The Paltrow/Astronomer Credibility Gap

Forbes

01-08-2025

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During a recent Coldplay concert at a football arena, their video cameras, one of which is known as a kiss cam, captured the CEO and Chief People Officer of Astronomer, a $93 million AI software company, in a romantic embrace. The moment quickly went viral, accumulating 120 million views on TikTok alone. In the fallout of what became known as #Coldplaygate, both senior executives resigned.
When corporations encounter such public relations disasters, they rush into a crisis communications strategy. When Johnson & Johnson learned that someone had slipped cyanide-laced capsules into Tylenol bottles that killed seven people in Chicago, they reacted by immediately recalling the product from all the pharmacies and issuing a national warning to customers. By taking full accountability, Johnson & Johnson was lauded as a role model and went on to become a case study in business schools.
Astronomer chose a different approach. They retained Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds's public relations firm, Maximum Effort. Reyolds enlisted Coldplay's frontman's ex-wife, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, to create a video intended to offset the crisis. The Wall Street Journal reports that 'Paltrow's video quickly went viral, garnering more than 36 million views on X and more than 540,000 views on YouTube' in its first few days.
In the video Paltrow says, 'Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones.' To the first, 'OMG! What the actual f?' she responds with a description of Astronomer's data workflow technology. And to the second, 'How is your social media team holding?,' she responds by pitching attendance at the company's upcoming technology conference. The Wall Street Journal article observed that she was 'humorously sidestepping the scandal.'
Attempts at humor in business has always been unwise because business people are not professional comedians—even professionals' jokes bomb. That risk is compounded in our increasingly globalized world where any audience is likely to composed of diverse cultures with vastly different senses of humor.
Worse still, by not answering directly and jumping to a positive statement Paltrow did what is known as 'spin,' a strategy often attributed to politicians with disparagement.
Johnson & Johnson's action enabled them to recover the market share they lost during the crisis. Astronomer's video clip had some positive reactions that differed with the Journal's opinion, but only time will tell how it will fare.
The best advice for a crisis—or for even lesser challenges—is to answer every question asked by every audience. You can decline to answer in few select instances (for example, questions about competitive or classified information, or litigation or rumors) but for every other subject, you must tell your audience just what they want to know. This is known as ' quid pro quo' or 'something for something.'
Your answer must also take responsibility about the crisis or challenge. Never evade or avoid. Once you do, you must go beyond your accountability and add what actions you are taking to correct the crisis or challenge—the equivalent of Johnson & Johnson's recall of Tylenol bottles. Johnson & Johnson also went beyond the recall to develop a safety cap and seal that has since become the pharmaceutical industry standard.
Three simple but vital steps to be transparent: Be accountable. Offer a solution. Put it into action.