The heatwave has landed, and the news agenda is reaching boiling point. Labour is trying its hardest to get out of the media doldrums by continuing to put all the blame on the Conservatives. I am starting to think Farage is on holiday, as he has been so quiet of late.

Let’s get about it and see who the winners and sinners from the last seven days in PR are.

Bezos prime candidate for confusing hippy protest

I am firmly of the opinion that if you are the third richest person in the world, and want to hire an entire city for your wedding, then you should be very much allowed. Jeff Bezos has seemingly hired nearly every hotel room in Venice to cater for all the A-listers going to his wedding next week.

This has split the opinion of the city muggles, to the point that the great unwashed are heading over to protest the event. A protest, catchily called No Space for Bezos, is going to try and peacefully disrupt the ceremony. Why? They have little else to do, I would suspect.

They want Venice to stop being treated like a showcase, and fear the city is being exploited by outsiders. I don’t really get their argument. Neither do a good swathe of the café, restaurant and tourism business owners based in the city.

Flags are going to be draped (ruining photo opportunities), river taxis will be held up by people jumping into the canals (ruining punctuality, something the Italians are not famous for) and blocking or closing entrances to some narrow streets (causing celebrations from bus drivers).

To be fair, Bezos has enough money to build a replica of Venice and get married there. I also suspect his security team, who I imagine are akin to every black-ops baddie portrayed in that kind of film, are ready to do whatever it takes to get that man hitched.

Still, you have to take your hat off to the sweaty hippies (there is a heatwave in Italy right now) for getting global media to look so seriously at their whiney protest.

If HS2 was a horse you would take it out the back and shoot it

HS2 has been a disaster from start to (nowhere near) finish. Announced as a feel-good investment bounce by head UK gold-seller Gordon Brown, and then formally launched by Call-Me-Dave (Cameron) it once had cross-party support.

Now, it has been scaled back to the point that I can’t really see the point of it. We already have fast trains between Brum and London. It has become the political whipping-boy of choice from both the main parties. Labour accuses the Conservatives of ruining it. The Tory’s claim that Labour are fudging the numbers.

This week’s latest announcement of it being further delayed and further over budget should really see time being called on the whole thing. Sell the land off or give it back to the original landowners. It would cost far less than the overall budget that is now estimated by the BBC to be circa £57bn.

Bad PR for everyone involved from day one.

Steely determination gets Labour and British industry back on track

Labour did have a strong PR win this week, with the announcement that British Steel will now be providing 75% of all the steel needed for British train tracks for the next five years.

The deal is worth £500m and helps secure the immediate futures of the Government bailed out steelworks of The North. The news is great for both the rail and steel industries of the UK.

The comms timing baffles me though, and as someone who worked for Alastair Campbell, I think I can say with confidence that he would be beyond irate at the communications scheduling.

Labour could have dined out on this story in a positive manner, for I would guesstimate a week, or at least until the weekend. No, it blew its own positive story out of the water with the HS2 announcement coming so soon after. What could have been the start of a positive business/economic bounce was quickly squashed. I just don’t understand how they keep getting the PR basics so wrong.

Great PR for British Steel, but poor PR by the Labour spin machine. Dare I suggest it tries moving away from politically focused PR operators and getting some normal comms strategists on board. Its current SpAds are just not hitting the mark.

Sainsburys and Morrisons ad practices get smoked out by UK Government

Sometimes a negative business story comes along, and you have to take a moment to wonder why whoever thought of it considered it a good idea in the first place.

Sainsburys and Morrisons have had a letter sent home from the UK Government about advertising practices. Both have been promoting heated tobacco products in stores. I don’t have a clue what they are, but they sound lethal, and that can’t be good.

Even the most junior marketing or advertising pro would know that tobacco related advertising is banned in the UK. How the supermarket duo felt they could get away with it is beyond me. The supermarkets were outed by the BBC, and in response they both basically said they considered the promotions to be legal. The Government thinks otherwise.

I am going to hazard a guess that these products offer the retail giants a large margin so it is in their interest to flog as many as they can. Anything with the word tobacco in it could be considered a gateway to encouraging smoking (very tenuous I know) and as far as I understand it, and I think it is medically proven, smoking is not that good for you.

So, the same supermarkets that preach how much they love their communities and alike are ignoring that mantra to also flog us products that could lead to something very bad.

The optics are very poor for the supermarkets. They should have just removed all the offending content when the BBC raised its concerns and moved on. Instead, they now have multiple negative headlines floating around that they could do without.

Bad PR for both.

Meta doesn’t want to be known as a spoiler

Meta stands accused of many things, addling the minds of future generations, being the platform of choice for election interference and giving nosey neighbours a platform for general skullduggery.

What I have never really considered to be a social platform problem, is plot spoilers for TV shows and films. Fear not though, Meta has rightly realised that this is the biggest issue on its platforms, and has announced a way for muggles to warn others if they are going to include a plot spoiler in their posts.

The announcement of a successful trial of this tech over on its Twitter rip-off, Threads, triggered an avalanche of positive media. Forget greenwashing and sportswashing, this must be tech-washing at its finest?

It’s solving a problem that affects the relative few, yet the resulting positive noise makes it a hugely worthy campaign. P.S I don’t want to spoil the plot of The Social Network 2… but Zuck is a bot! Boom.

Good PR for Meta.

The kids are alright

This is the feel-good story we need for this week. The BBC ran a beautiful video of kids doing Match of the Day-style post-match interviews after their exams over on social media channels, like TikTok.

Being incredibly old, and someone who mainly consumes short-form video content about growing potatoes and restoring lawn grass, this trend did not appear on my FYP. It turns out that once again though, I am hideously out of touch. Once I saw the story I “searched it up” (as my kids say, much to my annoyance) and chuckled away.

There is a lot of doom and gloom in the media nowadays, and this kind of story shines a light on the fun things that are going on. This is far away from politics, business and cynical old PR men who write columns like this. I salute the post-exam kids for making us all chuckle.

Thanks to me good-mucka Alan S Morrison for the story ideas. Got something good or bad you want to shout about, let me know. Oh, and do go and check out the hugely high-production TikTok videos that now accompany this expertly scribed column. 

Check out last week's Good and Bad PR-Tok