Good PR

Have you ever stepped, bare foot, onto a piece of Lego? If you have, you probably invented a whole new string of swear words at the time and the memory of the experience is enough to make your feet recoil in pain.

Well, Lego is now trying to do its bit to help prevent the injuries often sustained by parents stepping on the bricks so carelessly discarded around the house by their darling children.

Alongside Brand Station, a French advertising agency, Lego came up with the idea of slippers containing extra padding to help put a stop to those painful steps. Only 1,500 pairs of the colourful, comfy slippers have been made and will be given away randomly for free to people making a Christmas wish list on the Lego France website. 

The soles have extra grip and the familiar circular raised pattern seen on the top of Lego bricks, with a red and yellow design on top.

Even though all it has done is create a branded pair of Lego slippers, which I doubt would protect your feet better than any other slippers, the media has been quick to pick up on the stunt. I've seen the story on a lot of different websites already, like Metro, CNET, Gizmodo, Daily Mail, Huffington Post, ITV and more. You have to hand it to Lego, this was a clever move.

If the toy company would have just branded up a pair of slippers and said to the media "here you go, write about these", Lego would have been blasted for being too promotional. However, with a clever message and good accompanying content, the story did really, really well.

Here is the video that was issued with the Lego slippers story...

Bad PR

Bloomingdale's was forced to apologise recently for one of its Christmas adverts, after a massive error in judgement by whoever was behind the idea.

You see, the department store's one-page advert in its holiday catalogue appeared to reference date rape.

A female model can be seen laughing in the advert, with a male model looking over at her in a bit of a sinister manner, if you ask me. She's looking away from him and the message in the middle reads “Spike your best friend's eggnog when they're not looking”. Oh dear. Someone's getting the sack for that one.

It's really obvious how that could be taken the wrong way. In truth, I'm not even sure how it was even intended to come across ... that it's funny to get your mates drunk without them realising? Maybe a group of male friends would have been a safer bet for the ad, rather than a man acting strangely next to a woman. Really, they should have just binned the idea altogether. It was never going to be anything other than controversial in the worst kind of sense.

Bloomingdale's has since said sorry via Twitter, writing "We heard your feedback about our catalogue copy, which was inappropriate and in poor taste. Bloomingdale's sincerely apologises." Did it know that this would happen all along? Did it deliberately include the advert in the catalogue to drum up some media coverage, thinking that no PR is bad PR? Maybe.

Whatever the case, it really annoyed people and attracted a lot of criticism and Twitter abuse for the brand. It wasn't just the US media that picked up on this advert either; a quick Google search will show you just how far it went. Not cool, Bloomies, not cool.

Written by Shannon Peerless, 10 Yetis, @ShazzaYeti on Twitter.

Seen any good or bad PR recently, you know what to do, @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10yetis.co.uk on email.