Hollywood A-listers help turn a company scandal on its head

To take control of a scandal that turned a previously obscure data-operations firm into a household name practically overnight requires some skillful cunning. And, it turns out, the Hollywood A-listers Gwyneth Paltrow and Ryan Reynolds.

On Friday, Astronomer – the technology company whose married CEO was caught on video at a Coldplay concert canoodling with a human resources executive at the firm who is not his wife – capitalised on the heightened attention when it released a video response featuring Paltrow as a “temporary spokesperson”.

Gwyneth Paltrow has been hired as a spokesperson for the company in the news.Credit: AP

As in: Paltrow, the ex-wife of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, and the woman who introduced the world to the concept of “conscious uncoupling”, became the face of a niche tech start-up with roughly 300 employees operating in “a small corner of the data and AI world”, as the interim CEO described it in a LinkedIn post.

“Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones,” Paltrow says directly to camera in a video posted on Astronomer’s social channels.

The first question then appears on-screen: “OMG! What the actual f.”

“Yes!” she responds, a hint of knowing and exasperation in her voice. “Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.”

She adds: “We’ve been thrilled so many people have a new-found interest in data workflow automation.”

Viewers were given a peek at what Astronomer actually does, a move that “was quite clever, I must say”, said Michel Pham, a business professor and marketing strategy expert at Columbia Business School. For companies that abruptly find themselves embroiled in scandal, he explained, using humour to capitalise on the spotlight requires a deft touch.

It’s little surprise that the tongue-in-cheek ad has since ricocheted across the internet. On Instagram, the video has so far received over 64,000 likes. (For context, Astronomer’s previous post, about a recent data conference in Berlin, had received 135 likes as of Monday afternoon.) On YouTube, the ad has been viewed more than half-a-million times.

The video was produced by Reynolds’ production company, Maximum Effort, the company confirmed in an email statement, but it’s unclear who reached out to whom or when, exactly, the company was hired. Neither Astronomer nor representatives for Paltrow responded to requests for comment.

Reynolds founded Maximum Effort in 2018 and has since cultivated a reputation for creating snarky advertising and viral content that the actor calls “fastvertising”.

“A lot of times we’re working really quickly, working with limited budgets, but we’re also acknowledging and playing with the cultural landscape,” he said in a 2022 interview with The Washington Post. “We try to create marketing that’s moving at the exact same speed as culture is.”

When companies face scandals that are related to their core product, like a mechanical failure in a car, for instance, there is little space for humour, Pham said. “But in this case, this was about an affair and most people, I think, understand that affairs happen and that it doesn’t necessarily compromise what this brand does.” That gave the company leeway to play along with the conversation.

Pham pointed to an example in Britain where, in 2018, fast food chain KFC had no chickens to serve its customers because of supply-chain disruptions and was forced to close hundreds of outlets across the country. Days later, instead of an apology statement from an executive, the company took out newspaper ads with a simple message. “FCK” – an anagram of its own name and a thinly veiled obscenity – followed by a tagline: “A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It’s not ideal.”

“They were pretty candid and they acknowledged the problem,” Pham said.

Another example of a brand turning infamy into a positive came in 2019 in a move again orchestrated by Maximum Effort. When exercise equipment manufacturer Peloton released a holiday ad showing a man giving his wife a bike, the 30-second spot was swiftly criticised for being sexist and dystopian. Within hours of its release, Maximum Effort reached out to the woman in the commercial, who came to be known as “Peloton Wife”, and a few days later, she starred in an ad that showed her drinking Reynolds’ gin with her friends, toasting “to new beginnings”.

In 2014, Prince pulled off a similar marketing twist, or what comedian Dave Chappelle described as a marketing “judo move”. In 2004, Chappelle had played Prince, dressed in a “Purple Rain”-era ruffled suit, in a sketch on Chappelle’s Show.

When Prince released the single Breakfast Can Wait almost a decade later, he used a picture of Chappelle dressed as him. “You make fun of Prince in a sketch and he’ll just use you in his album cover,” Chappelle told Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon.

“What am I going to do? Sue him for using a picture of me dressed up like him?” he said. “That’s checkmate right there.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.