A whole year has rolled around and who doesn’t love a yearly round up? Well, it doesn’t matter what you want, you are getting one anyway.

When prepping for this article (despite what you may think, this is not my first rodeo), I like to have an overall think as to who had an overall Good or Bad year in PR. On the Good PR front brands like Greggs have had another stormer and solidified it's position as one of the UK’s most successful and loved brands. The Double Gregger bus tour has caught my eye, as have TV appearances in various documentaries. Will it continue into 2025, of course it will!

On the Bad PR front it has been yet another heavy year in politics. The Tory’s got annihilated in the polls and Labour came Starming into power. Within a few weeks of being in power, Labour were in the doldrums. A series of muddled policy announcements combined with a business-bashing budget put them on the PR back foot from which it has yet to recover.

One unlikely winning double act from 2024 must be Trump and Musk. Both evaded prison time, Musk saying himself that if Trump didn’t get voted in, he could find himself in trouble with the law. In the end though, Trump got in and Musk has been handed a worryingly important role in the new government, to try and identify and eradicate government spending waste. Few would have thought that Trump could get back into power, and watching the queue of big business owners such as Zuckerberg and Bezos queuing up to kiss the royal ring has been awkward to watch.

Let’s take a meander through the months.

January

Brewdog had a torrid 2023 and whilst its PR world calmed down significantly through 2024, it did start the year with a negative bang. It announced to staff that it was withdrawing the National Living Wage for workers. Ouch, the trade unions loved that.

The ITV documentary on the Post Office scandal was front of the media agenda in January and really shone a light on what the Post Masters had been through. January also saw M&S kick off a fantastic year, by winning a fastest growing supermarket gong and were also declared the retail winners from Christmas 2023.

February

February was an action packed month. Fast fashion supremo Boohoo got a big poke after it was revealed that some of its made in Britain range actually came from overseas.

Internet retail giant Amazon got a slap by the government in France for overzealous monitoring of its factory workers. Whilst shrinkflation continued to dominate the media in the UK, Premier Foods won us over by announcing that it was cutting the costs for a load of its brands, including Mr. Kipling.

In February we also learned that the petrol car industry was guilty of lobbying the media with negative misinformation about the electric car industry. Who would have thought it. It was the first negative story of many for the water industry in 2024. Southern Water had a cyber-attack and a load of customer details were pinched. To be fair, it was probably the most positive, negative story that the water industry faced this year, and many more will follow in 2025.

Aldi continued its march into British hearts with an announcement that it was creating 5000 jobs via an aggressive expansion plan.

March

Looking back, March felt like a quieter month on the PR front. We had Princess Kate’s photoshop scandal and her fantastically heartfelt recovery. The Mayor of London also announced that he was going to be “donating” all of the cars that are being scrapped because of ULEZ over to Ukraine. I don’t know if they willingly accepted a load of Vauxhall Nova’s or if they even made it to the front line, but, they are off our streets.

Specsavers did a few eye-catching media stunts throughout the year. It's the Paddy Power of the vision sector, and I did like its March campaign of balancing a Specsavers branded van on one of those bollards that just pops up in the street. Eye catching, funny and most importantly, the media loved it.

April

April was quite a tough month for the Scots amongst us. A bunch of muggles got together and complained that the daily canon firing ceremony from Edinburgh castle was too loud. The century’s old tradition nearly got cancelled. At the last minute the Defence Secretary stepped in and said it was carrying on.

If that was not a significant enough blow to the hard-man image of the Scots, then came the announcement from NHS Scotland that it was prescribing vitamin D to its population. Ricketts made a comeback due to the lack of sunshine up there and vitamin D was needed. Maybe they should have fired a shower of it out of a cannon.

On a more serious note, April saw the first ever in-depth report into the downside of using a vape. If smoking is bad for the lungs, it was determined that vaping was lethal for the heart. As I said at the time, the scientists deserved extra praise for getting the study any air time given the size of the lobbying budgets of the vape companies.

My favourite positive story of the month was for the British Army who got global media love for lifting the ban on its trained-murder-crew from growing beards. Hoorah.

May

Wow, May was a busy month. From used car dealers winning top spot in a government enquiry into the most complained about sectors, through to the age old conversation about relevancy in Digital PR, it all went on.

The first story about the Co-Op Arena not being ready in time hit the headlines. Co-Op had to spend £100m to have its name associated with the live music arena, and then had to lend a few of its comms team to deal with the crisis.

The NHS started testing drone shipping for emergency blood deliveries across hospitals in London. Amazon has been trying to get this story to take off for years and the little old NHS got it up and flying in no time at all.

It was also the month where robot dogs with flame throwers attached to them were first put on sale in America. And sell they did! I am still blown away about this story, despite writing about it again several months after.

May saw two of my favourite stories for the whole year. A minor political party in Germany proposed a price cap on kebabs if they got into power. Sadly they didn’t. The muggles not being allowed anything nice was my other favourite story. A real-time digital screen portal was set up between New York and Dublin. It is now no longer real-time after you can guess what was repeatedly shown on the screens by the muggles. Don’t Google it.

June

June saw Rishi getting soaked as he announced in the pouring rain that a General Election was coming. The media image pretty much summed up the entire Conservative Party campaign, although he did have one good TV debate that shocked us all.

The big news in June was the revelation that orange juice is not made from just oranges. The world’s biggest OJ manufacturer, based in Brazil, announced that a poor harvest of oranges had left them no option but to pad out the drink with mangoes. I was blown away.

TfL was blamed for the downfall of the Evening Star. The publishers said that the successful deployment of WiFi on the tube network in London had resulted in sales plummeting.

