Good PR

If you’ve watched any Sky TV channels recently, or been to the cinema for that matter, you may have seen the ads for the new crime drama Fortitude. You know, it’s got that bit in with the old guy saying, “I shot him. BANG!” in the really sinister voice?

Anyway, Sky Atlantic has been doing its bit to drum up interest in the upcoming series and, more recently, that took on the form of a PR stunt in Central London.

An eight-foot polar bear was let loose on the streets to roam around the capital, even getting on the tube at Charing Cross train station at one point and having a stroll along the South Bank. Nobody was eaten alive or anything gruesome like that though, because this was in fact an animatronic polar bear (created by a team of 19 at Hollywood special effects experts FX).

Fortitude is set in Svalbard in the Arctic Circle and the Sky Atlantic director Zai Bennett said, “There are 3,000 polar bears to 713 residents” in the series and that they “present an ever present threat to the Fortitude’s inhabitants”.

The idea to give Londoners a chance to see what it might be like to come face to face with one of the world’s most dangerous animals was certainly a good one and it went down well on Twitter too.

There are plenty of great images that came from the stunt taking place and I’ve seen the story on media outlets like the Metro, Mashable, Huffington Post, City AM and Yahoo!

Stunt executed by Taylor Herring.

Bad PR

We all understand the importance of proofreading our work, emails, messages, articles, letters, etc., to make sure that there are no typos or grammatical errors, however; no organisation knows just how important this is at the moment, than Companies House. 

The government registrar, whose responsibilities include providing detailed information and news on all registered companies, recently published liquidation news regarding a “Taylor & Sons”.  Unfortunately, for both Companies House and “Taylor & Sons”, the actual name of the firm in liquidation was “Taylor & Son”.  As a result of the simple typo, the engineering firm “Taylor & Sons” lost customers and lenders, leading to the eventual collapse of the business.

Now, having gone through a high-court battle and winning, Taylor & Sons is now due £8.8m in compensation from Companies House for the very simple error. As a state-run organisation, I guess that’ll be “us” the British tax payer footing the bill.

Lesson here, make sure you proofread, especially if you work in the public sector, so the British public isn’t any more out of pocket please!

Shannon Haigh, 10 Yetis, @ShazzaYeti on Twitter

Seen any good or bad PR recently, you know what to do, @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10yetis.co.uk on email.