1. Neutrogena has a decision to make this week
Last Thursday, Neutrogena joked its way out of the Tate McRae ad. Disclaimer: this is a new story to me. Neither the ad nor the singer made it into my algorithm. If you missed it too, it's the one where the wipe never touches the singer's face. They came back with an animated pack of makeup wipes with the caption, “It’s time to come clean.” The internet loved it. Capturing a viral moment isn’t easy for a brand. It was genuinely good work. Either they’ve got a great media monitoring system or a great social media manager who caught it.
Hayden Panettiere died on Sunday. She was 36.
Separately, a clip from May started circulating again. In it, she says Neutrogena tried to end her contract in 2015 after she talked about her postpartum depression on live television. That’s her account. Neutrogena has never responded to it, in May or since.
Staying quiet made sense in May. It doesn’t now. A brand that showed on Thursday that it can respond in a day doesn’t get to be slow on Monday.
Do they say something this week? I think they have to. Tell me if you disagree.
2. Vishal Garg got fired by the board that gave him his job back
This name comes straight out of the 2021 pandemic archives. He’s the Better.com founder who fired 900 people on a single Zoom call in December 2021, the one that started the whole genre. I’m honestly surprised we don’t call them Better.com firings, the Kleenex of Zoom layoffs.
He apologized for “mismanaging the execution,” took leave, got an executive coach (so he says), and was back as CEO in about a month.
This month the board fired him. He’s calling it a boardroom coup. He’s hired Alex Spiro, and he’s offered to work for $1 a year to get the job back.
The apology ended the news cycle nearly five years ago. It didn’t fix a single thing the board is pointing at now.
Do you remember this story? And was that 2021 apology the start of a rebuild, or just a reset button? I have an opinion. What’s yours?
3. A CEO denied replacing his writer with AI, then said he wished he had
On August 11, Stella Sacco posted on Bluesky that she’d been the lead writer on Saber Interactive’s Rideshare “Stimulator” and got replaced partway through by ChatGPT. Saber denied it. They hadn’t replaced her or any writer with AI, they said, though they were using AI in the game.
Then CEO Matt Karch talked to the press. He accused her of breaking a confidentiality agreement, said she’d been replaced by “someone more talented,” and added that in retrospect he’d “frankly, have been happy to replace her with AI,” because AI is “programmed to be honest.” Oooooof.
Naturally, he made a worse one about himself.
On August 15, Sacco posted that Karch had apologized to her privately, “unreservedly for the awful way he spoke about me in the press.” Around the same time, the Steam page quietly picked up an AI disclosure.
He insulted her in public and apologized in her inbox. The only reason anybody knows he apologized is that she told them. None of this surprises me. I’ve seen moves like this plenty of times
Was that a real apology if the person he wronged had to be the one to announce it? I have thoughts.
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