Good and Bad PR: Wowser by Wowcher, FIFA, ASDA, fuel prices & the King

Has anyone mentioned the heat yet? Welcome to this week’s Good and Bad PR. Ladies, gentlemen and everything in-between, let’s get to it.

World Cup branding bans have a beautiful backlash

FIFA is doing itself no favours with this World Cup. I am not just talking about its refusal to let Scotland have an automatic route through to the latter stages either.

Everyone in marketing land rejoiced when Levi’s quietly briefed in via social media how it had been forced to cover up its logo on a World Cup stadium it normally has the rights to advertise at. Now, more brands are following suit.

Gillette is the latest company to have been asked to cover its branding at a stadium, and then done so in a way which attracted more publicly than FIFA could have ever given them. It covered the logo with what looks like shaving cream. 

The world’s media loved it.

Now, Heinz has had an accidental social media hit thanks to an innocent muggle posting a picture of the pettiness of FIFA, with all the brand names covered on its sauce bottles at a stadium.

Except for the Scottish fans bailing them out with their positivity, FIFA seems to have had a swing and miss with its PR campaign for this tournament. It needs a big, wholesome story to land – and soon.

Wowcher sheds crocodile tears over email “mistake”

Every week I feel obliged to say that the views spouted in the column in no way represent the views of PRmoment. Keep that in mind for this section.

This week, e-commerce deal of the day site Wowcher had to issue the kind of apology that secures national headlines. In my opinion, it joined the rising number of brands who try to manufacture fake-troversy (fake controversy) to gain media exposure and better its online presence. This is a topic that gets my goat, and that I often talk about in my own social media videos.

The offending email newsletter referenced “crocodiles” and “kids”. It came just a few days after a child was harmed by a crocodile at a UK farm zoo.

We know why brands are doing it, and once again the blame lies clearly at the door of the search and AI overlords. They are notoriously crap at understanding the real context of brand noise, but they reward it regardless. The more noise a brand makes across news, social channels, the likes of Reddit and all the platforms AI loves, the higher it will rank in Google and the more frequently it will be surfaced in the LLMs that muggles use.

Some brands, such as Protein World, have talked openly about this. The protein brand's CEO acknowledged it had increased its sales on the back of their much-hated “beach body ready” campaign.

As an industry commentator, I have also speculated in several high-profile public media conversations that the McDonald's CEO’s inability to eat a burger in the same way that normal humans do, and KitKat’s “heist” situation were both “fake-troversy” stories that the brands leaned into, and that helped them in the long term.

The difference between the far classier McDonald's and KitKat (Nestle's) comms operation, and Wowcher, is that they know what is in (pardon the pun) good taste – and Wowcher clearly does not.

There is no long-term damage done to Wowcher because of this email “mistake”. It will lose a few subscribers and that’s it. The sad truth is that this will have undoubtably helped lift their brand in the eyes of Big G and OpenAi, and I fear it speeds up the race to the bottom in the digital marketing industry.

A "hold your head in shame" Bad PR for Wowcher.

ASDA delivers a comms masterclass despite 3.3% drop in sales

Not many brands can announce a near 5% drop in sales and still come out unscathed. Well done to the Asda comms team for pulling off this masterstroke. I have historically been a bit critical of the way in which the supermarket giant conducts its PR campaigns but make no mistake, they delivered this time around.

Not only did the results not trigger a wave of media hate, but arguably more importantly, they were well received by The City analysts. The brand was able to communicate exactly why they are where they are and why the plan they are working to is actually working.

Allan Leighton, its chair, is a well-known and very savvy media operator. His highlighting that the brand is in its second year of a turnaround plan, and then not being drawn into giving an end date for the plan, is a shrewd move. The brand buys itself more time to deliver and you know what, I think they will as well!

Good PR for the supermarket brand, and I fully expect that at this time next year it will be a Great PR gong.

Will rocket and feather return to UK fuel pumps?

At the time of writing, the US media is heralding the re-opening of the Straight of Hormuz because Americans have immediately seen fuel prices dropping. The Competition and Market Authority (CMA) here in the UK, the organisation that once accused the UK petrol pump industry of a “rocket and feather” approach to pricing, will be closely watching how quickly UK fuel prices drop.

In May 2026 the CMA put out a report saying that it was happy that the pricing strategy of the large petrol pump companies was as it should be. Its main issue was with a lack of competition within the sector.

With the American media crowing about the price drops so loudly, it won’t take long for UK muggles to start reflecting that the same is not happening here. This is going to be one to watch. The CMA does not shy away from coming out swinging.

King Charles and his tax bill. What will the public verdict be?

I am not going to lie and say that my column being late this week is a rarity, it happens most weeks. Sorry Ben.

This week though, I have held off because I was hoping King Charles’s tax return would have dropped and we could start to get a picture of the media and muggle reactions.

Sadly though, it has yet to land, so all we have is a bucket full of positive coverage about the announcement that it is about to be shared for the first time in royal history. I did smile at the thought of him getting the dreaded brown envelope dropping through the royal letterbox, and him trying to navigate his way through the HMRC’s call system.

By this time next week, we should have an idea on how it’s gone down but for now, it is nothing but praise for announcing the move. 

More Good PR for King Charles.