Insects can’t help getting caught by a billboard, but a restaurant in Arizona has no excuse for getting caught up in a fight

Good PR of the week
 

As bad PR is a long one this week, I thought I’d start with a couple of video PR campaigns and leave the wordiness ‘til later:

Sticky insects
 

Here’s a nice stunt by Orphea4D Protection to promote its insecticide spray, turning an outdoor billboard in Milan into a giant fly and mosquito trap over time, as you can see in this time-lapse video:

Cool 7Up stunt
 

In the second of this week’s video campaigns, 7Up had a huge “melting” vending machine-sized ice block carved, placing cans inside. As the day went on, members of the public were able to help themselves to one of the drinks:

Thanks to Inderdeep Gill for spotting this!

Bad PR of the week
 

Amy’s Baking nightmare
 

Witness the most complete and incredible social media meltdown by a business EVER.

Amy’s Baking Company Baking Boutique and Bistro, a restaurant in Arizona, US, was recently featured in an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Ramsay dumped married owners Samy and Amy Bouzaglo for being “too difficult to work with“. (I know what you’re thinking ... Samy and Amy? Not enough couples have near-identical names these days).

This week, the couple took to the restaurant’s Facebook page (all offending statuses and comments have been deleted now) to defend themselves against comments from viewers of the show.

Despite the fact the comments were deleted, everybody’s favourite usually-pointless-but-usually-humorous online list compiler Buzzfeed documented them all. Here they are, in order (credit to Ryan and all those behind this Buzzfeed article):

It starts oddly, a tad too pious for my liking, but still, normal-ish:

Then something happened to the caps lock key. As we all know, the more capital letters you use, the more in the right you are:

Then “ressling” was brought into it, rightly highlighting that Americans enjoy being entertained by athletes like John Cena and Randy Orton:

Then they entirely misunderstand the point of “social” media:

Samy then found a Reddit thread and issued an open invitation. Perhaps he wanted to set differences with a good ressle? 

Then there was the moment they threatened legal action against, well, the world:

Then Samy insisted she wasn’t a witch, but a child of God, borrowing a bit from a documentary about the Salem witch trials I once watched:

Then they bragged about their “multi million business” (sic):

Then they called Gordon Ramsay HORRIBLE:

She might not be a witch, but she is WONDER WOMAN, declaring they’d be parents to A HUMAN KID, as opposed to ...?:

Then the caps lock key was fixed, but the batshit-craziness wasn’t:

And then, with one of the thousands of recorded gods since the dawn of time (6,000 years ago, don’t you know?) allegedly on their side, the mental updates unfortunately stopped:

The actual restaurant page has gone from a couple of thousand “likes” to more than 45,000 in a few days, with the following seemingly serious status posted up, in which the couple say they’ll be GETTING THE FBI INVOLVED as a result of being hacked:

“Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy & Samy”

The obligatory parody accounts have started, including one Facebook page dedicated to catching the “hackers” responsible for the statuses and this funny Twitter account.

Huge thanks to John Rockley, Jonathan Kerr and Meg McAllister for tweeting me with this! 

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 he’ll happily credit you for your trouble.