Good PR of the week
 

BrewDog reveals all
 

They are not everybody’s cup of craft beer, but BrewDog’s founders, with the help of Manifest Comms, pulled off another PR stunt this week, projecting a 60ft image of their naked bodies onto the Houses of Parliament, in homage to Gail Porter in the late 1990s. The “painting the town blue” campaign also included messages projected onto Battersea Power Station and Marble Arch.

I’ve seen quite a few fans of the brewery ask why it doesn’t just stick to creating good beer, but as we all know, if it wasn’t for the stunts the company is becoming known for, half the people drinking the beer would never have heard about the brand and bought into its values in the first place. Anywho, here’s the moneyshot:

LG and Coke stunt videos
 

And now, because I have a couple of video stunts for you, I’ll keep my waffle relatively short.

Here’s one from LG, aiming to demonstrate the lifelike clarity of its new monitors:

And here’s one from Coca Cola Zero, in which it gives “members of the public“ (you’ll see) the chance to win tickets to watch the new James Bond movie, Skyfall – if they can run through the train station in under 70 seconds. Well worth a watch:

Bad PR of the week
 

Zynga’s exit strategy backfires
 

While Apple was busy shilling its latest Product You Don’t Need™, Zynga, the online game company behind FarmVille, was busy telling more than 100 employees to pack their desks and get out.

The workers were informed they had a couple of hours to leave – a request that coincided with the Apple event all too coincidentally for the online public, who quickly shared the messages tweeted by ex-Apple designer Justin Maxwell:

The job losses were confirmed by Gamasutra here, an article that also includes the internal memo sent out by CEO Marc Pincus. Zynga share prices dropped and nobody seemed pleased with the company.

But why?

I mean, nobody likes making redundancies, but the problem here is that it was so obviously timed to happen during the Apple event in the hope that the news would be lost under the sycophantic cries of “ERMAHGERD this new product is a WHOLE 2.5 per cent smaller, honey, sell the children, I need this in my life“.

When one person can, with one quick tweet, share a story quicker and wider than any newspaper on the planet can, we have to agree that companies just don’t have the comfort of being able to bury bad news anymore.

Zynga could have avoided the majority of hatred towards it if only it hadn’t tried to take this the back-door route.

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.