While the timing of any ill-fated PR stunt-turned-disaster can be way off, ours is spot on. Enter All in Good Taste, our new monthly round up of PR gold stars and faux pas, which is landing just in time for a retrospective round-up of the year’s best and worst foodie FCK ups and how they were handled. Is all publicity good publicity? It would make our job a lot easier, but we’ll leave it to you to decide.
KFC pulling legs
With a disasterclass in crisis recovery, an ill-advised change in supply chain left the colonel’s crew short of chicken, and having to shut stores. Keeping abreast of the public’s reaction, they published a series of ads in The Sun & The Metro under a clever FCK motif, apologising for the lack of chicken.
The puns came thicker and faster than the chain’s gravy side – ‘The chicken crossed the road, just not too our restaurants’ – but are the chicken quips enough to placate a nation of hungry customers, or is this one to chuck in the family sized FCK-it bucket.
Brewing up a storm
‘Craft’ beer brewing bastion, Brewdog, made the headlines most months this year. But the standout was a stab at a stand over the gender paygap; with an overtly sexist rebrand of their Punk IPA – Pink IPA – which would be cheaper for female identifying drinkers. Cynical headline-grab making light (beer) of a serious issue, or heartfelt attempt at effecting change?
Don’t be an idiom
PETA, the group that divides opinion with its radicalisation of anti-animal cruelty messages, in an attempt to stop people ‘trivialising animal cruelty’ with every day sayings, managed to trivialise the struggle of victims of homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and for that matter – most other ism’s. While we’re sure carnivores and vegans alike are about to stand side-by-side in dropping ‘bringing home the bacon’ for ‘bringing home the bagels’, I’m not sure they’ll be making 2019’s Oxford Dictionary.
If all else fails, quit
Not all comments will sit well, Will Sitwell, and while the inbox of any journalist would be enough to drive most of us to murder – we’d proceed with caution when verbalising it, or in this case emailing. The social-media bandwagon takes no prisoners, and in no time at all Will’s reply to a PR pitch suggesting ‘a series on killing vegans, one by one’ went viral, the only actual casualty being a career.
Frozen festive feels
Finally, a festive feel-good as Iceland managed to make a monkey out of mainstream media. When the ode to the palm oil was found to be too political to broadcast, the budget supermarket managed to save a few quid on ad-slots by posting the full advert, and reason for not broadcasting, on its own channels. Queue the viral uproar, and more impact then the TV spots could ever have made.
