Jim Walsh

Crisis professionals know that a crisis usually occurs at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. There are many case studies demonstrating this and airlines and transportation organisations factor it into their crisis management plans.

As well as coming at an inconvenient time a crisis can come from an unexpected source or from an activity, that on the surface, carries no danger.

In his book ‘Just My Type’, (an excellent read for anyone in the communications industry who has a love of typography), the author Simon Garfield, tells the story of how an apparently straightforward promotional activity almost became a doomsday scenario for a French organisation.

Garfield says that in the second week of January 2010 the unfortunate people at HADOPI, the French government agency charged with the promotion of copyright protection on the Internet, woke up to a marketing disaster so huge and absurd that they may not have believed it was actually happening.  The typeface they had chosen to promote their campaign on posters, film and all other communications, which was called Blienvenue, turned out to be something they had no right to use.  They couldn’t have licenced it legally either, because the font was an exclusive custom font designed for France Telecom.

When the HADOPI campaign was unveiled the similarity with the France Telecom typeface was spotted by a designer who had worked at the type foundry where Blienvenue was created 10 years earlier.  His tweet was picked up and word spread among the design community like wildfire and then into the mainstream media in France and surrounding countries.

The designer for HADOPI claimed that the logo, which was unveiled as the official logo, was only intended as a draft and had somehow been subject to ‘erroneously digital manipulation’. Three days later the agency announced that it was in a position to present its other, proper version.

Was it a genuine mistake or had there been a volte-face after it had been exposed?   As Burson-Marsteller and Facebook discovered (see WalshPR Inperson Blog 16 May ‘Smear attempts are not representative of PR work’) in this age of instant communication when bloggers get their teeth into an issue the truth eventually surfaces. In this case French bloggers discovered that the official HADOPI logo had been registered for official (i.e. not draft) use six weeks before its launch. They also found that the second ‘proper’ version was rush-ordered from the foundry on the day of the first unveiling.

Presumably there is a legal case winding its way through the French justice system but the lesson is, take nothing for granted if you want to avoid a crisis.