I tried to go to sleep but I can't this whole thing is incredible.
As a person in corporate communications who has served time in the dungeons of rep risk and been tossed asunder the shores of crisis management, I know from shitshows.
I am, full Hideo Kojima stylez, BEWITCHED by the choices that Be On Cloud is making, and I could argue that there's a fascinating case study to be made by someone studying PR and crisis management, but not me, because I already escaped the halls of j-school and you can never make me go back.
I'd heard distantly that BOC had pissed a lot of people off by mismanaging some of their talent and fan engagement, which isn't difficult to imagine because marketing--which is basically lead/sales generation--is one of the hardest needles to thread for any organization. Also so many fandoms are absolutely batshit insane so like who the fuck knows what misalignment of the house of Jupiter had pissed everybody off. Don't @ me you know it's true.
But the first time I was like, "Oh BOC needs to hire an agency," was when the first round of controversy arose re: Build and some of his old tweets and comments that lead to his (first) hiatus.
The first rule of crisis comms is to shut the fuck up.
I would say almost 99% of effective communications is knowing when not to say anything at all. The human instinct is to explain, to argue, to justify; we hate being misunderstood, and it's amplified by about 6 million when you have an echo chamber of people talking about you and getting it--in ways big or small or debatable--wrong on some level. But truly, and I know there are a lot of you who are in this business with me who are nodding along, the number one most important thing I do in my job is preventing people from talking.
Despite your desire to be understood, you will not be understood. Firstly: you are not good at communicating; if you were, I would not have a job and there would not be a vast, multi-billion dollar industry built up around employing people like me. Secondly: your silence is powerful. It's your opportunity to recognize and benefit from the second rule of crisis comms:
Which is understanding that feelings are your enemy.
If you are having an emotional reaction to something--which we all do! we are human!--it is impossible to take an objective stance and see the full scope, potential ramifications, or identify the oftentimes painful next steps that need to be taken. I know this feels over the top, that if--for example--there is a natural disaster it should feel easy to lean into your empathy and kindness and say "oh let's support a bunch of charities." But that same impulse is going to lead you to realizing later that you gave $20K to a religious group that throws LGBTQ+ youth out onto the streets as part of your spray and pray approach to wildfire support, and then you've gotta call someone like me again, which nobody wants. This is the same position a lot of HR practitioners are in, but whereas they have the impossible job of firing people or navigating their compliant departure, comms has the job of sometimes having to do a live, public amputation of something or someone you care about to save the larger organism.
There are nicer and meaner ways to do this, and the tone of your reaction is just as important as what you react with, as is understanding as a risk management function the consequences of your silence, of any delay, of potentially moving on misinformation or incomplete data, and having a ruthlessly clear vision of the actual goal.
That's always the first conversation I have with someone on what is frequently one of the worst days of their professional career: what's the objective here? There's an ideal outcome, an idealized outcome, and what the actual imperative objective for the organization is. That objective is not always pretty, it often feels bad--but it's a controlled descent rather than a catastrophic disintegration.
Which is why if you are an organization where optics are important, it is critical to have the cold dead heart of someone in the communications discipline at your operating committee table. So while you are like, "Oh but Danny has worked here for 35 years and has a three-legged dog and he didn't mean to say that," someone like me can make all sort of sympathetic noises and then provide you the professionalized air cover to say, "That's nice, but also fuck Danny and fuck his three-legged dog. Cut him."
Like, if we engage in this exercise with BOC--what is their objective? What's the imperative at the end of this clusterfuck? In theory, for them still to be a successful production company, for their other remaining and newly incoming artists to have fruitful careers, for their future projects to be well-received, and for them to continue to cultivate lucrative sponsor relationships leveraging the rising fame and popularity of their stable of talent--right?
If that's the case, then the math on the current set of circumstances is painfully easy: regardless of how this ultimately lands, this is a person who has now twice exposed BOC to massive reputational risk. And because there are actually multiple people involved, distance yourself from all these other parties, too, in a clear, comprehensive way before it starts fucking your books.
And that's not an abstract thing, there are likely numbers behind this kind of thing. If you're a brand thinking about collabing with BOC's artists, even if they're not Build, do you want to be associated with a production house that continues to hang onto him? Or let's say he leaves but it takes ages and there was a whole circus before it happened, as a brand you have to think twice about your association with BOC. That's not just feelings--that's money, that's an existential concern for your organization.
And I'm aware that it's not great that none of this actually takes into account the so-called truth of what's happened. That's not really something that should or can be effectively litigated in the court of public opinion. Will you get shit if you cancel someone and it turns out they were innocent? Probably. But it's going to be a lot less shit than you'll catch if they aren't. It's all about risk management.
The fact that they are holding a live presser has me in transports. The fact that the accused and the accuser are both going to be present made me lightheaded. The fact that like half of BOC's people are in fucking Japan doing something and that the whole thing broke when the CEO was following Mile around Paris full Kris Jenner style has me in its unshakeable thrall. The fact that execs at BOC are engaged in active dialog with fans (!!!!!!) over social media (!!!!!!!!!) about this pending shitshow is UNFATHOMABLE to me. I would simply tackle phones out of peoples' hands! I would throw them into a river! EVEN BIRDIE FROM FUCKING GLASS ONION KNEW SHE WASN'T ALLOWED ON SOCIAL MEDIA GET OFF INSTAGRAM OH MY GOD. Even recognizing that there are profoundly different social and media expectations for Asian fandoms--live press events in response to significant events negative and positive are much more common in East Asia, I understand--this is such an absolutely unhinged deployment of what is a scenario where there are potentially real legal stakes involved. Truly I feel hashtag blessed to be witnessing the professional equivalent of a white guy in an infomercial at 3 a.m. failing to carry two plates at the same time.
I don't know anything about the Thai legal system, and I don't know any real detail about the substance of the very serious allegations that BOC and its artists and management are currently wrangling with, but I know this: they should shut the fuck up, and they should not let anybody who has a single emotional attachment to any of this make any of the decisions.
Also: they need to hire a crisis comms agency.
Genuinely the urge to go make a LinkedIn post about this in some professional group of PR people just to watch everybody start frothing is so intense but then I would fully experience that Lenny from the Simpson's situation of asking them all not to tell anybody how I live.
