There’s no time for pleasantries this week, which has been an action packed seven days. Let’s take our weekly dive into the world of Good and Bad PR.

Interestingly, three of the brands mentioned in this week’s column have already featured here in 2025, which once again reinforces the cyclical nature of the media. I will leave discussions as to the reasoning behind that for the far loftier people of comms land than I.

It Asda be the start of something massive

When I last wrote about Asda, it was to hand it a Bad PR. This week it has been very much turned around. In that last column I didn’t want to just give the brand that I love a boot; I gave it some tips for getting out of its current plight.

It would appear to me that it pinned my ideas on the CEO’s wall. Yes, that must be the only reason behind their success. Definitely, maybe?

My first tip for Asda’s route back to greatness was to announce a petrol pricing slash. This week, it announced a 4p petrol price cut. The media? Well, they loved it. As did the muggles. It was seen as the return of the supermarket-petrol-wars from the 1990s onwards.

Then, in a master stroke that wiped millions off the rivals share price (a massive achievement), the Chairman of Asda announced it would make less money this year as it drove its prices lower. He even talked about the size of his war chest. Tesco’s share price was the hardest to be hit.

A fantastic week for the Asda comms team and I’m glad I could be of service. They truly deserve the first Good PR of the week. I did notice that they have yet to wage a social media “banter-war” against them cheeky discount brands, maybe that was an idea too far?

Royal’s chinning off Guinness caps off the perfect week for Diageo

Guinness receives its second Good PR of 2025, and we are still only in Q1. The brand has perfectly managed a few media storms this year already. Rumours of stock shortages on the run up to its peak trading time, and of a sale which helped drive the value up, not to mention a cost increase that had muggles turning elsewhere.

The issues all fell to the wayside this week. An image of the thousands of barrels of the Black Stuff needed for Cheltenham Race Week went viral. An image of Peter Crouch buying 1,000 pints of Guinness at the races to pay out on a bet also went viral and drowned out the pricing issue.

The peak Guinness moment of the week though, must be Princess Kate chinning off a half a pint of the best drink in the world during a St Patricks Day celebration with the Irish Guards regiment.

Diageo will be shedding tears of joy, that it will surely mop up with the £50 notes laying around after such an awesome seven days. Well-deserved recipients of this week’s second Good PR. Will it now sell though, while the brand value is so high?

PRmoment founder Ben Smith caught up with Carma’s media analyst Ryan Boulter to give us his insight into why it was such a fantastic week in PR for the Irish stout:

Musk in the doldrums

Elon Musk is truly living up to his Bond villain stereotype by causing carnage amongst federal workers in the US civil service and taking pot-shots at world leaders, via his Twittering X platform. Given the real-life consequences to his business empire, you have to wonder how long he will stick it out, playing the role as Trump’s ‘Bff4Eva’.

The Tesla share price is tanking, it had a modest recovery on Wednesday (19 March) but is nowhere near where it was when he and Trump won the election in late 2024. In other painful news for the brand, its Cybertruck got named as the world’s most hated car which the likes of The Telegraph loved and ran with as a headline.

Swathes of owners in America are reporting incidents of graffiti and vandalism as a direct result of Musk behaviour that has received global condemnation.

It should have been a solid week for the Musk comms team. The Nasa mission to save the stranded astronauts using Space X tech was a success. That noise was drowned out by the general Tesla negativity and the continued attacks that he is making on US federal workers.

The irony was not lost on many that the FBI is now looking into the possibility that the Cybertruck vandalism is part of an organised and coordinated attack on the brand. I bet the Feds put that in the weekly email that he forces them to send him, outlining what they have achieved in the last seven days and justifying their jobs. Bad PR for Musk once again.

Has anyone seen a Joby in the sky for real?

I fear that this headline only works in a Scottish accent. You can’t have missed the noise this week, largely across the syndicated press types, around a brand called Joby.

Call me cynical, but I am declaring shenanigans on the brand.

Essentially, it is an air taxi brand that will use drone-looking and very quiet helicopters to operate a taxi service for rich muggles between airports. The syndicated media basically ran stories saying, “you can now get from <insert town name of the newspaper> to London in X minutes”. Nice clickbaity type stuff.

Something doesn’t ring true for me. There have been lots of demonstrations of the jelly-wobbler in action in America, but no actual commercial launch. The Joby brand has been floating around since 2009. It feels very much like the Amazon drone story. It makes for great headlines, but nothing concrete is being rolled out en-masse.

