The following is a guest piece written by Shannon Reedy, chief brand officer at Terakeet. Opinions are the author’s own.
A brand crisis used to play out in predictable stages: a spark, a media cycle, a response, and then it dies down. In the era of artificial intelligence, that playbook has become outdated, as demonstrated by the recent Campbell’s Soup controversy.
After an alleged executive conversation went viral, the fallout was swift and measurable. Beyond traditional media coverage, the narrative was quickly reinforced across AI platforms and search engines, extending its reach and impact.
The incident reveals a new crisis-management reality. When AI becomes the first stop for information, a negative brand story spreads faster and lingers longer, and can dangerously represent “truth” for critical audiences like your employees, shareholders and customers.
It raises a critical question for brands: How do you respond when the algorithms are shaping the story faster than you can?
Brand havoc
In November, news surfaced about a lawsuit alleging that a Campbell’s executive made disparaging remarks about the company’s products, referring to them as “highly [processed] food” for “poor people.” The executive also allegedly claimed the brand uses “bioengineered meat” and made derogatory comments about employees.
In the aftermath, Terakeet’s analysis found that Campbell’s experienced a surge to 70% negative news sentiment and page-one search real estate flooded with damaging narratives.
Anyone who searched the Campbell’s brand or its products would now be met with the story in prominent Google features like the news feed, People Also Ask section and AI Overviews. Years of marketing and branding were wiped away in an instant.
One of the biggest risks AI introduces is its inherent bias toward negative information. In the digital ecosystem, sensational or controversial stories attract outsized attention, and once they gain momentum, they’re quickly reinforced and amplified across platforms.
That’s exactly what happened with Campbell’s. Coverage spread rapidly across social media and traditional news outlets, creating a flood of new content that AI systems began ingesting and reinforcing.
The story drove a spike in searches around “3D-printed meat” and questions about whether Campbell’s uses real meat, and generative AI didn’t step in to correct the narrative. Instead, it surfaced fragmented context, pulling language from Campbell’s own website referencing “mechanically separated chicken,” which further muddied perception rather than clarifying it.
The consequences of a reputational event like this extend well beyond headlines. In addition to the immediate erosion of consumer trust driven by questions about product integrity, Campbell’s experienced a 7.3% drop in its stock price, per Terakeet’s analysis. That translates to a drop of $684 million in market capitalization.
Consumer response followed quickly. Calls for boycotts emerged in reaction to the executive’s flippant remarks, underscoring how leadership behavior and executive visibility can directly influence purchasing decisions and brand loyalty.
The ripple effects are likely to extend into talent and employer branding as well. Allegations surrounding the employee who recorded the remarks — and their subsequent termination and lawsuit — introduce another layer of reputational risk. For prospective employees, these narratives shape perceptions of company culture, leadership accountability and psychological safety, all of which can impact recruiting and retention.
Be proactive, not reactive
The Campbell’s Company issued formal statements and published a press release on its website reaffirming that the ingredients used in its products are real. This traditional public relations response helped reintroduce factual information into the conversation, and early signals suggest that AI systems are already beginning to reference the company’s clarification.
However, this alone is not enough to reset the narrative now circulating online. Once controversy is widely distributed across news, social and search, it becomes part of the data layer AI relies on. This makes online perception harder to correct after the fact.
Ideally, Campbell’s would have taken a more proactive approach, strengthening its search presence and narrative landscape before a crisis emerged. By publishing authoritative, clarifying assets in advance, the brand could have established a stronger foundation. Brands that have strong owned digital assets in place effectively create a firewall that helps protect against misinterpretation when scrutiny inevitably arrives.
When page-one search results are fortified with credible, brand-controlled content, negative moments are far less likely to dominate visibility or linger after the news cycle fades. Strong search foundations don’t eliminate risk, but they significantly reduce how long and how loudly controversy echoes online.
Equally important is ongoing monitoring of how your brand appears in generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. As more consumers turn to these tools for news and context, AI-generated summaries are becoming a primary touchpoint for brand perception. Ensuring accuracy in these outputs is a critical part of modern reputation management.
Campbell’s experience underscores a broader shift in how brand reputation is formed and sustained. In an environment where search engines, social platforms, and generative AI systems collectively shape public perception, reputation is no longer something brands can correct after the fact.
The brands that will emerge strongest are those that treat brand visibility and their reputation as a strategic asset, investing early in their online narrative clarity, search real estate and AI sentiment. Because once a story takes hold, the question isn’t whether it will influence AI — it’s how your brand is consistently shaping AI outputs.
