Mark Cuban isn’t afraid to mix it up on Twitter with anyone, but his Tweets last Friday have one Shark Tank Entrepreneur calling him the “Anti Shark.”
Cuban, along with the other Sharks, was live Tweeting during the east coast broadcast. During the Cerebral Success pitch he and the other Sharks disparaged the product calling it “unethical.” Barbara didn’t think so: she struck a deal with the “brain supplement” business.
Anti Shark Tweet
Several Sharks Tweeted their feelings about the product, but Cuban took it a step further with the following Tweet:
To make matters worse, ABC’s official Shark Tank Twitter re-Tweeted it:
Like a lot of other people, I wondered what the heck this was all about, so I contacted Brandon Marz from Marz Sprays. They were the featured update segment, immediately following Cerebral Success. Brandon was, as he put it, “confused by the whole thing.”
“This just goes against the whole spirit of the show,” Brandon continued, “Shark Tank is all about encouraging entrepreneurs to be successful. I haven’t seen anything like this before.”
I reminded Brandon about Cuban’s Twitter war with Scott Jordan 2 years ago. He said, “that was different. They were going at it on air and it continued after the show. It was an extension of what happened on air. With us, we were nothing but courteous to him and out of nowhere, he disparages us during our update segment. Why would he root for a successful Shark Tank business to fail during their update segment? To have ABC re-Tweet it is just as puzzling. The whole thing is disrespectful – to us and to Lori.”
As of this writing, the Tweet by Cuban and the re-Tweet by ABC was taken down, but, as Brandon put it, “we worked hard to get to the point where we would warrant an update – we were looking forward to it, and then he does that. We never get that back. Mark Cuban has 2.3 million followers on Twitter, we have around 7,000. We have yet to assess the impact, but if 1% of his followers decide not to buy our product because of his ‘celebrity status,’ it’s potentially millions of dollars in sales.”
“Right after the update segment, Barbara Tweeted out congratulations to us and to Lori. That’s the spirit of the show. Millions of people use supplements each day and they improve the quality of people’s lives. If he doesn’t believe in supplements, that’s fine; but to act so mean-spirited towards a successful Shark Tank business is anti Shark Tank and anti entrepreneur. He knows what kind of impact and audience he has. I just think the whole thing is unfair.”
Both ABC and Cuban removed the Tweets, but the damage was done. “They must have realized it was the wrong thing to do,” said Brandon, “or they wouldn’t take them down, but why even do it in the first place. And why would ABC validate it when they are promoting live Tweeting on air? It’s embarrassing. Maybe they removed it because NBA owners are under so much scrutiny this week.”
Marz Sprays Moving on
“I don’t want to sound like I’m whining. Everyone at Shark Tank was wonderful to work with and we got a good inflow of new distributors from the broadcast. We have a nice mix of online sales, retail sales, and distributor sales. We’re in every Walgreen’s now and we have international distribution in Singapore, Peru, Belize, Russia, South Africa, and all over Europe. We’re moving forward full force with our business, that’s why we got an update in the first place. I just have one question: WHY?”
Why indeed. Do you think Mark Cuban was anti Shark Tank with those Tweets?
