Good PR

Pancake-omatic
 

A Wallace and Gromit-inspired machine that promises the world’s freshest pancakes has been developed, commissioned by the happy egg co. to mark Shrove Tuesday.

Starting with a free range hen, the pancake making chain reaction took a team of four design engineers from Helix design production more than 200 hours to construct and 100 to test. It uses household objects, including an old-style gramophone and an electric whisk, and features a "luxury nest throne" for the hen to lay her egg in.

 From the press release:

"The pancake-making process starts with the hen laying an egg. As the egg rolls down a ramp, it pushes a wooden spoon, which winds up a gramophone. When the music starts, the egg is dropped into a holder on the spinning record, then swung around and cracked into a bowl containing other pancake ingredients. The bowl moves down a conveyor belt where the mixture is whisked and then released slowly into a hot pan. The pancake is cooked for 30 seconds, flipped and placed on a plate."

The contraption will go on display at the Design Museum later this month, and is shown in action in the video below:

Well done to Mischief PR for a nice job well done with this!

Bad PR
 

Scrunch or fold
 

To introduce Bad PR this week, I want you to do something for me. Please do play along.

Look across your desk. Look at the first person you see. Now, look them dead in the eyes and ask them:

“Do you scrunch or fold the toilet paper you use to wipe your backside?”

Go on, I’ll wait.

Done? Unless they’re the sort of fool you’d find in the Big Brother audition queue, or the sort of person you’d find eating urinal cakes as a dare, they’ll have felt incredibly uncomfortable and kindly asked you to never talk to them ever again. They’ll wonder what you could possibly do with this information.

This is exactly what Andrex has done with its amazingly misjudged "scrunch or fold" £3m marketing campaign and you too should be wondering what they could possibly do with this information.

Via a TV ad campaign, Andrex is asking members of the public to participate by visiting its homepage (I’m not linking out of principle), placing it firmly in the realms of a social marketing campaign and as such, perfect fodder for this column.

“A PR manager needs to be fired for this” is the highest voted comment on the Youtube video, which speaks volumes about the concept. I don’t think its British prudishness at play here; I just think it’s an entirely unnecessary campaign costing an extortionate amount of money.

Watch the TV ad below and swallow back the vomit as a woman erotically announces that she’s "a scruncher".  

Huge thanks to Atomic PR’s Amy Ronge and BT’s James Bates  for emailing 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.