, or if it's mean-spirited, spiteful, attacking someone else, then just don't do it.

And that's the easiest way.

to prevent yourself from having a major cancel culture incident.

And the biggest way to prevent just a personal crisis overall is just, it's very simple.

Don't take naked pictures of yourself.

Oh, man.

They get leaked every time.

Once you send that out, you've lost control.

Right.

And we see it all the time where people, they just don't think.

Yeah, yeah.

They get excited.

They're in the moment.

They let that photo fly.

Didn't that happen with Bezos?

Yeah, that was a weird one because it was actually the brother of his partner who apparently

was involved.

and

it was a talk I don't know the details and I haven't been texting with Jeff to get either his photos and I certainly haven't been texting his partner either but at the end of the day you know we've counseled a lot of people who have run into trouble because of the

yeah

or inappropriate relationships with people other than their wives right that's that's one that always uh yeah typically doesn't end well stop sending guys please just stop it they're not worth the risk Definitely not.

Because even a hacker can get in.

You never know how they get leaked, but it happens.

It does.

So it seems like the more famous you get, the higher the chance you have of being canceled almost, right?

Like the risk just seems higher.

I'm going to challenge that a little bit.

Okay.

Okay.

So on the one hand, you may have a higher risk of being canceled because you're a bigger target.

Yeah.

You're living in the public eye.

Our society loves to build people up and then take them down.

So I think you're living

in a fishbowl.

You're under the microscope when you're living as a public figure, a celebrity, an influencer, an athlete, et cetera.

But ironically, the people who are at the biggest risk of being canceled are everyday people, average citizens.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm trying to understand how.

Yeah, and why.

I'll tell you.

I'm glad you asked.

The answer is, think about a celebrity.

They've got a lawyer.

They've got an agent.

They've got a publicist.

Maybe they have a crisis PR guy sitting there helping them.

They have accountants.

They have financial advisors.

They have a whole team of people who are invested in their success and want to see them succeed.

Plus, they have a built-in following.

They have fans.

They have supporters.

They have people who are going to be with them no matter what, through thick and thin.

If you're an everyday person, small business owner, entrepreneur, just someone who's working at a company, if you you get attacked in the press and all the cancel vultures, that's what I like to call the people who love tearing other people down and they feast off of other people's pain, those people have no one to turn to.

And so they are at a marked disadvantage.

They often don't know what they should do.

They don't know if they should say anything, if they should say nothing, who to call, etc.

And so for the average everyday citizen, by the time they figure out what's going on, it could be too late.

They've lost their job.

And unlike a celebrity who maybe a studio will still want to work with them despite the controversy, they figure the person's marketable.

If you're an everyday person and when someone Googles you, all they see is allegations that you're a bigot, a racist, a misogynist, you name it.

And it's pages and pages deep on Google talking about how terrible you are and you got fired.

by your by your employer

you're radioactive that's interesting yeah i i never thought of it that way but they have no defense team none no recourse and i've seen people over the last couple of years who a video of them goes viral and people rush to judgment they call them names they call them karens they expose them they attack them they give death threats and there's no process by which these people have a fair opportunity to set the record straight.

In a matter of days, they get fired, their online online reputation eviscerated.

And in many cases, these people are devastated.

Yeah.

I mean, Kevin Spacey himself, back to him today, you know, he spoke briefly to the media and he said, these allegations came out and I was destroyed.

My reputation absolutely obliterated.

I had no one.

And that's what happens.

It's a very,

very emotionally, it can even be physically, psychologically damaging thing.

Oh, yeah.

To get canceled.

Especially for that long, six years.

Jesus.

Some people get canceled forever.

That must be awful.

Yeah, I know someone who was a client of ours, and I tell her story in my book, The Cancel Culture Curse.

She was actually the reason, the impetus that I wrote the book.

Wow.

This is a woman who's walking down the street, sees a guy chalking outside of a home.

She knows it's not his home.

She comes up to him and she asks him what he's doing and says, do you live here?

