I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
“Viral? It's gone viral?” I managed to stammer.
“Yes, sir,” she said, nodding.
“How viral?”
“Nuclear, sir. That blogger must have contacted someone at Salon Magazine, and one of their writers did a piece on it. Now it's all over Facebook, people are tweeting about it left, right, and center, and—”
I held my hand up to stop the chatty intern. “All right, all right, I get it. It's bad. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Take a seat over there, why don't you?”
The intern looked confused and borderline frightened.
“But sir, I'm just an intern, this meeting is for—”
“You had enough initiative to bring me this news without hesitating, so please take a seat over there. Pay attention and you might learn something useful.”
She nodded and scurried to an empty chair.
I looked out over the sea of faces staring back and on each one I could see the same expression: worry. They each knew about the tweet after I had interrogated them all. So they knew this was a crisis situation, and we had to do some serious damage control to keep it from escalating. Our reputation was at stake.
Something going viral that comes across as insulting or hate-filled toward a particular group of people had the potential to utterly destroy a company. If we didn't play our cards right, we could find ourselves in the midst of a firestorm of bad press, lost clients, and possibly even lawsuits.
I stood in silence for a moment, not quite knowing what to say and running through the situation over and over in my head. There had to be some way to deescalate the torrent of bad press that had already begun
I stood from my seat and faced the room. “You're my family,” I said in a tone of quiet but firm authority. “And whatever happens, I'll protect all of you. I'll take the rap for this myself if someone has to go down.”
It was what my grandfather would have said—and what he would have done.
“Perhaps nobody will have to go down,” piped a familiar voice.
Lilah.
Everyone turned to look at her. She was standing confidently, addressing the group. A surge of intense attraction billowed through my core.
“Why is that, Lilah?” I asked.
“Everyone is expecting us to back down, to cower, to grovel at their feet for an apology. Right?”
“I suppose they are.”
“Screw 'em. Don't apologize. We are a team, despite our diversity. I know if I were to ask all of you, you would each identify with various groups. That’s what makes us all such a great marketing team. Everyone here has a different background and therefore a different way of looking at things.
“We all know that quote was taken entirely out of context, but let's run with it. There's actually nothing inherently transphobic about the statement, even when taken out of context. Sure, it's a bit old-fashioned, but it says nothing about transgendered people at all. That's just what the politically correct fascists are reading into it.
“So, let's hit them with something completely out of left field. Let's not apologize. Let's run with the campaign exactly as planned—putting a heavy emphasis on the badass, male aspect of it. Let's make the ad campaign even more about a badass man's man than it was going to be.
“Let's show whoever is behind this that we're not going to be intimidated, that a bit of bad press and words taken out of context aren't going to knock us.”
“Are you sure about this?” asked one of my senior men from the back. “It's a risky card to play, especially considering the implications if it backfires.”
“I don't think it's going to backfire,” countered Lilah.
I looked everyone in the eye, individually, as I glanced around the room. Every one of them had contributed to the campaign that was currently being taken out of context and, like Lilah had said, we were a diverse group. That is how I knew her idea would work.
“And, I don't either,” I agreed. “In fact, I think it might just turn this thing around completely. It's a bold, audacious, and an entirely unexpected move. I think it's going to work.”
Murmurs of agreement started to flutter around the room. Eventually, everyone agreed that it would indeed be the boldest course of action to take and likely our best chance of making it through unscathed.