The summer hiatus is over and I am back with a new season of Good and Bad PR. I have returned a little heavier on the family side, courtesy of some Good PR by my partner, Melanie, having a beautiful little boy. We have named him Sebastian.

Enough of the mushy stuff, let’s get down to business.

Honk if you hate driverless cars

Waymo is a driverless car company with a car park near a residential block of flats in San Francisco. The thing with driverless cars is that their settings are fixed, quite rightly, at “ultra-safe”.

This means that if anything comes near to crossing their path they let out the kind of scared noises usually reserved for parents of your partner when you are giving them a lift. In Waymo cars case, it is loud beeps.

All good when it comes to stopping the car from hitting a loved pet that is dashing in front of it. Not so good when it comes to all the Waymo cars trying to park in their dedicated car park at the end of the day.

The cars driving and parking so close together were triggering honking galore and the residents had enough. They complained and little appears to have been done, so they posted it on social media and the story travelled the globe.

Waymo have now had a calming word with their cars and encouraged them to calm down a bit, and lowered the sound levels of the honking. Peace has been restored to San Francisco, and only a minor Bad PR rating from me, as I found the story funny.

Bin man cleans up after PR blunder by Veolia

When a community movement happens for one of your employees, brands need to jump at the chance to harness that positive feeling. I have plenty of experience of this thanks to my time at First Group.

We had plenty of misses on our PR journey, but every now and again, when a driver or employee did something that earned love from the local community, we always jumped on it.

Not Veolia and Bromley Council though. They seemingly prevented one of the bin collection staff, Paul Spiers, from accepting a gift from local residents amounting to £3k, to send him on an overseas holiday for the second time in his life.

You know the story, lots of corporate defensive quotes about company policy

Fortunately, before you could say “can you do me a presentation deck on the cost to benefit analysis” a local travel company bent the rules of a competition to ensure our guy still got his holiday.

It could have been a real win for Veolia and helped with their corporate reputation but instead they were left looking like killjoys. Bad PR for them.

Bartlett gets chastised by ASA

Everyone’s favourite marketing-industry pantomime villain, Steven Bartlett got bitten by the ASA last week. His crime? He did not declare his commercial involvement when crowing about Huel and Zoe.

I am surprised the BBC have stuck with him, or at least not carried out a stronger set of due diligence checks. Or maybe they have, and this is why he has been unusually quiet about the latest image set-back.

Lights out for creepy cyber-security company

Palo Alto did nothing to shift the reputation of IT people as being a bit “off-message” when it comes to understanding social-norms. The world’s largest cyber-security conference happened last week and given the global IT outage the happened recently, you would think they don’t need any help on the PR front.

Palo Alto, a service provider to that sector, decided to host the conference after-party and, well, they went a bit 1980’s in their approach to room décor. They decided to adorn the room with women dressed in revealing outfits, with lampshades on their heads.

I don’t know what the point was that they were trying to make, and I don’t really care either. It triggered a swift CEO apology, a thoroughly understandable diatribe of hate from many in the cyber-security industry and I would guess a firing of their marketing event activation manager.

What were they thinking. It reminded me of the betting and gaming conferences that go on today, around the world, and usually in places where the media don’t pick up on stuff like this. Maybe a story for another day.