Steaming through March aren’t we. Seems a bit quieter in media land this week as all the gambling digital PRs are off to Cheltenham Races looking for winners and content relevancy.

Fear not though, I have remained in situ, holding down the fort and writing this week's Good and Bad PR.

Let’s start with something good.

Zuckerberg and Graber’s shirt show

As regular readers will know, I am a massive fan of corporate sh*t-housery. Well, any kind really, not just corporate. This week I loved reading about some fantastic geek on geek action. When Mark Zuckerberg was last permitted out by his robot overlords to speak to the muggles, he was seen wearing a quirky t-shirt.

To us normal folk it was about as quirky as putting the milk in before the tea-bag, i.e. not really that interesting, but certain folk love moaning about stuff like that. His t-shirt had some Latin phrase on it about Julius Cesar. You will be surprised to hear that I don’t speak Latin, so I am not going to even try and repeat it.

It was seen by the geek community as some form of power play. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber attended the same event on a different day and boy did she blow the minds of the attendees. She came out wearing the same style of t-shirt but her slogan, again in Latin, was something to do with wanting a world without Cesar’s.

Geek land went crackers. Whilst us normo’s see it for what it really is, two of the chess-club kids from school having a pop at each other, the tech press wrote it up in their droves. Good on Graber for taking a swing at Zuck and kudos to whoever in her team that came up with the idea.

Deforestation is the best way to tackle climate change

Talking of global oddballs, whoever came up with the idea to chop down part of the Amazon rainforest to clear the path for a new road to the COP30 Climate Summit really needs a day off to take a long hard look at themselves.

I mean, come on. Surely, as is so often the case with the bad PRs, whoever came up with this plan did not ask the comms team for their thoughts on this. The optics are terrible.

There is no further narrative for this bad PR. I refuse to regurgitate the feeble excuses that the organisers trotted out, and well done to the world media for quite rightly putting the boot in.

HS2 Lego model has twenty thousand reasons to cause annoyance

I was not even sure if HS2 was still a thing. The next bad PR reminds me that it is. The marketing team behind the most scrutinised building project the UK has faced since Captain Tom’s family built a spa in their garden without the right permission, have biffed up.

I am going to guess that this was commissioned by the brand or marketing team. HS2 has spent £20k on a Lego model of one of the stations on its route. I reached out to some of my chums in the construction industry and apparently, not only is this common place, but is actually quite cheap for a model of this type and scale.

In a further twist, you may wonder how this story got out? I guessed it was from a FOI request, but an anonymous email address that initially shared the story with me gives my spidey-sense the feeling that it is an internal team member who has outed it. Always comes down to a disgruntled staff member doesn’t it.

The comms team's only real defence is to point to what the COP30 team has done in Brazil.

No need to Boohoo any more over toxic brand reputation

I have ummed and ahhed over this being a good or bad PR story. I am going to go with a narrow win for the good because of the coverage it achieved.

Boohoo has gotten so sick of its brand getting the boot from media, muggles and (I would guess) Mike Ashley that it has decided a rebrand is the only option. It checked down the back of the marketing couch for recognisable but dormant brands and domains that it owned and found it has Debenhams in its 123-reg account.

Hey presto. You read that right. Boohoo is now Debenhams. Boohoo, which has spent the last year and a bit fighting off Mike Ashley who wanted to take control of th brand, has rebranded as Debenhams, the brand Ashley fought for years to take control of. Baffled? Me too.

I think it is great to have a much-loved high street brand back in the mix, so this is why it gets the good PR nod.

Nationwide reinforces why Building Societies are loved

I used to work for a mid-size building society. I was the first ever externally hired comms person that it brought in. For legal reasons I am not allowed to divulge, I didn’t last there very long (all my own doing your honour).

I learnt very quickly that building societies are one of the most chaotic yet beautiful industries out there. I have too many stories about the odd things that went on, but fortunately not all building societies are like that.

Sam Greenslade from GBPR sponsor Carma had this to say:

Nationwide has long been at the forefront of a great example of the mutual model working well. This week it solidified its position as the nicest personal finance company in the UK by giving each of its members (note, they are not called customers in the mutual world) £50.00 as part of its take-over of Virgin Money.

Great PR for Nationwide and for the wider building society sector as a whole. It will have triggered a swathe of new members joining their local society in the hope of receiving a payout themselves in the future.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist

What a headline for the last Bad PR story of the week. A water company has played this very same trick, in trying to convince the water authorities that its customers should pay for the repairs to its massively under-invested-in infrastructure.

You may remember from my yearly round up that I spoke about some media stories being cyclical and some industries having a tougher time at the minute than others,

I expected water companies to be at the forefront of the negative stories again in 2025 and I have not been wrong so far.

United Utilities, custodians of the water system at Lake Windermere, officially a World Heritage Site, has successfully convinced the water authorities that it should be allowed to up the bills for its customers. Part of that money will then help it repair the damage caused by its accidental pumping of actual shit into the world-respected lake. What’s worse is it did that and then didn’t report the full volume of how much went in there.

You read that right. United Utilities, a major player in the UK water infrastructure that has (as an industry) had to pay millions in fines for polluting our water is going to use bill-payers money alongside private-investment to fix the issues that its shonky system caused. This is the same company which paid £340m over to its shareholders in 2024.

This sounds terrible, it looks terrible, and no doubt smells terrible. Bad PR for United Utilities.

What a crap story to end on. Thanks to Alan S Morrison and Craig McGill for the story suggestions this week