“There’s a lot of people here to watch us expose our nightmares,” said Andy Baker, SVP/group creative director for National Geographic Channels, looking out across a room so packed people were sitting on the floor.

Baker sounded surprised by the turnout, and maybe a little nervous as well – a combination of awe and trepidation befitting of Thursday’s Conference 2013 session titled “Horror Stories: Nightmare Campaigns and How They Were Turned Around.”

Hosted by Chris Sloan, president and executive creative director of 2C Media, the session also featured Brian Dollenmayer, EVP of on-air promotion and marketing operations for Fox Broadcasting Company, and Lara Richardson, SVP of marketing for Discovery Channel. Each told fascinating, often hilarious stories of wildly different types of nightmarish campaigns, though all shared a common thread in that they had a happy ending.

Dollenmayer started things off with a tale of Fox’s marketing efforts that had to be shuffled around the near-violent feud between high-profile American Idol judges Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj. At the rivalry’s apex, Minaj told a particularly poor contestant, on camera, he had “better range than Mariah.” To which Carey responded, “Don’t make me come over there and do some hair and makeup.”

Following the incident, Carey fretted about Fox creating promo around the moment. Dollenmayer assured her it would not. Then he went on vacation, and returned to discover that Fox International Channels had run a promo on Australia’s Network 10 entirely focused on the catty on-air moment. From there, things got worse when a study was released showing that people found Minaj’s on-air personality annoying and Carey a diva.

To combat this PR disaster, Dollenmayer and his team created promo that redefined Carey’s image as sweet and caring, and embraced Minaj’s image as a ball-busting firecracker. They then used the power of editing to create a spot that showed Minaj’s infamous insult, then cut to Carey laughing in a totally different city, creating the illusion that all was fun and games on-set.

National Geographic Channel’s Baker told the nerve-wracking tale of the campaign for the network’s show, “The ‘80s: The Decade That Made Us,” for which Nat Geo’s marketing team had virtually no actual approved footage of the iconic decade to work with other than about 12 seconds of a Jane Fonda workout video.

Still, the network managed to create some promo that popped, by cleverly cutting together recent interview footage of ‘80s legends such as Fonda herself and Steven Tyler talking about the past. It also, thanks to inspiration from the international branch, managed to put together one of the cleverest promos of the year, a dazzling bit of Rubik’s Cube choreography clicking and clacking through the decade in question. When the show aired, “it got a really nice rating for us,” said Baker. “Hopefully I won’t be back here next year talking about a nightmarish campaign for ‘The ‘90s.’”

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