Crisis Comms, Cheating CEOs, and Coldplay
What the Coldplay kisscam fiasco exposes about startup culture and comms
In one of my non-Spin Class jobs, I consult with startups who don’t yet have in-house comms or marketing people. Founders, especially in tech, are often reluctant to make early investments in “soft” functions like communications, GR, and public affairs. Their investors and boards demand aggressive timelines for delivering products to market, turning a profit, going public, or preparing for a sale. Because comms isn’t a revenue-generating business unit, it’s rare to see a start-up invest in bringing in true comms talent early - or, even if they do, empowering comms leaders as true thought partners and leaders on par with their counterparts in product, engineering, or strategy.
I always tell them its to their advantage to invest early in trusted comms leadership. The earlier you bring in comms talent, the more you train your product and engineering teams to view comms as a thought partner. The earlier you bring in comms, the more they contribute to your growth and strategy. Etc.
Last week’s Coldplay CEO kiss-cam incident, and the company’s halting, slow response to it can be an opportunity for other start-ups to take a hard look at how they’d be equipped to handle a similar situation. My guess: most startups would have a similarly halting, slow response.
The Coldplay concert was the evening of Wednesday, July 16. The video went viral almost immediately. The memes began in earnest on the 17th, and broke through to mainstream press later that day. On the evening of the 17th, a fake apology from Astronomer’s CEO went viral after being promoted by an imposter X account.1
The fake viral apology was only possible because there had been no official comment from Astronomer or its leadership. Astronomer didn’t release its own statement confirming that it was investigating the incident until Friday, July 18 - nearly two full days after the video first appeared online.
That’s communications malpractice. It’s also unsurprising.
Yes, some of this is beyond anyone’s control. It’s just too perfect for this moment - these two people (white, middle-aged, privileged), the setting (a motherflipping Coldplay concert, come on), and their dumb behavior all lead to the exact combination of high-drama/low-stakes that activates the Internet and turns a viral video into a rich memetic text about This Moment and Who We Are. When you enter this part of the ocean, your only real option is to ride the wave as best you can - and try not to drown fighting the current.
But there’s still a lot you can do as you’re trying to stay afloat. Any decent communications pro who has the trust of their internal leadership would have recognized the viral moment in the making on Wednesday night, immediately issued a holding statement, and set up a crisis response team. That didn’t happen.
I don’t know if Astronomer’s comms team is to blame for the company’s terrible initial response. But I suspect not. The more likely culprit: a company culture that doesn’t anticipate/plan for crises and doesn’t empower their comms team to lead when crises hit.
Fill the Void - Or Others Will Fill It For You. All a holding statement had to say is “we are aware of these reports and conducting an internal investigation.” There’s no reason in the world that this couldn’t have been issued Wednesday night as the video started to go viral. But by not saying anything, Astronomer left a void other actors started filling.
They were lucky it was just memes. A distracted leadership team is a sitting duck. Astronomer easily could have become a target for a whole host of other actors, including regulators and auditors, cybercriminals, or even hostile state actors.2
A holding statement, even a simple one-liner that simply repeats what we already know, demonstrates your authority. It buys you time and operating space.
And as the Boucher Rules say: when you don’t have results, talk process. You always have process.
Crisis vs. a Serious Problem. This video and its fallout matters a great deal to the families involved. The next impact rung out includes Astronomer’s employees and investors, and maybe their customers (although the nature of their work is inherently behind the scenes and not publicly branded - it doesn’t mean something to be an Astronomer customer, the way it means something for someone to they drink Bud Light or shop at Target).
But then it falls off an impact cliff. Because it’s high-drama/low-stakes, everyone is aware of it, but not actually impacted by it.
No one died. Law enforcement is not involved. There will probably not be public hearings, or a mass exodus of customers… if they can tie this episode off and move on to the next phase. That’s the distinction between a Crisis and a Serious Problem.
It’s really, really hard in the moment, when something feels absolutely catastrophic and world-ending, to be able to hear “actually, this isn’t a world-ending big deal.” That’s why, ideally, leaders have trusted comms advisors in their inner circles before a crisis hits: to help see that bigger picture, and navigate everyone to that next phase.
Use Someone Else’s Crisis to Refine Your Process and Standards. Everyone thinks that they know what to do in a crisis. But when confronted by a true communications crisis - especially one that goes viral beyond your typical audience - most people freeze and get stuck, at the exact moment when they most need to make swift decisions based on imperfect information.
No one outside Astronomer knows its internal approvals process for external comms, or its history with crisis response preparedness. But I’d be willing to bet that even if the CEO hadn’t personally been involved, they had a cumbersome and unnecessarily top-heavy approvals process. Astronomer is a small company, with under 500 employees (according to LinkedIn). Start-ups at this size typically are stuck in their early processes where the CEO approves most or all significant decisions. And the higher-profile a crisis is, the more likely order and discipline are to break down.
