Actor’s Astronomer ad pokes fun at canoodling CEO, while Kim Kardashian’s face sling raises eyebrows and jowls
She is an actor, a businesswoman, a guru and an influencer, but at heart – let’s be honest – Gwyneth Paltrow is a sales guy, who has shown us time and again via Goop how thoroughly she understands how to monetise sneering. This week, crisis PR-style, she lent her world-class expertise to Astronomer, the company that dragged everyone’s eyes up to the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert two weeks ago when two of its married executives were entwined where they shouldn’t have been.
In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, during which the male half of the pair resigned, a widely asked question was: could the mass public shaming of two executives from a company no one had heard of – “a niche tech startup with roughly 300 employees”, as the New York Times put it – be considered a net win or a loss for Astronomer? It was a tough one to judge. On the one hand, all publicity is good publicity. On the other, is being known as the company that brought us two pilloried presumed adulterers necessarily a recommendation for its data and AI services?
Enter Paltrow, with her instinctive ability to ride waves of popular sentiment – and former marriage to the lead singer of Coldplay – appearing in a video released by Astronomer’s social media team. “Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones,” said Paltrow, looking straight to camera with that slight smirk she always wears that seems to say “members of my family happen to find me very amusing”. A series of questions then appears on screen, including “OMG! What the actual f-.” To which Paltrow replies: “Yes! “Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.” And so on.
