Yesterday morning Netflix employees walked out of the offices in Los Angeles, and a much larger crowd of people who do not work there stood on the sidewalk with them. There were signs. One counter-protester held a sign that said jokes are funny. It was on every feed I follow before ten.
I have watched a lot of brand crises from inside strategy rooms. This one is a different species.
The usual crisis arrives from outside. Someone says a thing about you, a room convenes, the room produces a statement, and the statement is aimed at people who were never going to read past the headline. It works more often than it deserves to.
This one started inside. Ted Sarandos wrote internal memos defending the Chappelle special, both were public within hours, and by this week he was telling Variety he screwed up in how he said it. That was not a communications failure. It was a positioning failure that communications got handed afterward.
Your employees are not a stakeholder group you brief. They are an audience with a distribution network, and they know things about you that your customers do not.
Three things I would put in front of any executive team watching this.
One. There is no internal channel. There has not been one for years, and pretending otherwise is how memos like these get written. Write everything as though it will be quoted, because it will be quoted, generally by someone who is quoting it correctly.
Two. The argument you make inside has to be the argument you would make outside. Netflix says publicly that it stands behind creators, which is defensible and which plenty of people accept. The written internal position was a far larger claim about whether what appears on a screen causes harm in the world, and the company was not prepared to defend that in daylight.
Three. Discipline delivered during a disagreement about values converts a content story into a labor story. Different reporters. Different half life. Nobody prices that in.
Write everything as though it will be quoted, because it will be quoted, generally by someone who is quoting it correctly.
Here is the part that gets lost. Much of Netflix's brand over the last decade was built by its own people saying, publicly and unprompted, that it was a good place to make things. That asset is not on any balance sheet, and it does not depreciate on a schedule. It just stops.
The quarter will be fine. Squid Game is still the biggest thing on the planet. But the people who built that reputation are now a documented source of counter-evidence, and no statement fixes that.
I once spent two agency days on external messaging for a company whose employees had already told the truth about it on Glassdoor. We never opened Glassdoor. That was the engagement, in a sentence.