Good and Bad PR: Clowns get cancelled, Citroen gets recalled while London Met Police get fancy

What a glorious week it has been in the land of communications. This week I received so many submissions for story ideas that I have not been able to fit them all in. For example, I will leave my far more fun, Creative Moment colleagues to cover the likes of “Aldeh” from Taylor Herring and Aldi, which I loved.

I will stay firmly in my PR lane, well, kind of. Don’t forget, you can get a summary of my glorious column over on TikTok, and I have even heard there may be a sponsorship opportunity.

YAP Global and OneBalance show crypto sector how to do PR

I have worked on a fair few crypto campaigns in my life. All were run by the types of people who you would not be surprised if they turned out to be Bond villains. The crypto industry is even more shrouded in mystery than the current batch of PR’s trying to flog themselves as LLM experts (another story entirely).

This week though, two new heroes emerged in the crypto sector. I keep an eye across the entire span of industry trade press, thanks to a team of PR watchers and heroes keeping me abreast of what is going on (thanks Alan S Morrison) and this week, OneBalance stood out in their sector.

OneBalance, using the respected crypo PR machine that is YAP Global, announced a Series A funding round worth $20m. A great PR story itself. The fact it got the story to go mainstream is where the real win comes in.

The media is a bit scared of the crypto sector. The mystery surrounding it, and the historic allegations of shenanigans means the mainstream media tend to shy away. Combine this with Google standing over news websites with its algo hammer, ready to nail anyone it thinks could be running a story that is promoting a scam, and you can understand that fear.

I digress, the funding is going to be used by the UK (hoorah) based OneBalance to try and help the industry develop a better user experience across the various chains, wallets and crypto platforms. Probably the first time I have written about the sector positively in over 10 years (no really) of writing this Good and Bad PR column and worthy winners of the first Good PR of the week.

No time for clowning about

Some sad news reached me this week. It turns out that no sector is immune to change and this has even rung true for clowns. Ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe an entirely odd story did the tabloid rounds about clowns having to rebrand.

Gone are the red noses and custard pies. There are even more bizarre costumes and some quite frankly, very dark, clown names. Senior figures in the industry believe that clowns are no longer cool.

Personally, I think it is the horror-film genre that has done for them. They need a collective PR campaign to fight back and put them firmly back on their pedestal as the number one entertainer of choice for adults and kids alone. I am available.

Bad PR for the clown industry. They should be fighting back and defending their heritage rather than buckling to the pressure of the muggles.

Citroen shrugs off car recall issue

Speaking of clowns, car maker Citroen is having a shocker on the run up to the peak travel season of the summer holidays. It has issued a “do not drive” recall to the owners of certain models of the C3 and DS3 cars.

The owners have duly got in touch with the car giant only to find out that in many instances, the repairs can’t be booked in until after the school holidays or in some instances, early 2026. When you think that the typical family that goes camping in the UK probably drives either a Citroen, Renault or just rides a pedal bike with a basket on the front, this could spell disaster for the school holidays for many.

Citroen trotted out the usual lines about doing all that it could, but the statements lacked any real empathy and were the auto-motive industry equivalent of a Gallic shrug. Bad PR for Citroen and its owner Stellantis.

Batman and Robin save the day in London

The team of PR industry story-spotters and I had a bit of time off over April and we missed this next story. Thankfully, it started doing the rounds again on social media so I can give it a shout out.

The police have a hard time of it. None more so than the Met Police. Quite often they stand accused of not taking a common-sense approach to everyday situations. London is awash with chancers, and I don’t just mean in the Square Mile. On the Tube, and on several of London’s most iconic bridges, it is no surprise to see pop-up gambling sharks, fleecing tourists by providing a “fun” distraction whist the pickpocket gangs target those stood watching.

If a bobbie turns up with one of them massive hats on (do they really still wear them?) they are going to be seen a mile away. The plod needs to blend in, innit. Two of the Met police’s finest took it upon themselves to wear fancy dress to walk amongst the muggles and nab the pesky crooks, and it only went and worked.

What costumes did they pick? Batman and Robin! This, dear reader, deserves awards and special commendations at all your fancy London-based awards bashes.

Get them on the stage and salute their contribution to the media with this fantastic story. Just don’t sit them too close to the LLM PR “specialists” that are popping up as they may get lifted too. Great PR for Met Police and I apologise for missing it.

Busk Stops and bucket hats give Umpf to campaigns

Umpf has had a cracking week for its clients with two stories that went everywhere. The first was an Oasis bucket hat story for St Davids retail destination in Cardiff. It was PR gold in that it tied in murals (every retail destinations campaign du jour right now) and Oasis (every business is trying to muscle in on the bands revival) to give a strong win.

The second one, announcing the launch of Busk Stops (designated places where buskers play) at Buchanan Galleries in Scotland is glorious PR. Simple, easy to execute and boy did it pay off with the coverage. Love the Umpf team for coming up with them both and more than worthy winners of a Good PR gong.

Marks and Spencer offers masterclass in PR via the humble sandwich

Before ending on my typical tirade against pointless science, I have to talk about the Strawberries and Cream sandwich that M&S launched to honour the start of Wimbledon.

Yes, the sandwich story itself has been a massive PR hit, but for me, it delivers much more than that. In my eyes this is up there with the Amazon Drone story, in that it has a much higher value than the story content itself.

M&S has been fighting a cyber-incident crisis-comms story now for several months. It has been hard for the brand to shift any of the negative stories off the first page of Google and Google News. The first stage of the crisis communications process is coming to an end, and this was signalled by the announcement that it will have all online ordering systems back up and running very soon.

The next stage of any crisis campaign looks at the short-term recovery and how to fast track getting the negative stories onto page two of Google. I am not going to give away the more nefarious tactics that you can use to do this for fear of being struck off (again) by the CIPR (boring lot) and being red-listed by my mate Sarah at the PRCA.

One thing regular readers will know is that I am a huge fan of Amazon’s approach to dominating the media on the run up to peak retail times. They don’t just go out with boring offers and deals stories; they engineer a huge campaign that will dominate the press. Amazon’s go-to story being that drones will soon be, allegedly, delivering our orders (calm down there Pinnochio Bezos, we know you read this column, I added an allegedly in). It always delivers coverage for them.

This is exactly what M&S has done with the Wimbledon sandwich. It’s a short run product listing. I don’t know how many will be sold. I doubt it will last very long before getting pulled. What it has done though is flooded Google with their fun story and nudged the bad shizzle down.

This has also signalled the first tactical misstep by the discount supermarket brands who have breathed more “noise” into the story by announcing knock off versions. As we all know, Google loves “noise” and this is what it looks for. The discount brands talking about it, albeit in passing, will help M&S in its drive toclear up its Google profile.

Great and most likely, award-winning PR by the OG’s of the comms world, the M&S PR Team.

You have got to Brie kidding me?

The “pointless science” PR story of the week goes to Université de Montréal. They funded research into confirming or denying the theory that eating cheese too late in the evening before bed, can give you nightmares. It can. We all knew that already, thanks though Team Science. Maybe get back to curing actual issues using science.