Good PR of the week
 

Commuters drag male abuser
 

The National Centre for Domestic Violence launched a new interactive campaign at Euston Station, highlighting the way intervening in domestic violence (in a safe way) can help the victim.
 
A number of billboards in the station were utilised for this campaign, with the left-most showing a man being generally aggressive to a woman, beside text asking you to “use your phone to stop this now“, asking you to drag him away at ncdv.org.uk/stop.
 
Once you went to the site on your smartphone, as shown in the video below, you could just thumb the man to the right, which set off a conveyor-belt effect, moving the man further away from the woman across the billboards. Note that I went onto the site on my laptop and wasn’t able to “swipe” using my mouse.
 
The campaign was created by ad agency JWT London. I’m personally glad there are campaigns like this that give people information to highlight domestic violence and try to do something about it, but I feel it could have gone that extra mile and been viewable to people that weren’t just at Euston Station.
 
I had to watch the below video to understand the immediacy of swiping the man away and how it affects the billboards, so feel like a webcam set up at Euston and showed via the website for people not at the station would have done this and given the campaign a wider audience, as it would have been shared more online.

Lynx is a clear winner
 

Now we’re done with the worthwhile campaign, can we get back to marketing straight from the mind of The Man, please?
 
Thanks, and enjoy this fun consumer stunt:
 
To launch the limited edition Lynx Anarchy spray, Lynx and Soap Creative created the “world’s first invisible ad“, using the windows of a terraced house in Sydney, Australia, some “hacked” LCD TVs and polarised glasses.
 
As you can see in the video created for the stunt below (which features young and attractive people all clearly approved by The Man, like that scene in Mad Men where Draper and Sterling are casting), sexiness abounds, with the ads displaying raunchiness you’d normally have to pay for or use your browser’s secret-shopping tab to see. The dogs swimming in a water-filled room are odd additions, but who am I to question it?

Diageo fails to give award
 

Rival brewer Bulldog claims that global drinks company Diageo has “deliberately abused its position” as the principle sponsor for the BII Scotland awards to deny selected winners BrewDog a gong.

At an event on 6 May, BrewDog employees were seated with judges. When the winner of the category Bar Operator of the Year 2012 was announced and it wasn’t BrewDog, one of the judges said that the independent judging panel had voted for it as “clear winners” of the award.

As is stated here in the press release highlighting the snub, the “winners” refused to accept the award, as it had BrewDog engraved on it.

Here’s a picture of a BrewDog employee with a wooden spoon.

James Watts, co-founder of the cheeky brewers (also behind the beer bottled within taxidermied animals you may remember) had the following to say: “As a sponsor, Diageo had no right to interfere with the independent judging process, but it abused its position to make a small and stupid statement like this one.”

He added: “Two days after the award, I took a phone call from Kenny Mitchell, chairman of the BII and Award Committee. He told me directly; ‘We are all ashamed and embarrassed about what happened. The awards have to be an independent process and BrewDog was the clear winner. Diageo, the main sponsor, approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. It said if this happened it would pull its sponsorship from all future BII events and its representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening. We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We were blackmailed and bullied by Diageo. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog.’”

As reported on BBC news, Diageo have since apologised saying: "There was a serious misjudgement by Diageo staff at the awards dinner on Sunday evening in relation to the Bar Operator of the Year Award, which does not reflect in anyway Diageo's corporate values and behaviour."

Thanks to Steff Lewis-Sabey and Alex Myers of BrewDog’s PR agency Manifest for Tweeting 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 we’ll happily credit you for your trouble.

Good and Bad PR is a feature on the blog of 10 Yetis PR Agency. Rich also writes about PR stunts at PRexamples.com.