Good and Bad PR: A bad week for Lidl, Club Tropicana and Ticketmaster

April is racing by and the news agenda shows neither any signs of slowing down nor moving away from coverage of America’s regime change plans for Iran. Let’s have a look at the stories of the week that caught my eye.

Lego says it best, when it says nothing at all

How is this for a coordinated looking segway from a mention of the conflict in Iran in the intro, and it also being my first story. For legal reasons we can’t share an example of the Iranian propaganda videos that use lookalike Lego characters to mock USA and Trump.

This is threatening to become a real brand reputation issue for Lego, not least because the mainstream global media have tracked down the Iranian content agency behind the videos and ran interview-based stories on them. The high profile media attention is already having an effect on how up the search rankings the story is appearing for straight brand search terms.

How are Lego dealing with it? Right now, they are doing the perfect job by saying nothing publicly (they don’t need to) and instead ramping up their wider content output. Pro-active press releases are up, its short form video content output is up, and the spend to amplify that content also looks to be up.

One of the hardest things a crisis communications person ever has to do is convince a client that they should say nothing, and Lego deserves great praise for the way it is handling the situation so far. The first Good PR of the week.

A rare PR misstep from Lidl as it becomes ASA’s first junk food ad-ban victim

The German discount supermarket brand hardly ever makes a comms mistake, but this week, alongside Iceland, it became the first brand to fall foul of the new junk food ad bans by the ASA. Let’s be honest, no one is surprised that Iceland, who’s hero product remains the Type 2 diabetics pudding of choice, the Viennetta ice cream, also had ads banned, but I was really surprised that Lidl got told off.

What makes the story even more odd is that on the day the ASA announcement hit the media, Lidl posted a story on its company LinkedIn talking up its efforts to encourage healthy eating. The post on LinkedIn celebrated removing cartoon based packaging from its least healthy own-brand products in early 2025 and announced it was going to go one step further with the launch of a new range of plushies characters to sit alongside its healthier ranges of products.

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with the ASA will know that they are very good at making noise around key milestones. Lidl and Iceland being the first to have ads banned for failing to meet strict new guidelines on promoting high in fat, salt and sugar products was always going to attract a significant dollop of media coverage.

For the social and PR teams at Lidl not to have cross referenced the media grid with each other shows a potential comms disconnect that really surprised me. Bad PR for Lidl.

Club Tropicana, wheelchair users are not free (to visit)

Sometimes a story comes along, and you just think “how?”. An 18-year-old wheelchair user visited a nightclub called Club Tropica in Manchester. The security staff lifted her and the chair into the club and off she went. 

A few minutes later the security team returned and said she had to leave by orders of the management. A litany of nonsense excuses were allegedly given, some of which breached various Equality Act rights. It looks as though the nightclub received professional comms advice, as their defensive statement hid behind the announcement of an investigation. Sigh.

Bad PR for Club Tropicana in Manchester and brave PR from Maddie the alleged victim, for going public with her story.

Animal activist found guilty of causing criminal damage to a restaurant pet

In the year 2300, historians will maybe cite this story as being the point at which the world gave up trying to support hippies. An uppity marine biologist in Dorset grabbed what she thought was a soon to be eaten lobster from a fish restaurant and then “released” it into the harbour. The lobster was never to be seen again.

The only problem with this, is that it was the restaurant owners pet lobster. It was used for educational purposes to teach kids about the pinchy, but tasty, little creatures. I like the footnote from the Crown Prosecution Service who highlighted that the lobster that was snatched was not even on an endangered species list.

Activist Emma Smart confessed to her sins but still received a three-year order banning her from going within 10 metres of the restaurant. Even worse, she gets a Bad PR from me.

Live Nation, owner of Ticketmaster found guilty of running a monopoly

Ticketmaster must now be starting to enter the territory of considering a total rebrand to try and shake off its negative reputation. Live Nation, the owners of the much-criticised ticketing site has been found guilty of illegally operating as a monopoly in a seven-week trial taking place over in America.

As well as the monopoly decision, the brand has also been found guilty of overcharging fans. All in all, a bad day at the office. It now looks like the ticketing company could be forced to separate parts of its business to try and satisfy the American legal system and anti-competition regulators.

The tone of the response from Live Nation is everything we would have come to expect from such a negatively perceived brand. It was aggressive and bullish in its defence, and said that “the jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter”. Punchy.

They could do well to look at how other brands who sustain such consistently bad media coverage try to deal with the onslaught. The traditional comms playbook would involve trying to publicly fix the mistake, upscaling their community support efforts, and shouting about doing good. 

In my opinion, this does not seem to be in Live Nations lexicon. Bad PR for the brands involved.