She actually knows the guy who owns the house.

Oh, okay.

The guy whips around.

He's got his camera on.

He films her and he says, you know, why don't you call the cops?

You got a problem?

How do you know I don't live here?

So he's very combative.

He captures this thing and then he posts it online and he, and the ending part of his video is, that's Karen and she's going to call the cops on me.

And then he pans over and he was chalking Black Lives Matter outside the home.

Now, she wasn't attacking him because he was a person of color.

She wasn't attacking him because of his message.

She actually says on the video, your message is okay.

You just shouldn't write on private property.

Yeah.

But it didn't matter.

The media jumped on the story.

He hired a PR firm.

They pushed it all over the world.

Days, people are saying, look at this horrible, racist San Francisco Karen.

She targeted a guy for chalk drawings of Black Lives Matter.

And what happened to her?

All of her business dried up.

Lost her company.

A gang of people came to her house.

What?

Yes.

They were ringing her doorbell.

They had weapons

to punish her.

Yeah, that's terrible.

Three and a half years later, she still gets death threats.

Wow.

All from that one video.

From one video that was out of context, and she didn't even have the chance to set the record straight.

That's nuts.

Have you ever seen a cancel culture attempt go the other way where the person or company was able to rechannel the energy for their benefit?

It's a great question.

I think there's a really timely one that's, and this is is the sad part.

There's so many damn examples of cancel culture that I could come back on your show next week and there would be a whole fresh set of examples.

I'm thinking of just in the past week, there's a country singer named Jason Aldean.

Yeah, yeah.

So there was an attempt to cancel him based on a song of his and it backfired terribly.

Really?

Yeah.

He's now number one on the country music charts.

What was the song about?

He's got this song called Try That in a Small Town.

And it's a song that he says is about celebrating downhome American values, patriotism, decrying lawlessness, respect for the flag is something that he's saying is an important thing.

And he comes out with this song in May.

No one says anything.

And then in July, he puts out a music video to accompany it.

And the video is filled with footage of protesters.

confronting cops, smashing storefronts, burning American flags.

And immediately the media seizes on it.

And there's just this whole avalanche of stories that come that say, this is a, this is a song that promotes vigilanteism.

It's a pro-lynching song.

Whoa.

Because he, part of it was filmed outside of this courthouse where decades ago, someone was, I guess, lynched.

Wow.

And so they ascribe this motive to him.

And they say, oh, this is an

pro-lynching.

It's promoting violence.

And

country music television immediately pulls it from the rotation.

They cancel the video.

And what ends up happening is he comes out and he does something that's really important when people come to cancel you and you haven't actually done anything, which is he refused to be canceled.

And he said, this is what my song is about, not this nonsense that you're saying.

I'm proud of what I've written here.

There's a reason I wrote this song.

My message is different from how you're communicating about it.

And now, again, number one on iTunes.

Crazy.

So he'll benefit from this whole thing.

Yeah.

Do you think there are certain people that are uncancelable?

A couple.

Which names?

One person who is definitely uncancelable, and this is not a political statement in favor or against, is Donald J.

Trump.

I was thinking of him, too.

He is uncancelable.

He could do crazy things and get away with it.

He has done crazy things and gotten away with it.

That's a fact.

Can't deny that.

You can't deny that.

And Trump supporters themselves would say, yeah,

he's done and said some crazy stuff.

I mean, that's part of the reason why he has a following and people like him.

But, you know, Trump said it best himself.

When he was in the middle of the campaign, he said something along the lines of, you know, I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I'd still be popular.

I'd actually get more votes.

Wow.

And he was right.

That's crazy.

What about Tate?

Tate?

Andrew Tate?

He's cancelable.

You think so?

I think so.

Look, there's a core constituency.

He's got his supporters who are going to be with him no matter what.

So there will always be some people who are with him.

Yeah.

But I think his image has taken a pretty significant hit in the wake of the arrest and the allegations.

