It has been a heavy week on the news agenda front, but fear not as I am here to guide you through the Good and Bad PR moves of the last seven days.

Don’t forget, dearest reader, if you have a story that you think deserves praise or you want to throw a rival under a bus, I am here and treat all messages with confidence.

Adding fuel to the fire

Another terrible week for the Labour party. How quickly the milk of power has turned sour. The optimism that came with their storming to the top has now fully drained away. Mired in scandal about donations and freebies and the Winter Fuel cull announcement debacle, it must be one of the worst received policies since that time I asked my staff to come back into the office for an extra day a week, they face a pretty bleak time to come.

The trade unions, always a flaky bunch at the best of times in my experience, tried to get the Winter Fuel announcement reversed, but it won’t happen. There are now questions starting to be asked about new housing quota’s and whether or not they are more unrealistic than Boris trying to count how many kids he has.

The wheels have not come off but they badly need a popularist announcement to get them back on track. Bad PR for the Labour government as a whole so far.

If the price is right...

Big brands have also had a torrid week and I guess we are not shocked to hear the various issues have surrounded brands that consistently tout ‘customer first’ and ethical motives.

The first is Nike. To be fair, I was really surprised to see the brand was caught up in a misleading-pricing advertising scandal. They were caught showing adult sized shoes but with a price tag of the kids sizes. It was a third party retailer who did the deed but Nike had to try and defend it, and try they did.

Next up was Sky not declaring that a Now TV ad did not make it clear that a one off monthly fee would actually roll-on until you stopped it. In both cases you have to think a muggle would be quite stupid not to realise the reality of the two adverts, but then again, Costa has to warn consumers that their drink cups may contain hot drinks.

Tesco turns chicken in Aldi price match beef

Aldi was embroiled in yet another online battle this week, this time against Tesco and yet again, it came out on top. BBC Panorama looked into Tesco’s price-match claims and found the products were not actually like for like.

It picked out some chicken nuggets, chicken kievs and chilli, (and lots more etc) to see if the products were like for like and found that in lots of cases, Aldi’s products had a higher meat percentage. The BBC lapped up the coverage and Aldi went to town on social media.

Another massive win for the discount supermarket brands over the more established supermarket rivals and further evidence that the big brands are constantly trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

Meta’s stitch in time

Last week I gave Meta praise for trying to do more to protect our kids online. What a fool I was. It was clearly them getting ahead of a negative study they knew was coming out from Health Behaviour In School-aged Children (HBSC). HBSC surveyed 280k kids from around the world on their experiences of social media, and you guessed it, the results were not brilliant.

It revealed that 11% of those spoken to engage in social media in a negative way, up from 7% in the last stats.

In a way, I admire the Meta comms strategists for getting ahead of this story and putting their own new plans for countering it, the week before the HBSC news came out. It meant they were easily able to bat away any accusations of not doing enough with a “but only last week we announced XYZ improvements”.

Andy Barr expands his culinary palate, thanks to Amazon

For several years now in this column, and in most of the conference talks I do, I talk about the Amazon drone delivery service story being my favourite example of puff PR. It constantly delivers big hitting media coverage (pardon the pun) and usually at a peak shopping time to help them create “noise” for SEO reasons.

Well, I am going to eat my hat. The point that has always been lacking in the Amazon stories is the fact the Civil Aviation Authority (and its similar body’s overseas) have never confirmed it may happen. Well, now they have. The CAA says we can expect to see drone deliveries in our skies within three years.

My Dad would have loved the chance to carry out his threat when the story first broke six years ago and shoot down laptop sized packages to then sell on Ebay. Good PR for Amazon at least.