Good and Bad PR: Apple’s new CEO, McDonald's draws a line and Blue Peter badge for the King

Did this week herald the start of our summer heatwave? How is that for a classic British small talk intro... Enough of that, let’s look at the media hits and misses from the last seven days.

New Apple CEO announcement demonstrates its global media pull

Tim Cook has gone and John Ternus is in at Apple. There have been less column inches written about new heads of state, compared to the world media attention on Apple this week. Not many brands can command the volume and length of write-ups that Apple has had for its new boss.

When you look through the articles you start to get a real picture for what a strong and well-orchestrated campaign this has been by Apple. The new guy had been quietly and confidently eased into the spotlight in recent months – carrying out a larger range of media interviews but with no reason given.

We can now see that this was a deliberate move by the Apple comms bosses to see how he did when he had global media attention and how the media, in-turn, reacted to him. Safe to say, it must have been a successful test.

What has staggered me is not just the volume of coverage that Apple has received, but also the length of time that this story has now been running. A typical global CEO announcement has a news life of two days max. Apple’s announcement is now nearing a week of positive pick up and still going strong.

Great PR by the Apple comms team.

McDonald's boss tries to draw a line under the past

Many have criticised McDonald's UK and Ireland MD, Lauren Schultz, for her appearance on the BBC Today show. She was asked to comment on the BBC's own expose into working standards and allegations of abuse at the fast-food giant and she did. I feel she did well with her replies.

Some of the criticism has come from clueless crisis comms muggles who think she should have been better prepared. As someone who works in the murky world of reputation management, I think this was a perfectly executed plan by the brand and its team. She was in no way put on the back foot by the questioning and made it clear that she was drawing a line under what had gone on.

To the untrained comms eye, it could feel like avoiding the question, but for me it now paves the way to successfully move on from the whole situation. People seemingly forget that McDonald's is one of the best performing strategic communications brands in the world. They have navigated their way through many a comms headache using the power of their PR skills – and this is no different.

The horse-meat scandal? Not a blow landed on the Golden Arches. The criticism pointed at lots of global brands about the speed in which they closed their Russian outlets? Again, McDonald's slipped that one perfectly. Whilst many in the UK (me included) believe the BBC to be the be-all and end-all when it comes to a trusted media outlet, brands like McDonald's will consider their exposé into its worker allegations to be a small dot in the global PR ointment.

McDonalds did not trip up this week, they merely prepared perfectly for the next step in the brand-employee-relations campaign that they are clearly now executing.

Salmon getting off their gills on cocaine are swimming further than their boring colleagues

This very much falls under the category of pointless science, but I did smile at the story. The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences thought it very important to discover what a salmon would do if it were coked up. The answers were not surprising: it swam more than its none-coked-up mates.

The scientists wanted to see how the drugs that are apparently slipping into the global water-system are going to affect fish and marine life. I don’t really get why, especially when there is better science-ing that they could be doing, but hey, someone has to give the salmon what they want.

I am going to guess that the scientist in charge was a massive fan of the Shamen’s song, “Ebeneezer Goode”. They famously sang: “Got any salmon, sorted”. I would rather they had done this to a more high impact marine animal such as a Great White shark, or better still a polar bear. That may have taught the boffins a lesson.

So next time you are in Sweden and think you can hear trance music, and see glow-sticks coming from a nearby river, you will know the reason why. The salmon have had another hit.

Bad PR for Team Science.

King wins Blue Peter Green Badge to try and make the show relevant again

The only people who I ever recall having watched Blue Peter were either those who also attended maths-club at school, or those who had an unhealthy attraction to Anthea Turner. Both are areas that I have never shown any interest in.

When the BBC bosses were brainstorming how to make the show more appealing to the media, they hit upon the brainwave of giving the King an award. It didn’t matter that they had done this just three years before, they simply recycled the story and changed the colour of the badge.

Hey presto, this week saw King Charles being awarded his second Blue Peter badge – this time, the eco-warrior Green award. The media lapped it up. I am not sure that the Green one beats the Gold one that he also received in 2023, but the media didn’t care, and splashed the story everywhere.

I just want to say, on the record, that the picture editor from the BBC online news team who chose to use a PA Media picture that was zoomed in on the King’s oft spoken about fingers, deserves a two-week stint in the Tower of London for treason.

Good PR for Blue Peter.