We all survived another week in media-land so let’s take a gander through the good and bad in the world of PR from the last seven days.

Larry ousted by Keir’s little kitty

It has been another tough week for Keir Starmer. The realisation of just how big the bullseye on his back is now he is PM will have hit home hard after the clothes saga. That’s not why he gets Bad PR this week, though.

Larry the Downing Street cat seems to have fallen out of favour with Team Labour. Not only has Kier’s family brought in a new kitten, but word has started to circulate that a formal announcement is being prepped for the sad day when Larry goes on up to the ‘Great Mouse Playground in the Sky. Surely, a bit premature?

In addition, it has emerged that a Scottish Labour MP has branded Larry “a little shit”.

His crime? Refusing to hang around and have his picture taken with all the excitable new Labour MPs.

I can forgive Kier for most things, but not sticking up for his mouse-munching cat is not good enough. Come on Kier, get your cat-hating crew in line.

Jassy gets sassy

Talking about getting your staff in line, Amazon’s Andy Jassy has had enough and is demanding everyone at the global retail, media, tech solutions and everything else giant gets back to their desk.

The fully remote era of Amazon workers ended a little while ago but now they are reverting from a hybrid split of three days in the office back to five days a week. Jassy argued remote working has thwarted innovation and reduced the entrepreneurial approach of the brand.

In a double whammy of middle manager hell, he is also introducing a bureaucracy whistleblowing email inbox. Staff can use it to flag any examples in the company where too much red tape has held back employee success. It basically sounds like Jassy is keen to get the Amazon monster firing again. I call this as Good PR, the city folk and company analysts will love it.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

Instagram is trying to reel in parents and appease global social media regulatory bodies with a series of announcements aimed at making it safer for kids to use their platform.

The new rules around privacy, usage restrictions and parental access for those who have an account and are under the age of 15 kick in here next Tuesday. The message landed really well with the media and regulators/watchdogs alike.

The kids themselves, well, they are all a bit miffed. They don’t want to have to ask their parents to change the various settings on their account. There is also a very real concern that kids will just, shock horror, find a workaround to dodge the new rules.

A strong move by Meta but is it enough? I doubt it will dent the amount of abuse and trolling across social media.

Soaked by Shell

I don’t think I have ever spoken about one of our own campaigns in this column. It would be a slight abuse of my position, maybe. Stuff it, I am going to this week, not least because of the response of the oil company, Shell UK.

We did a PR stunt for Asthma + Lung UK and took over several playgrounds in London, Manchester and Birmingham, to highlight the fact many of them are in toxic air areas (over 99% actually). The media across broadcast, print and online loved it.

The park I was in happens to be opposite a Shell office. I think, maybe, they mistakenly thought we were the rebellion lot and, maybe, took a somewhat novel approach by turning the sprinklers on. It soaked our camera equipment, props, staff and me, in my clothes. All at 6.35am.

Still, it gave the security goons a giggle and also won it the much-coveted award of Bad PR.

Google lends an ear

Let’s end on a Good PR for a brand that gets battered more than a north Atlantic cod, Google. Those of you who have an eye on SEO will have been following the Helpful Content Update drama.

In March the search giant ran an algorithm update that looked to try and eradicate sites that were pumping out more AI content than a University student writing their final assignment.

Unfortunately lots of “innocent” sites seem to have been falsely accused and were also nuked. Several of the owners of the defunct sites had a strong media profile and highlighted how odd it was that the big national newspapers were ranking for things like “The Top 10 Best Air Fryers”, but sites that actually knew about tech like this no longer appeared.

Many of the national news sites stood accused of not actually reviewing the tech they were crowing about. Instead it was alleged that they were just banging through traffic to the places where you could buy them, using an affiliate link, so the media earned a kick back whenever a sale was made. Scandal all round.

Google actually listened and in a new algorithm update that happened in mid August to mid September, they gave some of the life back to the knowledgeable and experienced sites that knew what they were on about.

A global brand actually listening? Nice one Google!