Good and Bad PR: Tunnock's, AI Lords, Pork Pie Way and Swatch

Welcome to this week's increasingly prestigious rundown: your one-stop shop for highlights and lowlights of the week in this glorious profession of PR! (It's not really a profession though, is it - be honest...)

Here we go then.

Tunnock’s & Smoking Gun show the value of traditional PR

We live in an industry that is currently obsessed with AI/Geo PR. Everyone knows my stance on it, GEO PR is not a thing, it’s just PR. (A bit like Digital PR then?)

Whilst 90% of the industry is droning on about it (including myself), people like Smoking Gun are just going about their business, and delivering amazing traditional PR campaigns, which is actually what the AI overlords want, ironically.

This week they launched the world’s first Tunnock’s themed hotel room for EasyHotel, in Glasgow. It is everything I love about PR. Simple, picture driven, and truly well delivered. It got a huge dollop of coverage, and I hope to see it in a few award entries next year. A very well deserved first Good PR of the week. 

Praise that I am sure is of far higher value than any award (apart from the PRmoment ones obvs).

AI has a terrible week across the global media

Are the overlords on a sticky wicket? This week has been yet another stinker for the AI world. It started with EY having to withdraw a report detailing cyber risks in loyalty schemes for having “hallucinations” (made up information). Then came the CEO of Standard Chartered, who had to try and explain a leaked memo where he said that AI would replace “lower-value human capital”. Wow!

Bill Winters is the CEO in question, and he once again demonstrated that even global brands sometimes forget the age old comms mantra of: “don’t put anything on a staff memo that you would feel uncomfortable being read out loud to muggles”. Every time I re-read “lower-value human capital” it makes parts of my anatomy clench.

Then came former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is the latest high profile businessperson to get booed by students in America for talking about the rise in AI during a speech. This time it was the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony. Students clearly see AI as a threat to jobs and apparently their “intellectual development".

Three high profile misses for the AI overlords (and I haven't event mentioned the Musk vs. Altman techbro fallout case!) 

So, AI has triggered a general Bad PR gong from me.

Leicester City Council bank on the muggles being cheeky – and it pays off with Pork Pie Way

Melton Mowbray has a new bypass, and Leicester City Council needed a name for it. Spurred on by the clear success of the Boaty McBoatface campaign by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, they asked the muggles.

The muggles have not let them down, and it is now called “Pork Pie Way”. I love this. Of course there was backlash and of course it was from the animal-bothering crew, PETA. They said it was “pig-demeaning” and demanded it was changed to “vegan Pie Way” instead. The council leader shrugged it off and did so with the fantastic quote of “nothing more that pie in the sky thinking”. Another win for the traditional PR purists out there like me. 

Good PR for Leicestershire County Council comms team.

Swatch shop closure has me sitting on the fence 

Most of the messages I got this week were to submit ideas about the Swatch shop closures. I don’t think, long-term, that it is bad for the Swatch brand. I recorded a surprisingly popular TikTok a few weeks ago on the rise of using PR to generate faketroversy and manufactured outrage. I feel this falls into this category.

The coverage overall was not really that negative. The brand got two separate write ups on the mainstream national news section of the BBC website. This alone was SEO/AI discovery gold. Despite what the search and AI overlords would have us believe, they do struggle with sentiment. Google and AI, however, love “noise”, which Google now calls link-building.

I ran the BBC articles on Swatch through my good mate Karan Chadda’s webpage sentiment analyser (and AI powered tool), and both articles came back neutral. So, you get the point I am trying to make.

The negative is that the shops had to shut, but the positive is that there is clear and overwhelming brand demand, and as such, I am saying this was actually a PR hit for Swatch.

They get a Good PR from me.

Lycra-clad men stand accused of ruining the views of picturesque Windsor

It feels like a very traditional-PR-heavy column this week. This last story received national plaudits, and is once again a very simple angle. A café in Windsor offered a free cappuccino to cyclists who come along in their Lycra gear.

The deal has become so popular that some locals are now fed up with the two-wheel-Lycra-brigade taking over the town at weekends. Not least because it is men of a certain age wearing clothing that clearly shows, in some instances, what they had for breakfast that morning: a chipolata.

Given it is home to the oldest royal rest home in the UK, you have to feel sorry for the poor Royals that sit on their balcony overlooking the town and see all that dangling about. Surely, it would be enough to put them off their morning pheasant and lobster butty?

The locals are labelling the influx of middle-aged men as "mamils", which you have to admit is funny. Anyway, another traditional, simple, effective PR campaign – and not a hint of AI in attendance. 

Good PR for Cinnamon Cafe in Windsor.