Dr Pepper uses muggle jingle, and the marketing world goes mad

Unless you have been living under a rock, you can’t have avoided the story about the lady-muggle on social media that offered up her own singing jingle for Dr Pepper, that they only went and used.

There are lots of figures being bandied around in the global media relating to how much she was or wasn’t being paid. The top end being $2m and the bottom end being speculation that she got nothing. What has happened is that it won Dr Pepper positive media of the social and traditional variety from around the world.

The knock-on effect is that the muggles now think that anyone can go on and do this and social media is being littered with sub-standard marketing jingles that brands are getting tagged in. My favourite so far is the Irn Bru guy and I think they are the kind of brand who may well take it forward and bleep out the swearing.

The other effect has been all the social media try-hard brands like Wendy’s etc, trying, but failing, to pile on and get in on the action. Kudos to Dr Pepper, the winners of the first Good PR of the week.

Bond Villain Musk announces the creation of his robot army

Everyone’s favourite Bond Villain, Elon Musk turned a dark day in the office into a positive share price bounce this week. Annual revenue at Tesla has fallen for the first time as his dalliance with politics resulted in his falling from grace with both Trump and his customer base.

Never one to go down without a fight, and in the same week where he told the collective global elite at Davos that he is an alien (I think he was joking), he announced a recovery plan that pleased the stock market analysts. He is shutting down a few of his car models and pivoting their factory line to focus on the mass production of his AI humanoid robot, Optimus.

He aims to have them on the market for sale in 2027 and for them to retail at around $20-$30k. They will be able to complete tasks in both the factory, and in a domestic environment and the infrastructure investment is expected to cost Tesla around $2bn.

The pivot away from cars is no surprise to close followers of Musk. It has long been rumoured, by those in the secretive world of his battery division, that the cars were just a convenient way to take the brand mainstream and the plan was always to pivot back to the mass and very scalable potential of the battery technology.

Good PR for Musk for turning the potential banana skin of falling revenue into a stock market bounce.

Boring HS2 wins positive headlines for maybe the first time

This one goes out to all the comms people at HS2. Over the years I have been criticised for some of my decisions on the Good PR front where I have praised a troubled brand’s comms team for the way that they have managed a bad PR situation.

HS2 has faced nothing but negativity since its inception, largely through being one of the hottest of political hot-potatoes. When constantly in the firing line it would be easy to hide away and just say nothing. I always urge brands who constantly face criticism to not fear sending out positive stories and HS2 did that this week.

Two of its tunnel digging machines were fired into action, Madeleine and Karen. The end of nearly every article that ran the news contained a barb about costs and delays of the project, but they all led with the positive news, and I love the work of the comms team for this.

As a side note, I recently discovered that due to the size of the boring machines and the potential cost of removing them, the likes of the channel tunnel diggers, are encased in concrete and left where they stand at the end of their job. Like a huge machinery time-capsule. Seems a bit sad to me.

Anyway, great PR for HS2 and its comms team.

Meta and Google left to fight their corner on addiction accusations

Over in California there is a test case about to start, brought by a muggle who is accusing the big social platforms of causing her to be addicted to them and negatively affecting her mental health.

I am not here to comment on the merits of that, but I can make observations about how it is playing out in the media. All the main social platform owners were initially involved, Snap, TikTok (ByteDance), Meta and Google. Early in the process, Snap settled out of court with an agreement that meant it did not have to publicly accept any guilt.

At the last minute, ByteDance has now done the same and left Meta and Google to go it alone. The remaining combatants have a long history of successfully managing significant legal challenges and I don’t see this one to be any different. The ramifications of the brands losing this are huge with class-action shark-lawyers rubbing their hands with glee.

This is a case that I suspect will be dragged out for years. I am by no means qualified to make such an outlandish statement, but as a casual observer, there surely had to be significant findings in the discovery information that caused ByteDance to quietly walk away. This is going to be one to watch and I don’t think it will play out well for both the remaining tech giants.

Bad PR for the social media industry.

Airlines caught out trying to fob off the muggles

The Civil Aviation Authority threw a few of its biggest customers such as BA, Ryanair, Wizz Airlines and EasyJet under the aeroplane this week courtesy of a report into how they deal with delay or cancellation claims.

The big brands stand accused of trying to initially dissuade muggles from making claims for delays and cancellations, before then being forced to pay out via an escalation to the Consumer Dispute Resolution Ltd or the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution. The Civil Aviation Authority wants claims and complaints to be handled faster and consumer rights groups want the airlines to stop trying to fob off disgruntled customers to get out of paying.

With the amount being paid to customers whose initial claims were dismissed now amounting to £11m you can see why the Simon Calder crew are up in arms. The delay and stock-excuse tactics being used by several of the airline’s flies in the face of many of their marketing claims about being oh-so-caring. Well, with the obvious exception of Ryanair who make no such claims and refused to answer any media questions posed to them around the story.

This story won’t dent the public love for Ryanair, but with BA featuring so frequently in the write-ups, they do now face significant brand-reputation damage.

Bad PR for the airline industry.