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Good and Bad PR: Wake N Bake Donuts is the ‘clean’ winner this week

Good PR

Wake N Bake Donuts, a doughnut shop in North Carolina, has caught my attention today and given me a little giggle.

For some weird reason, totally alien to me, there are people out there who are choosing to eat Tide Pods that are designed to go into your washing machine and clean your clothes. I don’t know why – I can’t even begin to get my head around it. You think those doing it know it’s a dangerous “hobby” and that they can do serious damage to their organs!

What Wake N Bake Donuts have done is launch a doughnut that is iced to look like a Tide Pod. You know, because it’s safer than the weird craze taking the internet by storm. Who doesn’t love doughnuts?!

The doughnut shop uploaded an image of the doughnut to their Instagram with the caption “This is a Donut… you can eat this! Tide is for laundry silly.”

Seriously – Caitlin who came up with the doughnut idea is a legend. This is hilarious and I really hope everyone now goes to the shop and eats all of their dougnuts!

Bad PR

If you’ve got a young child with a smartphone or tablet device, I encourage all parents to sit down and check out all apps that they’ve downloaded – especially the child-friendly ones that look all sweet and innocent.

This week Missy Kebz released a video on YouTube that came to my attention thanks to LADbible; it’s a video of her child’s phone with an app called “Blaze and the Monster Machines”. The thumbnail for the app looks friendly enough and you can definitely see why kids would download it; it reminds me of the film series Cars by Disney.

Anyway, Missy Kebz goes on to open the app and “make a call” in which a menacing voice comes through, seemingly innocent to begin with (albeit sounding very creepy) but then it takes a dark twist – the “caller” on the other end says:

“What’s this hogwash, you look afraid. Is it this knife in my whirly tirrly hands? Making you a little nervous, huh? That’s alright, because this knife is going to improve your look when it’s sticking right out of you”

Seriously, WHAT THE HELL?

Who thinks to create apps like this?! Aimed at children with such a dark, menacing twist, effectively threatening and scaring the life out of small children.

The voice creeps me out and I can’t imagine how children felt upon hearing that for the first time. Let alone how their parents felt when they discovered their children were hearing this message.

My biggest question though is how did this get approval through the app store? I’ve had clients try to get apps signed off and included in the app store and know it’s not the simplest of processes, and can be very time consuming, so how this slipped through baffles me. Surely the apps aimed at children need more stringent guidelines than the rest?

I’ve done a search on the app store and the app seems to have been taken down, thankfully, but I hate to think how many children discovered this and are now too scared to sleep at night convinced someone’s out to hurt them.

There are some sick people on this planet.

Written by Samantha Summers, 10 Yetis
Seen any good or bad PR lately? You know what to do @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10Yetis.co.uk on email

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