In a comms crisis, you have to make tons of decisions and move out swiftly. You can’t run every statement by your CEO (especially when the CEO is the subject of the statement, and therefore may have objectives outside of than the health and reputation of the company). You have to have clear lines of authority and delegation. And you have to have the ability to assess in real time what’s working, what’s not, and where you need to pivot.
If you’re working in comms at a startup, use this opportunity to make a point to your leadership about your own internal crisis readiness. Do you have holding statements for various scenario categories pre-drafted? Who needs to approve release, and how do you reach them (and who’s the back-up)? On what platforms do you release these? Who are your designated spokespeople, and how will they get their information?
If you don’t have solid answers to these basic questions, the Coldplay CEO episode is a great opportunity to ask your leadership to let you run a crisis simulation or tabletop. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a CEO/Head of HR affair exposed on Jumbotron by a bemused Chris Martin. I would personally not use a scenario this bonkers for a tabletop exercise because they’d immediately break my #1 rule (Live Within The Exercise, i.e. don’t waste time questioning its parameters and rules). But it’s a good reminder to:
Anticipate the Nonobvious. The nonobvious crises are often the most damaging. Most big companies today have a playbook for a data breach, or if/when Trump posts about them on social media - but not an investor being exposed as a domestic abuser, an internal Slack channel getting leaked to a reporter, or catching an employee spying for a foreign government (all situations I’ve dealt with).
Crises are inevitable. What crises you’ll have to deal with, and in what order, is completely unpredictable. Smart companies understand that and empower their comms teams to plan accordingly.
Everything is About Trust. Astronomer is a data and AI company. It created a product that, according to its website, is “the orchestration-first DataOps platform built on Apache Airflow®, empowers your team to build, run, and observe data pipelines that just work, all from one place.”
In other words: this company sells reliability, efficiency, and trust.
All of those things took a massive hit last week: both because of the incident itself, but more worryingly, because the company’s response to it. Can we trust the leadership team and board when their CEO is caught doing something so foolish? Are they this sloppy in other ways? If there’s a data breach, would Astronomer take 48 hours to issue a company response and alert its customers?
Astronomer eventually partially harnessed the problem by firing its CEO. But that outcome was inevitable, and waiting four days for it only constrained the company’s ability to tie off this chapter and change the narrative. From a corporate management standpoint, four days for a CEO transition is swift. From a crisis communications standpoint, it’s a geologic era.
If I were in house at Astronomer now, my main question would be “how do we rebuild and shore up trust after this?” Today’s LinkedIn post by their interim CEO gets at this. Importantly, that strategy will look different depending on who the audience is. But it will be a big part of Astronomer’s next chapter. Which leads to:
Comms Roles On Boards. When looking for new board members, start-up and corporate boards tend to de-prioritize communications expertise relative to financial acumen and other more MBA-coded career experiences. But that expectation is getting increasingly challenged when trust and corporate reputation, not just profitability and earnings statements, are driving your external narrative.
Does your board have someone whose career is built on earning and managing reputation? Does your board understand virality, and how information travels and jumps audiences in 2025? I’d argue there’s no more critical corporate function right now, certainly none where a fall can be so precipitous or the risk comes from so many different threat vectors.
Making The Most of A Moment (Authentically). This episode is now an inescapable part of Astronomer’s public profile and company DNA. It’s simply too viral, too of the moment, too rich of a memetic text to be packed back away with data, talking points, or customer success stories.
Ignoring it isn’t a realistic option, but neither is allowing this incident to define their company. Their eventual X statement was a decent start at walking that line: acknowledging that whole bunch of new people are now aware of Astronomer, but bringing the focus back to their key audiences (customers and employees). That’s perfectly solid PR. As is their interim CEO’s LinkedIn post today, which acknowledges the weirdness of the moment but pivots quickly to talk about their offerings and mission.
If they want to, they have an opportunity to go further in embracing this moment. I don’t buy “all press is good press” as a comms strategy, but as a marketing moment? A little more so. Just don’t go too nuts with it. In a situation like this, you basically get one shot to nod at the memes with from your owned channels. Any more looks thirsty. Be authentic to who you are: in this case, a successful SaaS start-up with a proven track record of excellence.
When the time is right, a little humor and humanity can help close this chapter out. Like, when they hire a new full-time CEO she could briefly update her X bio with “not a Coldplay fan.”3
If Astronomer can choose that moment well, they can make this but one chapter of their bigger story. And for the rest of us, laughing at them: make your team answer, honestly and specifically, how they would do better in the same situation.
I had to go back and check to see if Trump had posted about this incident in his Truth Social meltdown last night, and it appears not (yet)? I’m honestly surprised. There’s something telling there about what his information sources are these days… it seems like the kind of thing he’d normally be weirdly all over, no?
For like 24 hours max. See earlier re: thirsty.