Here we go again. Another week of PR hits and misses, join me as I ramble through it all.

Borkowski bags a win

Let’s start with one of our own. Everyone’s favourite celebrity media guru, Sir Borkowski of PR had a massive PR hit this week. He is one of the backers and strategists behind celebrity and business individual cancel insurance product, PREEMPT.

It combines his industry tekkers with a risk management and kidnap strategy company to offer celebrities a way out after putting their foot into it. Before you can shout “Welsh opera singer”, the press release listed modern day tactics of “bot farms” as a reason why celebrities can find themselves on the back foot for naively saying the wrong thing.

How many people will actually sign up to use the product? Who knows. Did it feel like a marketing stunt? Maybe. Then again, Borkowski is one of the best in the business at this, so who is surprised. Great PR for PREEMT and the top man himself.

Guinness waits for right price (tick follow, tock follow)

Another very media savvy brand is Guinness. They have had an interesting PR week where the owners have felt the need to come out and confirm that they have no plans to sell the business.

Having worked in acquisitions for a global brand I also know that this kind of public statement more likely than not means that they would consider an offer. I believe it is called “talking up the price” in the corporate world. This has come at the perfect time for Guinness as we head into the prime black-stuff drinking period.

Six Nations, Cheltenham Festival and “Friday” as it is also known in our house are peak sales times for Guinness. With product shortage worries hitting the headlines over the peak Q4 retail trading period, there is no doubt that the brand is in demand and they are in a very strong position with regards to the potential value. A great PR move.

DeepSeek goes silent

If you never needed evidence for a case study that a week is a long time in the media, this next Bad PR story is it.

AI wunder-bot DeepSeek had a fantastic Monday. They hit the global headlines for allegedly being even better than the likes of ChatBLT. By Tuesday they had reached peak-hysteria and as we all know, that triggers scepticism and hate.

By Wednesday, the wheels had loosened somewhat! Bloomberg ran a story, briefed in by OpenAI, that accused the China based DeepSeek of training its LLM on parts of its own software. The irony of OpenAI saying this having been accused by many global media outlets of “liberating” their content to train the OpenAI tool is not lost on this columnist.

The China based DeepSeek responded in the way that typical Chinese brands and government departments do. They ignored all requests for a response to the story and instead spoke about the number of malicious attacks the company is now facing from hackers.

The company has been forced to put new sign ups on hold and we await the next instalment on the AI saga.

Popeyes’ eye-popping PR

Popping back to the world of Good PR and a brand that is having a meteoric rise in the UK media landscape is Popeyes. This is the chicken shop that hails from the state next to the Finger Licking Good posse and has hit the ground running over here.

The brand has opened 65 restaurants in the UK since it landed over here and announced this week that it plans to open a new one every week in 2025. Last year, this very same columnists poked fun at a rival US fast food brand for making claims, without evidence, that they planned to open hundreds of new stores. This time around though, Popeyes clearly means business.

Having seen the store opening PR machine in full swing in 2024 via its work with Speed Communications, I know just how slick the operation is. Great news for the UK and great work by the Popeyes PR team.

A Labour of love

Popeyes opening new stores is exactly what the Labour government needed to try and counter the negativity that continues after its disaster-budget. Another week rolls by with more reports coming from the business community about needing to make job cuts in order to balance the books after that budget.

An interaction I had with a Labour MP only two weeks ago showed just how tone-deaf the party is to the actual state of the nation. I won’t go into detail but the lack of understanding of the challenges face by businesses of any size in the UK right now is hard to comprehend. The Labour comms team should have leapt on positives like the Popeyes story, no matter how relatively small they are, to try and give off an impression of business confidence.

Morrisons and Sainsburys were the latest big brands to cite the budget as the direct reason for its decision to make significant job cuts. They do so without a credible sounding defence from the Government. Someone senior in the Labour party comms machine really needs to get to grips with what is going on in the media landscape and try to get ahead of the stories.

As someone who worked, albeit very briefly, under Alistair Campbell, and seen his PR wizardry in full and glorious effect, I can only imagine how much it must be hurting him to see his once glorious PR-machine now laying in tatters.

Elongating the truth

I just think we all need to admit that Elon Musk loves to mess with people. This week was no different, although he took on his fellow space nerds with the latest Musk-Show.

In February 2018 Musk shot his own Tesla Roadster into space to herald the first SpaceX launch. Fast forward 7 years and last week eagle-eyed astronomers proudly announced that they had spotted a new asteroid that was orbiting the earth. You pieced it together dearest readers. Team Telescope had to come out less than a week later and say that they were cancelling out the new asteroid as it was apparently just Musk’s Roadster flying on by. You can’t make this stuff up. A rare funny PR hit for Elon.