In partnership with
{{rh_onboarding_line}}
Over 70,000 social media professionals are reading this newsletter today!
Welcome Back to TWISM’s Autopsy Series!
In this series, we examine the biggest actual marketing deaths worldwide. While others made expensive mistakes, you, along with 70,000+ professional TWISM readers, are learning from their failures for free.
Keep in mind that these weekly autopsies could save your career.
Together with Attio: 🤝 Know your customers to make more money.
Introducing the first AI-native CRM
Connect your email, and you’ll instantly get a CRM with enriched customer insights and a platform that grows with your business.
With AI at the core, Attio lets you:
Prospect and route leads with research agents
Get real-time insights during customer calls
Build powerful automations for your complex workflows
Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.
✨ Want to advertise in TWISM?
Reach 70K+ social media pros • Top-Rated Service • We optimize your copy
🔬 The Main Autopsy: Tourism New Zealand’s “Everyone Must Go” Crisis
Patient Details
Brand: Tourism New Zealand (TNZ)
Campaign: “Everyone Must Go!” Australia push
Budget: NZ$500,000 initial + NZ$300,000 additional boost = NZ$800,000
Cause of Death: Clearance-sale phrasing collided with a national “people are leaving” storyline.
Time of Death: Feb 17, 2025 (backlash/ridicule hit peak coverage).
What They Intended
Tourism NZ and the government wanted a punchy urgency cue to nudge Australians to “book now,” filling “spare capacity” in airlines/hotels and accelerating recovery toward pre-pandemic tourism levels.
What Actually Happened
The tagline was mocked as “clearance sale” language, exactly the wrong metaphor for a destination brand.
International outlets amplified the irony: “Everyone must go!” landed during a period of heightened conversation about New Zealanders leaving the country.
The phrase became meme-fuel, with critics reframing it as an apocalypse slogan or a “bathroom queue” PSA.
Social sharing did what social sharing does: it replaced TNZ’s intended meaning (“urgency to travel”) with the public’s interpretation (“urgency to evacuate”).
The controversy became part of the campaign’s earned media, whether TNZ wanted it or not.
The Numbers
NZ$800,000 total public budget for the push (NZ$500k + NZ$300k boost).
7,981 additional visitors reported between March–May 2025 (per Tourism NZ stats cited by RNZ/ODT).
NZ$22 million estimated incremental visitor spend (minister’s estimate).
6,804 visitors directly attributed to bookings via the campaign, plus 1,177 from indirect conversion activity (as reported by ODT via RNZ).
Early coverage framed the campaign as being ridiculed “widely,” including by UK/US media.
One media-intelligence snapshot reported conversation skewing more negative than positive (17.5% positive vs 38.7% negative).
Timeline of Destruction
Feb 16, 2025: Campaign launches; cost to taxpayers stated at NZ$500,000.
Feb 17, 2025: Critics and listeners pile on; “clearance sale” comparisons go mainstream.
Feb 17, 2025: International ridicule accelerates via major global outlets.
Mar–May 2025: Tourism NZ stats later claim 7,981 additional visitors during the period.
Jul 23–24, 2025: Government calls campaign “a winner,” citing results and incremental spend.
Together with HubSpot: 🤝 Close more deals, now.
Close more deals, fast.
When your deal pipeline actually works, nothing slips through the cracks. HubSpot Smart CRM uses AI to track every stage automatically, so you can focus on what matters. Start free today.
🧬 Failure DNA Analysis
The Root Cause: “Inside-the-War-Room Framing”
Cognitive Bias #1: Framing Effect
The team framed “go” as go to New Zealand, but audiences framed “go” as leave / clear out / everything must be sold off. Once a frame takes hold online, facts become optional.
Cognitive Bias #2: Curse of Knowledge
If you’ve lived with the brief for weeks, “Everyone must go” can feel like a playful urgency hook. Outsiders don’t have your deck, your context, or your KPI spreadsheet… they have vibes and timelines.
Warning Signs They Ignored:
The phrase is identical to retail liquidation language (“everything must go”).
Launch timing overlapped with heightened public conversation about emigration/exodus.
Political opponents instantly supplied sticky counter-frames (clearance bin, toilets, etc.).
The tagline is meme-ready: short, absolute, and easily weaponized.
Why Smart People Made This Dumb Decision:
“Urgency” is a conversion drug. Under pressure to show quick wins, teams overvalue action verbs and undervalue public interpretation. The result is a classic autopsy finding: a healthy strategy that died from a single line of copy.
🎭 Myth Busted: “If They’re Talking, It’s Working”
The Myth: Negative virality is still virality; attention equals effectiveness.
The Reality: Negative word-of-mouth spreads fast and recruits additional storytellers. In a survey study, ~79% of consumers said they share negative shopping experiences with others.
Data Points:
84% of consumers trust recommendations from friends/family most (meaning bad WOM is lethal).
Review valence has a strong relationship with purchase intention (meta-analysis finding r ≈ 0.56).
~73% of social users say if a brand doesn’t respond on social, they’ll buy from a competitor. Attention without stewardship doesn’t pay.
Why This Myth Persists:
Because reach is easy to measure and trust erosion is slow to show up in dashboards, until it isn’t.
What to Do Instead:
Treat controversy like contamination: isolate it, measure it, and stop it from becoming the story.
🛡️ Failure Prevention Toolkit: The “Tagline Toxicology Checklist”
Before you ship a slogan designed to go viral:
✓ Context Stress-Test
Run the line beside current headlines about your category/country.
Ask: “What’s the worst plausible interpretation in 5 words?”
✓ Meme Immunity Screening
Try to remix your own copy into a dunk. If it’s easy, it’s dangerous.
Kill absolutes (“everyone,” “must,” “always”) unless you want backlash.
✓ Cross-Cultural Semantics Pass
Check for common phrases that already exist (“everything must go” = liquidation).
Validate with locals + outsiders (not just internal teams).
✓ Social Containment Plan
Pre-write response copy for the top 3 misreads.
Monitor sentiment + top quote-tweets for reframes in the first 60 minutes.
Red Flags to Watch For:
Your tagline can be mistaken for a warning sign, legal notice, or discount banner.
Critics can summarize the problem in a single screenshot.
The message fights a dominant public narrative (e.g., “people are leaving”).
Your defense sounds like “at least they’re talking about it”.
Screenshots save careers. Which failure lesson are you bookmarking?
Forward this to someone who needs to see it.
P.S. - Have a social media disaster story to share anonymously? Reply with "AUTOPSY" and I'll send you our submission guidelines.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…
Go BIG or go home!
~ Josh from “This Week in Social Media”
Was this newsletter forwarded to you?