The company website trots out press release after press release about orders, partnerships and live demonstrations, but nothing that is commercially viable. Even the story that hit the UK headlines this week was nothing of note, only that it was partnering up with Virgin Atlantic to use its airport hubs. Meh, so what?

When the media asked the obvious questions about pricing and launch timescales they got no reply. This small but important fact was buried at the end of the articles in most cases.

I fear all the gushing headlines serve no purpose other than to help the brand deliver more funding rounds. 

They should be getting good PR for the headlines they generated this week. Call me Erin Brokovich though, as I am declaring it as a hollow victory. Bad PR for a lack of real transparency and not answering credible press questions about timescales.

The ONS is on them to prove to us they’re still in touch with reality

I love the ONS. I have used its data for so many press releases over the years that I feel dirty having a pop at it this week.

It added some new basket items to its Consumer Price Index this week, and the prices are a bit odd. If you don’t know what the Index is and you work in PR, probably best you find yourself another columnist to go and tut at. It is the Holy Bible ideation tactic for many people in comms.

Out went newspaper adverts (get that), turkey mince (don’t get that, in the health obsessed world, turkey mince is a must) and DVD rentals (get that). It replaced them with VR headsets (erm, ok) yoga mats (wtf) and men’s pool sandals (are they taking the piss?).

Are these new areas truly representative of the cost-of-living-crisis obsessed Brits right now? No. Some more relevant suggestions from me, free of charge. Maybe add in the average price of two hours parking in Central London and Birmingham. A three-mile taxi journey from four cities or the cost of X-box controller Scouser batteries (AAA).

Last year ONS announced vinyl records were getting added back to the basket. The yearly announcement is now just a PR opp, something I never thought the ONS would lean into.

I had so many people send me this story, as an example of civil servants being out of touch with what’s really going across the UK right now, that I had to give it a Bad PR nod. Remember though team ONS, I will always love you.

Unilever quashing the hippies and higher purpose aplenty

I have written about Unilever and its higher purpose nonsense in this column over the years far too much already. The new CEO vowed to eradicate such wokery from the FMCG brand and demonstrated this by allegedly ousting the CEO of hippy ice cream makers Ben and Jerry.

Long time readers of this column will know that Ben and Jerry’s entered the Unilever brand arsenal just as I was leaving my in-house role at the FMCG giant. So, I experienced a sliver of its hippy approach to flogging ice cream. Despite my cynicism, it really worked and still does.

Unilever is said to be having none of it though. Ben and Jerry’s filed a court case in the USA saying that Unilever violated its merger agreement by kicking its CEO because of the brand’s social and political activism.

Unilever is going out all guns blazing in its public response. Using the strongest corporate language a brand of this size can get away with, it released a statement including the words “regrettably”, “disappointed” and “confidentiality”. The real life equivalent of using “as per my last” and removing “kind” from “kind regards” in an email exchange

This could be a strong tactical move by Ben and Jerry’s. Unilever has already said it wants to have completed the spin off sale of the brand by the end of 2025, and this latest court filing could speed that process right up. Strong PR for Ben and Jerry’s.

No more period dramas for Aldi customers

Whilst Unilever stands accused of flexing its corporate bully muscles, one discount supermarket brand in the UK gave something big back this week.

Aldi has become the first UK supermarket to give away period products across its retail stores. Period poverty is a very real thing in the UK and not only is the brand doing this in store, but it is also giving away one million period products to the charity, Bloody Good Period.

Pads and tampons will now be available in every one of the Aldi store toilets. This gesture comes off the back of an announcement earlier this month that it is launching a fund for cash-strapped new parents. Great PR for Aldi.

Putting the Thrill back into Rhyl

This is a tough one for me. I unhappily lived in North Wales for nearly five years of my childhood. Next to the sea-side town in this segment, Rhyl.

A Northern media outlet once claimed it was like “Blackpool after a neutron bomb had gone off”, and I think that was unfair on neutron bombs.

I will hold my hands up, my family did not contribute positively to the state of the town. My uncle sold jewellery on the beach during the summer months, trotting across the sand, trying to sell sovereign rings to any unlucky passer-by. That gives you a general feeling of what goes on there.

Anyway, good news for the residents. It is getting some big cash monies as part of the levelling up fund. The hope is that it restores the town to its former tourist attraction glory days. So far, £12m has been allocated to improving the town centre, on top of the money and work spent on the likes of improving its biggest theatre.

It was once known as being the retirement town of choice for the Scousers who had done well in life, and I sincerely hope it returns to its former glory. Come on Rhyl, take this Good PR gong and rise to the challenge. I can’t wait to take a trip up there and see what has changed.