The Electrical Safety First charity had the first of many good stories for the year. Not a week goes by without the charity getting in the media around the dangers of shonky electrical devices. I salute them and the media team for all their hard work.

The Spanish kicked off at our UK breweries in June. It turns out that the hugely popular Madri is actually made in Burton upon Trent and from nowhere near Spain. This led to Estrella bosses raising the issue with the Euro Parliament. More fool them, post-Brexit we can fake any beer that we want, thank you very much!

July

July was a light month on the column front. We dedicated a whole week to celebrating Kier Starmer getting the key to Number 10. If only I had known how short-lived his feel-good-factor would last for.

A litany of mistruths have now emerged about what Labour said it would do pre-election and what it actually did post-election. Politicians fibbing? Who would have thought it.

If that wasn’t enough, thirty years of hurt was increased to 58 after England lost the final game in the tournament. The court of public opinion was 50/50 between the “well, at least we got there” camp and the “Gareth Southgate is boring” brigade. He quickly quit and has never been seen since.

Oh yeah, and someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump during an election rally. They didn’t succeed and the resulting bounce helped him to go on and win.

August

Are you still with us? August was a fun month to write about. I loved the video that went global about driverless cars. There is a car park in America, next to a hotel, where all the driverless cars go to park themselves up for the night.

Sounds cute, but they beep whenever a collision could be imminent and in a packed car park, with loads of other cars trying to reverse park, this leads to a lot of beeping. Hotel residents had enough, filmed it and let TikTok go and do its thing.

The big news in August was Oasis reuniting. It was the feel good story that we all needed after Kier had recently told us the UK was going to pot. Then the drama began. First up, hotels near the stadiums where the brothers were performing whacked up their pricing. 

Next came surge pricing. It turns out that artist’s management companies can tell the ticket selling companies to keep nudging the prices up as demand increases. By the end of the Oasis ticket sales season, the brothers would only take payment in kidneys or Bitcoin that they could then sell for millions*. (* that's not true.)

Realistically, Noel and Liam didn’t have a clue about all this but the ticket companies blamed them and the management team fought back. The concerts have yet to happen and I am sure they will be fantastic, but it took the edge off the feel-good-summer.

September

September felt like a quiet month but when I look back, it was a bonza one. The most eye-watering story was a group of scientists who claimed to de-extinct animals. They were going to start with Do-Do’s, Tasmanian Devils and, erm, Wooly Mammoths. I have yet to see any bumbling around where I live... so I am guessing all is not going to plan yet.

Volvo and Ford announced they were scaling back EV investments in September, which set the tone for the rest of the year. As did news that Amazon was recalling its workforce back to the office for five days a week. It felt like Amazon doing this then gave other, slightly smaller, but still quite large, companies the chance to do the same.

The feel-good story of the month came from Ikea. To mark a new store opening, it announced that if you rocked up in your PJ’s and spent over £50 on stuff you need to put together yourself, you got a free breakfast. The middle class muggles loved it and they attended in their droves!

October

October is the month that saw me received the most messages around suggesting a story I should write about. I am usually lucky to get 20 messages a month with story ideas but over 100 people sent me the one about Sperm Bank fees going up.

I wasn’t the only person to write about it. Nearly all of the UK media loved it, and most used silly puns for headlines. I mean, come on, who would trivialize such an important thing. Me, it was me, I totally did that.

Elon got a poke in October after his very kind gesture of offering those without internet because of the storms in America free Starlink services actually came with a $400 price tag. That only came out after he got the praise for making the offer in the first place.

Google has had quite a quiet year in relative terms. The main story of year for them was around its helpful content update. For those not of an SEO disposition, this is basically Google tweaking its search algorithm so that muggles find what they are searching for fast.

The algo updates are shrouded in mystery but one of the factors they were keen to nail was rumoured to be websites who were over reliant on AI content. The bot went a bit OTT and nuked a whole load of sites that were actually super helpful.

Historically Google would have ignored the plight of publishers but it started to listen and made slight changes here and there. This is a major step forward to Google and got Good PR from me accordingly.

The best story of October? And maybe the year. The UK conker champion being accused of cheating. It went everywhere! Fortunately, he was cleared of all wrong doing. Our conker credibility remains in tact.

November

Steven Bartlett had a torrid year in the media. He got exposed for not declaring shares in brands he plugged on podcasts, namely Zoe and Huel. Then came the story that his podcast is guilty of sharing misinformation. The latter issue has not helped the podcast industry as a whole which is facing UK government scrutiny around its lack of regulation. Once again, he is pioneer in an industry, but this time, not for good.

Jaguar dominated November courtesy of its rebrand that everyone and their dog commented on. Once all the negativity around the brand had passed, the car giant launched a new concept car that blew people away and Jaguar was back.

Greggs ended the year as it started, with another big media win. It managed to get Nigella to sign up to the Christmas advert and the media and muggles loved it. Sticking with the retail theme, Sainsbury’s had a big industry win that could cause the other supermarkets to follow suit in 2025.

The jolly orange supermarket giant announced that it would expand its discount supermarket price matching to its express stores. These have typically been the stores with the highest pricing levels across all of the supermarket giants. The like of the Coop and Tesco face regular media criticism about the disparity in pricing between their bigger stores and their smaller community stores and this move could really help consumers.

There we have it, what a year. We are half way through December and already I can see that Brewdog’s founder has ended the year as he started, with a negative story, proving these things are quite cyclical.

A massive thanks to everyone who suggests stories, especially Alan Morrison who sends me lots of really good examples every week. A massive thanks to Ben from PRmoment for putting up with me and an even bigger thanks to Elizabeth, the long suffering Editor who joined this year and has to wade through my waffle every week.