And so he's a controversial figure.

But there's a whole generation of people who are influencers.

They have massive audiences.

And at the end of the day, they're harder to cancel because no matter what, they're going to have a critical mass of people who are on their team.

I think there's certain crimes that are really hard to come back from.

There are.

And I'll tell you a crazy story, which is I took a client on several years ago that I think even most crisis PR firms would never have said yes to.

And that's one of the challenges when you're a crisis manager is you have to decide.

A phone call comes in.

You have to think to yourself, you're asking probing questions.

You're trying to understand what's happened here.

And you have to make a determination.

Is this person telling me the truth?

Does he or she actually regret if they've done a mistake?

Are they trying to hire us just to paper over or to cover up crimes or bad behavior?

But I got this call, and the man was being accused of the worst crimes you can imagine.

So short of, what do you think is something heinous that would be hard to come back from?

I'd probably say trafficking or child

stuff like that.

Okay.

Bingo.

He was accused of

children.

Right.

Okay.

Not just children.

They were, he was the head of the soccer federation in Haiti.

Wow.

And he was accused of impregnating young girls.

So in short order, there's a whole slew of media stories attacking him.

He gets booted out of his position.

The governing body of soccer, FIFA, bans him for life.

And he, the whole time, is saying, these are false allegations.

It didn't happen.

There's no proof.

This is an attack by my political enemies.

Wow.

Here we are several years later.

And similar to Kevin Spacey, it went through judicial processes.

He's had four different trials, different aspects.

He's prevailed every single time.

Wow.

But yet, he lost his job.

His reputation built over eight decades.

This is an older guy.

Eight decades?

Yeah, this is an older guy.

Now, his legacy has been besmirched forever, and he actually had to leave Haiti Haiti due to threats on his life.

Leave his own country?

Yeah.

It's terrible.

Man, that's scary, like, to think that that could just happen without any evidence or anything.

Well, that's why cancel culture is so dangerous.

It's the opposite of what we claim to value as Americans.

We believe in freedom of speech.

We believe in due process.

Cancel culture is the opposite.

Totally.

Think about what a jury is supposed to do.

When the jury goes in the jury box, they're supposed to have not drawn any conclusions.

They're supposed to keep an open mind.

They're not connected to the case.

They're not supposed to be advocates one way or another.

And they're supposed to have just an open hearing of the facts

before they draw a conclusion based on evidence.

Cancel culture is people hear about something, they form an opinion instantly, they share it with the world, they jump on the bandwagon, they decide guilty is charged.

Let's execute him even before they've heard the evidence.

Yeah, 100%.

I'm not a fan of it.

And it's toxic on social media too.

It spreads so fast like wildfire.

Yeah, and it doesn't have to be that way.

And so, you know, my hope is that we're going to move towards a kinder, gentler internet eventually.

There's no reason for people, I understand why a lot of people do it.

They want likes and shares.

And also they want to feel like they're an activist or they're involved in the hot story of the day and that they're doing something, they're fighting.

Some of these people who get involved, I think they actually have misguided but noble aspirations.

They think they're doing something good, but people forget there's a real person on the other side of that attack.

And if you go after someone and you try to make him unemployable and you get him fired, well, guess what?

Maybe he has kids at home who still need school supplies and food.

You've just ruined their lives, not just his, because you thought it was fun to take him down online.

Yeah, people don't even think about that, too.

All right.

It's been a pleasure, Evan.

Where can people find out more about what you're doing?

Yeah, thank you.

They can obviously visit redbanyan.com.

They can go to canceledculture.com or find me at Evan Nierman on Twitter.

Also, I've got a book that's just been released.

It's called The Cancel Culture Curse.

If people want to check that out, it's filled with ideas of how to survive cancel culture, but then also how to avoid getting canceled in the first place.

That's great advice.

A lot of people with a following, or not even a following, just in general, like you said earlier, need that advice.

Yes, indeed.

All right.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Thanks for coming on, Evan.

Peace.