Good PR of the week
 

Ben and Jerry’s cool campaign 

Ice cream brand Ben and Jerry’s has taken to sending personalised tubs to promote its new Join Our Core hunt for the next sustainable business leaders.

The competition is giving entrants the chance to win five cash prizes of €10,000 to support its sustainable business ideas, with the first 100 instantly bagging themselves a year’s supply of ice cream.

Ben and Jerry’s sent Harry Wallop, retail editor at The Daily Telegraph this personalised tub, which is how I first saw the campaign:

Find out more at Join Our Core.

Thanks to Lisa Wisniowski for Tweeting with this one!

Fosters waxes lyrical

Aussie beer brand Fosters has recruited “backvertisers” for its latest marketing campaign, finding five British men willing to have its ‘F’ logo waxed into their incredibly hairy backs.

The picture-desk-friendly efforts are tenuously (not saying that is a bad thing!) validated by brand manager Nic Casby by saying “We are encouraging men to embrace the laidback Aussie attitude to life and not be so concerned when it comes to their looks.”

From the looks of the men, I’m not sure they were the type to be too concerned about their looks in the first place!

Thanks to Sophie Louise Baker from Seal for sending this one to me!

Bad PR of the week
 

Lynx stunt stinks

As anybody will tell you, I’m a sucker for a good stunt. What we have this week though from Lynx is, I’m sorry to say, not a good stunt. It’s a bit of a shocker.

Lynx has done some great things in the past, including its “even angels will fall” campaign (featured here in my Good PR in March of last year), but their Lynx for girls marketing seems to be falling short, with one person describing the range as like “calling someone a slag all day, then expecting her to buy you dinner”.

To launch Lynx’s first ever female body spray, ”scores of women” camped outside Wembley Asda’s car park, in tents.

Source MyDaily.co.uk asserts that each of the women were “young and attractive“. Not me. (In case my fiancée reads this).

Now, the Asda in question was a 24-hour supermarket. Why then, would “scores of women” feel the need to camp out, given the fact the launch – with a braless Abbey Clancy – was taking place indoors at 10am?

I’m not going to pretend every stunt I’ve ever worked on – or will work on – will be perfect, but this one just misses the mark. 

Thanks to Elly Hogg for suggesting Lynx this week.

Sky News gets out red tape

Sky News has a number of fantastic journalists, who are also active in terms of social media usage. I was lucky enough to meet and briefly speak to Neil Mann, AKA @FieldProducer the other day, Sky’s digital news editor. He would be one of these fantastic journalists.

So it seems a bad idea for Sky to overhaul its social media policy in a way that prevents some of its journalists from using Twitter effectively.

During the riots, Mann was prolific, Tweeting to deflate, verify and add to rumours. In short, he was using Twitter as a speedy medium through which to deliver his journalism. I certainly appreciated his efforts, as did thousands of others. Since then, I’ve thought of Sky, in turn, as a particularly social media-savvy broadcaster. He acted as a great ambassador for Sky, and he and others have continued to do so.

The new policy, however, means that if an event like the riots were to happen now, Mann would be unable to report them in the fluid and informed way he covered last summer’s riots. Instead, he would have to deliver the content to the newsdesk – while on the road, travelling to destinations – preventing him from breaking any news via Twitter.

Another element of the policy is that Sky journalists are not to reTweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter, as “such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process“. I can’t disagree with the notion – news outlets are often quick to pounce on unconfirmed news via the service, such as with the fake Wendi Deng and “Official Gary Glitter” profiles, but this has been a particularly contentious aspect of the rules. That hasn’t stopped Sky journalists flouting this today, though.

Sky has been dubbed backward and many other things for its policy, so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not the policy is upheld, since journalists including Mann have been blatantly ignoring it.

Contact PR Rich Leigh with it by Tweeting him @GoodandBadPR or by emailing rich@10yetis.co.uk throughout the week and we’ll happily credit you for your trouble.

Rich also writes about PR stunts at PRexamples.com. Good and Bad PR is a feature on the blog of 10 Yetis PR Agency.