Good and Bad PR: JLR’s cyber attack, whistleblowing at Meta and Fujitsu takes a hit

Welcome to winter. A week ago we were moaning about burnt grass and wasps, right now we are digging out scarves and jackets. Let’s cut the small talk and get about the good and bad PR from the last seven days.

There is no limit to British spending power

The FCA were given a major task by Labour bosses; get Brits spending more. It had a brain wave to tick that box.

New proposals are going through to remove contactless payment limits with a bank card.

In theory, Brits can now spend more, but not necessarily because they have more in their bank-account. It feels very ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, but it turns out other countries have already removed the limit, and the policy change has been well received by muggles and business owners alike.

Could this be the start of the Labour PR turnaround? It is probably a bit early to be making such a bold claim, but in a week when the government had yet another comms wobble, this policy announcement gave them a much-needed media win.

Great PR announcement by the FCA, making it rightful recipients of the first Good PR gong of the week.

Jaguar Land Rover shows how cyber-crime has become normalised

If hackers had cracked the Jaguar Land Rover cyber brain just two years ago, it would have dominated every news channel around the world. Fast forward 24 months and cyber crime is now such a media norm that the resulting articles are far less exciting.

Last week, on 3 September, the manufacturer became the latest in a raft of cyberattacks on businesses. The attack forced it to shut down global IT and production systems, which impacted supply chains.

Jaguar Land Rover is very much in the middle of a crisis, but it is not facing the hysterical baiting the collective media would normally pile on to a brand of this size, and stature. The crisis is currently operational, and the extent of the issue is not yet known. But, it confirmed yesterday that some data had been affected.

Should it emerge that the hackers took customer data, this may trigger a more comprehensive media attack. Right now, JLR is scrambling to get the machines working and the ordering system back up and running.

I have a feeling that this story may carry on rumbling along, but the effectiveness of the much-respected comms team is moving the focus elsewhere.

Meta just needs to get better

Did anyone else see the video footage of all the big-tech CEO’s fawning over Donald Trump at a White House dinner this week? It was bizarre to say the least, go and find it. It felt like a global gathering of Bond villains.

Here, I am rolling two alleged stories into one bad PR gong.

The first, Meta stands accused by whistleblowers of suppressing some of its own child safety research. According to the Financial Times, two meta employees raised these accusations in a US Senate judiciary sub-committee. Meta refuted the claims as “nonsense”.

There were further allegations about how Meta employees were advised to copy in company legal representatives on sensitive missives to trigger attorney-client privilege. None of the claims are yet to be proven.

A second negative Meta story as reported in The Guardian also involves whistleblowers.

A former WhatsApp security bod has filed a lawsuit alleging that the company has lax digital defences. This is less whistleblowing and more grenade-lobbing. The former employee was dismissed for poor performance, so it falls into the favourite brand crisis-comms defence of being a disgruntled former employee.

I really liked the laid-back nature of the Meta VP of comms’ statement: “Sadly this is a familiar playbook in which a former employee is dismissed for poor performance and then goes public with distorted claims that misrepresent the ongoing hard work of our team.”

Nevertheless, this is worrying for the tech giant. Bad PR for Meta.

The Fog on the Tyne is all Wear all Wear

Massive congratulations to everyone’s favourite ‘number hardening’ CEO, Daryll Sparey of Hard Numbers for completing the Great Northern Run. I am led to believe his partner is of Geordie flavour so she will be seething to have seen the finishers medals had a map of Sunderland, and not Newcastle.

The UK media has had a good old chuckle about this story. I very nearly gave the comms team a good PR gong for the way they tried to turn the story around by saying it made the medal more unique. Not quite enough though, bad PR for the medal buyer.

Fujitsu caught bidding for contracts that it promised not to

I have always felt that Fujitsu got off lightly, brand reputation wise, around its role in the Post Office Horizon scandal.

According to reporting by The Register, Fujitsu had publicly committed to not bidding for new UK Government contracts until the inquiry in the scandal was complete. It has since emerged that it won a new £125m contract in April, despite the inquiry still being on-going at that time.

There were a few caveats in the letter from Fujitsu to the Government about the terms of its no bidding. Ironically, one of the key snippets of the letter was a line saying “no limitation or caveat on our intention to pause bidding”… and then they did in fact list some caveats such as continuing to bid for contracts if it was invited to do so.

Fujitsu is yet to respond to the speculative reports, but The Register did claim that it had previously been told by a spokesperson that it was “named preferred bidder for this contract in 2023”, which predates the voluntary restrictions.

Bad PR for Fujitsu.

Recombobulation remains a go in Milwaukee

When I worked for FirstGroup I was always hugely annoyed that Virgin Trains were allowed to have fun with its sign posting and we were not.

Not just on the trains that we managed but also with the digital bus display signs, it was always a no. I looked on with jealousy as Virgin Trains got good publicity from writing a funny toilet sign about only flushing loo-roll and not your hopes and dreams, etc.

Milwaukee Airport doesn’t have this problem. For several years now it has called a part of its airport the “recombobulation area”. Its where people go to adjust their pants, shoes, halo and bet etc after going through the security checks.

A light-hearted approach to a serious situation. With the news that American security checks at airports are being relaxed to not include shoes, there was a fear that bosses would call time on the area. Great news reached us all this week, it is remaining in situ.

This is a nice, simple and flawlessly executed dollop of good PR. Great work by the comms team for getting the story about its survival out there.

Pointless science is back with a red-hot story

Fear not dearest reader, pointless science is back. This week it is the turn of the University of Saint-Etienne in France. It unleashed a set of research that confirmed what we already know; when our babies cry, it makes us parents hot and bothered.

In addition to the entirely pointless science, it went on to add that the rise in temperature depends on the “acoustic roughness” of the baby that the noise is coming from. So, the louder the shrieking, the more hot and bothered we get.

Le Sigh, pointless.

Thanks to Alan S Morrison for the article suggestions as ever, and to my own baby, Seb, for helping to prove the last story every night.