Good PR of the week
 

Hurts cleans up
 

This is brilliant and, in a PR world where pitching on such an individual level is rare, a nice case study of personalised and creative marketing.

Hurts – a band I’ve never heard of, but according to the ever-accurate Wikipedia is an English synthpop duo – was behind this fun PR effort, targeting music website Popjustice with a secretive succession of actual, real-life posts.

This post on Pop Justice explains all and gives you the background, but, in short (in Popjustice’s words):

“A tape recorder arrived in the post last week, and a letter arrived this morning from Russia, along with a ticket to pick up a mysterious jacket from a dry cleaning place.”

The journalist went to the “dry cleaning place” and, lo and behold, in the pocket of the jacket was a gold cassette, on which were a few song samples, some “radio waffle” and lots of crackling, highlighting the reason many people who read this will never have bought, played or seen a tape cassette before. I just about remember them (being now somebody in his “mid-twenties”, boo), but my God, it sounds crap.

Lovely stuff.

Thanks to Ravi Pau and Blue Rubicon’s Fleur Wylie for tweeting with this!

Bad PR of the week
 

Say “neigh” to horse meat
 

You’ve all read about it, seen it or indeed eaten it.

That’s right; I’m talking about #horseburgers.

Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Iceland and Dunnes Stores (who the hell is that?) have all come under fire after a routine meat quality test found horse meat – up to 29 per cent in one case – in value burgers sold by the supermarkets.

Lidl, Aldi and Iceland appear to have escaped the wrath of much of the media and general public, with £300m (1.1 per cent) knocked off Tesco’s market value in the wake of the horse meat discovery. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), which carried out the tests, said that the burgers containing horse DNA were produced in two plants in Ireland and one in the UK.

The supermarkets have all reacted by taking the value burgers off their shelves and Tesco has gone one step further, buying ads in the UK nationals to apologise:

Paddy Power were quick to offer odds on what animal other than cow would be found next in a supermarket burger (in this fantastic joke roundup by The Metro’s Jimmy Nsubuga) and another especially handsome PR person* (ahem) worked with a discount code site to create a calculator helping you work out how many horses you could eat in a lifetime based on burger consumption (>here on the Mirror).

*If my mum says so, it must be true, right?

Have you seen any good or bad PR?
 

Contact PR Rich Leigh with it by tweeting him @GoodandBadPR or by emailing rich@10yetis.co.uk throughout the week and we’ll happily credit you for your trouble.

Good and Bad PR is a feature on the blog of 10 Yetis PR Agency.