How do you put coin out of your scandal? Software company Astronomer seemed to suffer great reputation damage when his married foreman Andy Byron was filmed by a Kiss Cam in embracing with his head of personnel policy Kristen Cabot on July 16 during a concert by the band Coldplay. When they appeared on the screen, Byron dived away and Cabot turned around, after which Coldplay-foreman Chris Martin said: “Or they have an affair, or they are just very shy.” The first turned out to be the case, the couple resigned.
That ‘Kiss Cam scandal’ was good for a week of memes and opinion pieces about privacy and surveillance, sex in the workplace and social media hypes. But Byron’s successor at Astronomer, Pete Dejoy, soon sounded excited about the global name recognition “on which few companies, let alone a start-up in our small corner of data and AI, can match.”
And so Astronomer launched a video under the ironic title on Friday Thank you for your interest in astronomerin which actress Gwyneth Paltrow (52) appears to be hired as ‘temporary spokesman’. “We are delighted about the sudden interest in data workflow automation,” she says with Pokerface. Paltrow announces to answer the most frequently asked questions, after which „OMG! What the Actual F—“In the picture appears and she Nezelt as a business drone:” Yes! Astronomer is the best place for Apache Airflow. “
Media empire
This cannot be cheap: Paltrow is famous and wealthy, in particular because of her media empire Goop, which promotes a spoiled Californian lifestyle and embraces any esoteric trend. Not without humor by the way: in 2020, Paltrow vast ‘vagina candles’ with its supposed intimate scent. She brought that as ‘punk marketing’ to tackle female shame about intimate scents. What makes Paltrow particularly suitable as a ‘temporary spokesperson’ is her status as a famous ex – from Brad Pitt, but especially from Coldplays foreman Chris Martin, from whom she separated in 2014 after eleven years of marriage. She sold that on goop as’Conscious Uncoupling‘, a spirual example for humanity – and perhaps for Byron.
Astronomer, a niche company with more than three hundred employees, undoubtedly realizes that you should not rub in a spot and that self -mockery can sow doubt about competence and ethics. But what helps is that many people experienced the Kiss Cam as a sad. The poor Byron and Cabot are both fifties, top managers and in the eye of love in love. That is at the same time a risk factor: it is possible to strike up as a staircase.
However, the makers found the right tone of implicit irony: marketing experts praise the video, which was viewed 675,000 times in three days. Until last month, an astronomer clip at most attracted three to six hundred hits.
Yet it rarely happens that a company dares to beat Munt through its own scandal. In 2015, candy company Reese’s laved itself in a viral storm when Christmas chocolates in the form of a cherry tree A manufacturing error More on turds of Christmas man faithful moose. Jokes about that went viral, after which Reese’s countered with photos of his shapeless sweets under the hashtag #alltreesarebeautful. The chocolates became a collective object.