Good and Bad PR: Network Rail’s new train, fake Labubu crisis and Evri calls the cops

How are we all doing on the week when the UK returned to normal, very chilly, temperatures? Didn’t we have a lovely hot summer though? Small talk, meh, done. Let’s go.

Ctrl, Alt, Deleaf wins the day

I love this story from Network Rail. I tried to find out if there was an agency behind it, but no one came forward, so I am declaring it as a massive win for the in-house comms team.

You know the drill, autumn rocks up, leaves fall on the train tracks, there are delays and the BBC writes a spikey piece about the wrong kind of leaves on the line.

Not this year though. The Network Rail team played a blinder. It asked muggles to name a new train, designed to clear leaves and debris on the tracks.

The muggles did not disappoint. Some of my favourite names include:

• Buster Grimes
• Britney Clears
• Itsy, Bitsy, Yellow Anti-leaf Machinery

In the end though, a panel of train historians and experts stepped up and the winning name, Ctrl Alt Deleaf, was revealed. The UK media loved it.

This was helped by every PR’s fave high-impact wire running it, Press Association. It secured hundreds of media hits, reminded commuters of the impact and seriousness of the issue and gave everyone an excuse to lop down that tree in the garden that was annoying them.

A great story and more than worthy winner of the first good PR of this week.

Environment Agency hit by whistleblowing employee drama

The Environment Agency doesn't have time to consider the impact of the first good PR story of the week. Its comms team are consumed by a crisis comms story, created by an internal leak.

As reported by BBC, apparently the internal snitch has revealed how the Agency is not turning up to inspect reports of serious pollution. In a number of cases, it is alleged that they are simply batting the inspection and report off to the water companies involved.

This is a serious issue and the person who leaked it deserves some praise. It will be interesting to see if they eventually get named and how the Environment Agency tries to rubbish the claims. This is one to watch. Bad PR for the Environment Agency.

Is that a fake Labubu in your pocket or are you just unhappy to see me?

To be clear, I don’t have a clue what a Labubu is. Apparently, they are a new fluffy toy craze that is being adopted by adults? Grow up, the lot of you.

Anywho, the dolls made up 90% of all fake toys seized at the border by the Home Office. An eagle-eyed comms person at the Home Office clearly spotted this and knew it would be the perfect media story. The Intellectual Property Office (IPO to its mates) also loved the story and hung a campaign around it highlighting the dangers of buying fake gear.

Three in four of the fake Labubu toys failed safety tests and the dangers of the choking and poison variety mean there is a very real impact.

Great PR for the IPO and Home Office and in particular the comms person who spotted the story potential and jumped on it.

It is ok to call yourself a content creator now

For several years now it has been the norm to mock those who publicly call themselves content creators. It is now ok to shake off that shame, as an All-Party (no pants?) Parliamentary Group found that these creative types contributed £2.2bn to the UK economy in 2024 and supported 45k of jobs.

The YouTubers that our kids all rave about are employing big teams and using only the best gear. Despite my opinion of the ones who block up my local golf-course most weekends, with their 300 cameras, 2 drones and over dramatic reaction to slicing the ball into the farmers field, it turns out they are actually doing good. Who knew?

A small prize for anyone who sends me a solid “influencers in the wild” picture or video this week.

Evri parcel matters

It is no good selling your tatty jeans on Vinted if the parcel never lands, and this is a very real issue affecting parts of Hampshire. Evri, alongside Hampshire Police, have discovered that a very precise 89 parcels went missing from parts of their patch recently.

The BBC story also showed a series of glum looking muggles, annoyed that their parcels did not arrive. Evri made all the right corporate noises, but something tells me this story is going to have legs. It looks like some internet sleuths are now involved and according to social media, the scandal could be spreading across the parcel delivery underworld.

Bad PR for Evri who’s comms team must feel like they are playing Whack-A-Mole with stories like this.

Amazon's haunting PR hyperbole 

Amazon is closing 19 Amazon Fresh grocery stores across the UK. You know the cashless stores it opened with great fanfare five years ago? They are now of the past.

Some of the stores will be converted to Whole Foods, another food brand that it owns. The rest will be quietly mothballed and moved on. You can’t blame Amazon for trying and failing. Without this kind of innovation, the retail space would not move forward.

It is however, the latest big PR gig that has quietly fallen by the wayside. Who remembers the drone delivery story that I always go on about. Not one drone delivery outside of a PR stunt, has been made by the brand in the UK.

What Amazon are masters of is, dropping a big new shiny announcement just before a peak retail period so that its online rankings go even higher (or Reddit mentions for those of the LLM PR flavour). I wonder what it will be this year, just before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Will the other chains that tried this new approach also now follow suit. I expect so, Amazon has taken the first-move pain away and others can do so safely in the knowledge that they won’t get such a big media boot.

Bad PR for Amazon this week. It tried and failed but I 100% expect another big innovation story announcement soon.

Thanks to Alan S Morisson for the story help as always and to Will James for the Network Rail story. What a pair of top guys.