Good PR of the week
 

Roy the redeemer
 

An eight-ton, 100ft-tall sculpture of Roy Hodgson gained serial pranksters Paddy Power a lot of media attention last week, erected on the white cliffs of Dover to coincide with the start of Euro 2012.

The giant board-built statue is a humorous rehash of the world-famous Christ the Redeemer statue found in Rio de Janeiro, and is allegedly visible from the coast of France, 16 miles away.

The bookie hoped the sculpture, which took two months to build, would “unsettle” the French.

I can’t imagine Roy would have been cheap to put together, but PR agency Taylor Herring made sure the image – and Paddy Power – found its way into most of the nationals and many other online outlets.

Lynx cleans up
 

Lynx Australia has launched a fun, “ballsy” new campaign encouraging men to clean their balls, because “nobody has fun playing with dirty equipment“.

The pun-laden video below is filmed in a QVC-style, demonstrating just how effective Lynx’s body buffer and shower gel is when it comes to cleaning balls.

The infomercial stars Australian tennis star Sophie Monk, and was created by, funnily enough, digital agency Soap.

The ad is an almost exact copy of Soap’s previous work in 2010 with Axe, the international name for Lynx (well, everywhere but the UK, Ireland and Australia, according to the font of all debateable knowledge, Wikipedia), but that doesn’t seem to have put people off, with more than 400,000 people watching the new Lynx ad. I’ve personally never seen an agency just copy another campaign without even really repurposing it, but two years seems to be long enough to have done so. Now you know – if you can’t think of any good new client ideas, just think of ones you’ve done in the past and hope nobody minds!

Thanks to Louise Moran for letting me know about this one!

Bad PR of the week
 

Mouthing off
 

Continuing with phallic PR, this week’s bad PR is courtesy of, well, everyone. Everybody seems to have taken offence at Durex’s decision to post a fake ad on its UK Facebook page, featuring a woman with plasters over the corners of her lips, advertising XXXL condoms.

As mentioned, and to clear it up, this is a fan image, using an image from an old Burger King ad. The issue arose when the ad was posted by Durex with the words “Poor woman (or maybe a lucky one?)”, with many angry commentators stating they didn’t like the fact that physical damage was being associated with sexy-time activities. The backlash prompted Durex to delete the picture, which was of course, by this point, already being shared around the world.

Durex trended on Twitter and, as far as I can tell, has not yet apologised, which is normally the least a brand can to move beyond things like this.

The fan-made Durex ad:

The Burger King ad:

Thanks to Alex Wilson and Will Gardiner for getting in touch with this one.

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.