Good and Bad PR: World Cup marketing campaigns, Meta showing fans they matter, IRN-Bru & Hel

Who wants to hold my hand and take a stroll through this week’s media hits and misses? Come on then, let’s go.

IRN-BRU kicks off World Cup marketing campaigns with anthem launch for Scotland

Ladies and gentlemen, start your World Cup marketing engines. IRN-BRU partnered with Susan Boyle, John McGinn and Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand to launch the official Scottish tournament anthem, and it has gone down a storm.

Some in the trade press used it to prod the drinks firm with the coolest parent-company name in the world, for moving away from using a Scottish ad agency. In fact, it was created out of the agency’s Edinburgh office and it has certainly landed well with fans.

My favourite bit has to either be John McGinn laughing at the end, or a stunt double breakdancing for Susan Boyle. I love the marketing campaigns that the World Cup unleashes. This week alone we have seen a nice execution from Heineken with Xavi and the loneliest fan, and I am sure there will be more global campaigns launched before the end of the weekend.

Great PR for IRN-BRU and everyone involved, and the worthy winner of the first Good PR of the week.

Meta steps up its efforts to protect World Cup fans from scams

Sticking with the World Cup theme, we have Meta achieving some rare positive-PR for announcing that it’s stepping up its efforts to stop fans from getting scammed on its platform. As the brand says, the tournament brings out the best in people, but with global events of this nature, there are some wrong-uns about who want to do bad things.

Ticket scams, accommodation scams, player and team harassment – it is all sadly part and parcel of the beautiful game, and Meta is not having any of it. They are stepping up their monitoring for nefarious activities, and throwing in an extra dollop of keeping an eye out for false immigration processing scams and offers as well.

Being such a globally renowned brand also means that they can partner with global security, and banking and safety organisations to try and protect fans. Fantastic effort by Meta. Let’s hope they keep these safety nets active after the World Cup too.

Great PR by team Zuck!

Tussauds and Harry Kane launch perfectly-timed wax work

This is the last mention of the World Cup… for this week at least. Tussauds has a comms template that works well. Tap into a societal moment by launching a wax work of a person related to that subject. When the new season of Bridgerton was launched, Tussauds announced that a wax work of one of the main characters was being unveiled, and during Emmy season, Tussauds launched its Bella Ramsey and Timothee Chalamet wax works, you get the gist. 

Just a few weeks before the World Cup, and as the fever starts to build, out came a Harry Kane wax work. If it aint broke, don’t fix it.

Kane, who is now a completely different character since he escaped from both his Tottenham hell and the intrusive gaze of an unrelenting British media, made a few very funny quips and splash, there it was, all over the media.

Great PR for Tussauds and Kane.

IG Group finds out what happens when you take on the financial services establishment

I will admit it from the off – I am not a fan of the investment brand IG Group. They lost me when they turned their snarky ads into attacking the building society movement in the UK. This was the modern-day equivalent of kicking a labrador. A labrador that does so many good things for the financially under-represented in the UK marketplace.

The reputation issue that IG Group now has, is that it has made some meaty enemies from within the world of financial services, many of whom have some serious media clout. I am all for an underdog and challenger brand story, but IG Group is neither of these.

It arrogantly thought it could swamp London with pithy attack billboard ads like an outdated 1980’s political campaign and us muggles would roll over and hand over our money. Nope. This week they posted a fat-cats related ad campaign, clearly aimed at kicking rival investment apps and brands that charge a commission or trading fee.

Instead of receiving a wave of support, as the likes of Nationwide did when it ran similar bank-attack campaigns, the ads have instead resulted in criticism from serious media heavyweights. One of which is the Deputy Business Editor of the Sunday Times, Oliver Gill, who took the time to post on his personal LinkedIn about just how much the IG Group CEO and CFO earn… plot spoiler: it’s a lot!

Like when I post a Bad PR story that reads as though I found it myself, I suspect the more savvy comms teams who rival IG have been making sure key journalists knew just how much their competitor's CEO was earning. And then, maybe contrasted this against the fat-cat campaign. Ouch.

Bad PR for IG Group. 

The comms and ad teams will say that column mentions like this prove they are getting under the skin of the industry. The reality though is that its out-dated approach needs a fast and hard pivot to a campaign that will move the focus away from attacking competitors and instead win consumers over with its strong customer services and its fee-free trading platform.

Not everyone is going to Hel, despite what the bus company wants

Let’s end on a global media success story. Polish bus company FlixBus has a route that goes to a place called Hel. For many years the company thought it would be funny to give the number of that bus… yes, you guessed it: 666.

Religious groups complained and lobbied so hard and so consistently that FlexBus gave in to the fun-police and changed the number to 669.

A new marketing person must have come in and debated how they could get some publicity for the brand and decided, enough with the religious control-freaks, bring back the number of The Devil.

The ‘Highway to Hel’, as it is known, route number has returned to 666. The religious and anti-Satan crew are up in arms, but the company is not backing down and even made it clear in its statement that “the number 666 was deliberately chosen as a marketing communication element”. The only thing that annoys me about this story was that I didn’t think of something similar when I worked inhouse at FirstGroup.

Great PR for FlixBus!

Honourable mention this week goes to Scotrail. The brand invested a rumoured £2m in new body-cameras for staff to try and prevent muggles abusing them. When the company investigated why they were not being used as much as they would have liked they found out it is because they put the charging ports in too high a place. As a founding member of the short-arse community, I feel for them.