Power & Light – a Real Marketing Problem

Last night, hip-hop legend DZ Jazzy Jeff was in town to take part in a free concert event at the Kansas City Power &  Light District, on the KC Live! stage.  Its only been about 9-10 hours, but Twitter and the blogosphere have exploded with controversy over the event.  What happened?  Well, DJ Jazzy Jeff ended his show abruptly after about 30 minutes and left the stage.  Initially, everyone who was Tweeting about the event’s reaction appeared to be that P&L, in another racially-charged decision, had told Jeff he had to stop playing hip hop.  I RT’d one of those same comments last night, but my opinion changed when I got up this morning and read the Pitch’s Plog and the comments with it.  It seems there may have been an equipment/DJing issue and Jeff’s performance was potentially damaging the sound system.  They asked him to tone it down and he quit, according to some of the Plog comments.  Knowing nothing about DJing or sound systems, this sounds just as plausible as the initial reaction.

The more I think about it, however, I have a hard time believing Power & Light would schedule DZ Jazzy Jeff to perform, knowing full well he would attract the same hip hop crowd that was the center of the dress code controversy, and then kick him out for playing hip-hop.  I’m not a big fan of P&L; I avoid it as much as possible, but they’re not stupid.

What they are stupid about, however, is not making any kind of statement about it yet.  I got up, fully expecting to see an article on KansasCity.com with comments from Jon Stephens, president of the P&L.  But I’ve seen nothing so far.  They should have immediately gotten up on stage after Jeff left and explained what happened.  They should have been immediately crafting a press release and gotten it to every major media outlet in town, and they should have gotten on Twitter and doused the flames instead of letting them simmer all night.  Now, there’s no doubt thousands of people in this city that are swearing off the P&L forever because of this and it’ll be tough to overcome the initial anger.  Not smart for a district in desperate need of consistent business from as many people as possible so maybe, someday, they can cover their revenue shortfalls.

As marketing professionals in this age of immediate gratification, we need to be prepared to handle issues like these.  Ford Motor Company and its social media leader, Scott Monty, had a potential fire quickly extinguished late in 2008 thanks to their quick action via social media – see a great recap of it here.  Kansas City Power & Light has given us a great reminder how fast a problem can rise, if you don’t remain vigilent.

EDIT: More good stuff on this issue from Zachary Cobb, including video from right before Jeff stopped playing here.

EDIT 2: Finally, Cordish responds with what most of us probably expected – that it was an issue of sound, not one of “you can’t play hip-hop.”  Personally, I can buy their explanation but again, the problem is that it took them over 15 hours to respond – I started this blog yesterday and I’ve had over 200 visitors because so many people are fired up over this.  And even more reputation damage is done to P&L now.  See the full story on the Pitch Plog here.