After reaching the giddy heights of so many brand-orientated campaigns in last week’s column, it is back to earth with a bang. It feels like it has been a slow seven days in the world of creative campaigns. Maybe it is the hangover from the Easter break?

Fear not though dearest reader, I have delved into the trenches and dug out the best and worst stories.

JCB digs being called an innovator

There are very few brands I love more than JCB. When I was growing up, I lived by the factory in Rocester for five years, and my mum worked there the entire time. A few years after she passed away, I took my dad to the JCB factory museum and when he told them about mum having worked there, they treated him like royalty and gave him an off the grid tour. It was dreamy.

So, when I saw that it had a massive PR win last week, I knew it was going to win the first, and always the most important, good PR of the week. The coolest brand in diggers has been at the forefront of innovation since it began, and I am not just on about the famous dancing diggers show.

This week it was successful in lobbying to change the law that prevented hydrogen fuelled diggers being driven on roads. To celebrate, it drove one around London and stopped at all the major tourist attractions for photo opportunities.

JCB’s top guy Lord Bamford, gave a quote, the Minister for the Future of Roads gave a quote and mother nature gave a sigh of relief that the air will now be that little bit cleaner. Who says B2B PR cannot be sexy? Love it. Nice one JCB.

American arrogance now affects the moon

The moon is getting its own time zone, and you can guess who is going to be dictating what that will look like. The American government.

The process needs to be agreed and apparently — for reasons involving Einstein’s theory of relativity that now make me wish I had paid attention in science-class — it can’t just be a bolt-on from an earth-based time zone. As this story broke, I welcomed the announcement that it would need to be agreed by “all parties”.

It turns out that this relates to only American-based “parties”, though. Other space organisations outside of America and Nasa are not invited to play. Team Nasa wants it to somehow correlate with Mars.

I am not sure who and where has the final sign-off on the time zone for the moon, but I reckon we can all get together and declare it 12.00pm and take the credit.

Bad PR for American space-busy-bodys. Just leave the moon alone and don’t be so arrogant that you think you control the universe now, too.

Deliveroo sale gives LSE a poke in the eye

UK-floated Deliveroo is being sold to US-floated DoorDash for £2.9bn. What an amazing story for Deliveroo. Great PR for the brand and a huge win for its investors.

Whilst plaudits for the delivery brand have been landing thick and fast, the London Stock Exchange has had to fight off criticism for not being as strong as its US equivalent, and potentially slowing the growth of companies listed on its share index.

Both companies listed on the respective exchanges at roughly the same time. DoorDash’s value grew by 84%, Deliveroo’s fell by 56%. One of the original investors in Deliveroo said that he now wishes it had listed in America.

This won’t help LSE and the UK government in its campaign to attract new listings. One of the key arguments for brands going over to ‘Merica is that it gives them access to a wider pool of funding and growth opportunities, and the recent comparisons between DoorDash and Deliveroo support this suggestion.

Great PR for the Deliveroo team, Bad PR for LSE and the government’s attempt to make the UK a credible and realistic home for brands looking to float.

Co-op shows how not to do crisis communications

When the organisation who has hacked your IT system comes out to correct your media update, you know as a comms team, you need to have a word with whoever gave you the information for your statement.

The long-suffering editor of this very column [editor’s note: I suffer very little editing this gem] wrote a cracking piece on the best way to approach a crisis like the one being faced by Co-op and M&S. Whilst M&S has come away with its reputation, so far, intact, Co-op has emerged with a digital egg on its face.

I have worked with several high-street and well-known brands who have been affected by cyber incidents and Bitcoin related ransom demands. They are tricky to navigate and quite often — as is more than likely the case with the Co-op — the IT department never really knows the full extent of the breach until well after a statement has gone out. Thinking about it, I am not sure who is more difficult to work with, trade unions and their disputes or cyber-criminals. Both are shrouded in mystery.

In my hugely humble opinion, this kind of lived-experience crisis communications, as the kids call it, is why it is always better to work with someone who has been there and done that, rather than an in theory only specialist.

I don’t agree with many media commentators who are saying that the Co-op deliberately put out an incorrect statement to calm customer fears. I genuinely don’t think that its IT teams knew the full extent of the issue, and accidentally gave incorrect information to the comms team.

I can hear the whir of the AI controlled crisis-comms-simulators, that C-Suites seem to love, being tweaked as I type. 

Sainsbury’s turns to VAR for self-checkout disputes

I love Sainsbury’s for doing this. I also love that its comms team will have suggested the VAR reference to a journalist for the story, without the term making it into the press release.

Instead of a big, burly security guard wrestling you to the ground because of an unexpected item being in your baggage area, Sainsbury’s is installing playback cameras at its self-service tills. If you place something with the wrong weight in the bagging area, rather than the normal air-raid siren going off and the till light turning red, the screen in front of you will play back what you placed down so you can double check it is not actually a user error.

If the problem continues, you can continue to stick to your guns that you have done no wrong. A store employee, probably no older than one of the cans of beans you have lost at the back of your pantry, will come over and do a VAR check of the video.

I am not naive enough to realise that it's just a deterrent for shoplifting, but I love it anyway. I can’t wait for VAR to be installed at my local Sainsbury’s where I shall test it to the max, as part of my research for this column.

Long-term followers of my social media accounts will know that I am currently waging a long-burn war of my very own against a national supermarket brand that, for the purpose of anonymity, we shall call “Hesco”. My sorry saga is around a similar till-based dispute.

Several years ago, I was accused by an over-zealous till operator of taking a bag for life that I had not paid for. It was in fact one that I had brought to the store. The till operator was not having any of it, and with a lengthy queue building up behind me and no sign of a supervisor coming over, I took the hit and paid the 30p. I was outraged.

Since then I have been trying to earn back that 30 pence through the medium of taking white mice from the Hesco pick 'n' mix. Not just eating them, that would be outright theft and completely wrong.

No, no, no. Being the mastermind genius that I am, instead, I place one on the conveyor belt and bide my time. When the confused till worker asks, I say that I was feeling a bit meh as a result of being a type one diabetic and felt that the white mouse would give me a pick me up. Yes, I am not below using my chronic illness to seek revenge against the brand.

Nine out of 10 times the worker would take pity, look around, and slide it though without charging me. I planned to do this until I gained back my unjust bag for life fee.

My plan has a major flaw though. It turns out that an individual white mouse weighs very little and based on doing one big shop per month at the store, it would take me approximately 42 years to reclaim that 30p via the white mouse liberation campaign. Back to the drawing board.

I digress, great PR for Sainsbury’s!