What Ed Sheeran’s Macklemore controversy teaches us about modern day crisis management
For a long time, crisis communications was treated as a reactive discipline, brought in after a reputational blow to manage how preexisting decisions landed. But we live in a starkly different world from the traditional era of crisis management, where the media had tight control of what audiences saw and it was easier to control the message. With social media and the rise of cancel culture, the communications landscape has fundamentally shifted and any crisis can snowball into a crisis of values. Navigating a crisis today, or avoiding one altogether, depends far less on the wording in a statement than on whether an organisation knows what it stands for and has been acting on it long before the headlines arrive.
Few recent controversies illustrate this better than the one surrounding Ed Sheeran, whose attempt to remain ‘apolitical’ after Macklemore was dropped from Sheeran’s Loop Tour over pro-Palestinian comments, left him at the centre of a viral row about censorship and complicity, with boycott calls directed at the once inoffensive artist.
With stadium owners objecting to Macklemore’s continued participation in the tour and fellow musicians withdrawing in solidarity, Sheeran’s statements insisting that the decision to drop Macklemore belonged to the promoter and refusing to take a position did little to contain the fallout. By the time he delivered an emotional apology on stage in Philadelphia, read stiffly from a teleprompter, people were asking who on earth was advising him.
But as someone who has spent years working in crisis communications and reputation management, what interested me was how familiar the strategy underneath the questionable execution actually was. Sheeran’s statements drew on fairly traditional crisis comms advice that I myself have given in different contexts; establish the facts, don’t take responsibility for somebody else’s decision, try not to unnecessarily alienate commercially important stakeholders and keep the show on the road. Those principles can still be appropriate in some circumstances, but their usefulness depends on whether they address what is driving the crisis and what your audiences are expecting from you.
There are a number of lessons here about communicating in a modern day crisis of values.
A values crisis can’t be solved with facts alone
Effective crisis management begins with understanding what people believe is at stake and what they need from you. Where uncertainty about what happened is driving the reaction, factual clarification and reassurances can do much of the work. Where the objection concerns a perceived violation of values or morals, particularly in an emotionally charged controversy, establishing the facts cannot substitute for taking a position and actions consistent with it.
Sheeran’s initial statement concentrated primarily on ‘setting out the facts’. He stressed that Macklemore’s removal was the promoter’s decision rather than his own, explained that venues had refused to host Macklemore and ultimately declared; ‘I am not complicit.’
That statement was a red rag to a bull when it came to public sentiment, because by this point critics weren’t asking who had technically terminated Macklemore’s contract. At a time when so many people feel completely powerless, people were looking at one of the most commercially successful musicians in the world and asking what he was prepared to do with the enormous power and influence he had.
Most people cannot phone billionaire stadium owners, put millions of dollars of business on the line or command international media attention. Ed Sheeran can do all of those things. Watching somebody with that degree of influence concentrate on explaining why it ‘wasn’t his fault’ rather than actually using his power and influence, was always going to provoke a reaction.
Sitting on the fence can now be as reputationally disastrous as speaking out
For a long time the conventional wisdom in public relations was that silence on a contested political question was the safe option and speaking out was where the danger lay, and there were cautionary tales to prove it. After protests against her 1978 Oscar nomination over a documentary on the Palestinians that she had narrated and funded, Vanessa Redgrave used her acceptance speech to attack the protesters in terms that drew widespread condemnation; she was reportedly passed over for roles for years afterwards, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra later cancelled concerts she was due to narrate, a decision a federal jury found had breached her contract. It is easy to see why the lesson drawn at the time was that a public figure had little to gain from taking a side on Palestine.
Times have changed. Audiences no longer depend on broadcasters to decide what they see, and footage and testimony from the people affected now reach them directly and continuously, which makes it much harder for anyone with a platform to suggest that they lack the information to form a view. And in the years since 2020, many employees, customers and fans have come to expect prominent people and organisations to take positions on matters of moral weight, and to read silence or neutrality as a position in its own right. The reputational risk of being seen to sit on the fence is now arguably greater than the risk of speaking up.
If Ed Sheeran believed Macklemore’s removal from the tour was wrong, this was the moment to make that belief mean something through action, whether that meant standing behind him publicly, pushing harder against those demanding his removal or exploring whether shows could move elsewhere. If, on the other hand, he believed Macklemore should have been removed, he could have said so and owned that position.
You can no longer control the narrative or people’s access to the archives
The traditional crisis playbook evolved in a media environment where organisations and public figures could exert much more control over the flow of information. You issued the statement, briefed journalists, provided a spokesperson and tried to establish the authoritative version of events. That did not guarantee you control of the story, but containment was at least a realistic objective.
Social media has blown a hole through that model. The organisation or individual no longer controls the narrative, the distribution or even the evidence people use to judge it, while a badly pitched statement can become the next phase of the crisis in its own right. Every sentence can be clipped, screenshotted and dissected, old statements can be surfaced instantly, and outrage can organise at extraordinary speed into boycotts and getting ‘cancelled’.
That makes the kind of heavily PR’d neutrality Ed Sheeran led with particularly dangerous reputationally. A legalised statement designed to offend nobody can end up satisfying nobody, because audiences will immediately interrogate every omission and look for discrepancies. Sheeran’s attempt to maintain that his professional platform was largely apolitical was always going to be scrutinised against the fact that he had previously performed at the televised Concert for Ukraine fundraiser in 2022.
Reputation management begins with values work, long before the crisis
Sheeran and his team would have been wise to prepare for what might happen if Macklemore who is well known for his Pro-palestianian advocacy decided to use the tour as a platform to speak out. And that preparation no doubt would have involved making some values based decisions.
Similarly, one of the strongest moves organisations can do to future proof their reputation is decide what they genuinely stand for and then use those values repeatedly as a compass for business and communications decisions. If you say you believe in human rights, inclusion, sustainability, fairness or employee wellbeing, those commitments should show up in how you treat people, how your HR processes work, who sits in your supply chain, which suppliers and partners you choose, which clients and sponsorships you accept and where the commercial lines you are not prepared to cross actually sit.
Those choices, made consistently over time, become your reputation, because they create the evidence people use to decide whether they believe you.
This matters even more in an increasingly polarised culture, where organisations will regularly find themselves under pressure from stakeholders who want fundamentally different things and there may simply be no option capable of pleasing everybody. The point of values is not to make those decisions painless; it is to give you a compass when there is no painless decision available.
Sticking to your values can obviously create a commercial cost in the short term, whether that means losing a client, upsetting an important partner, changing a supplier or walking away from an opportunity. But there is also a commercial cost to abandoning them, and that can be much harder to repair, because employees, customers and other stakeholders notice when principles you have spent years talking about suddenly disappear as soon as there is money on the table. Once people stop believing that your values mean anything, another beautifully crafted values statement is unlikely to win that trust back.
That is why I think crisis and reputation work needs to move much further upstream. Our role should not simply be to arrive after leadership, legal, finance and operations have made the important decisions and work out how to communicate them; we should be using what we know about trust, stakeholders and reputation to help shape those decisions in the first place, particularly when the commercially easiest option risks undermining what an organisation claims to stand for.
Sometimes the most useful piece of crisis advice is not that the statement needs rewriting, but that the decision, action or lack of underneath it is the problem.
That is central to the work we do at Ardent: helping organisations get clear on what they actually believe, embedding those values into how they operate and then acting consistently with them when the difficult decisions come. Do that properly and the communications become much easier, because you are no longer trying to make an unprincipled compromise sound principled; you are simply explaining what you did, why you did it and how it reflects what you have said all along that you stand for.