PR ER.

To coincide with the imminent release of the Wicked movie adaptation and Jesus' conveniently festive birthday, toy company Mattel released a series of character figurines for sale, inadvertently blundering into a PR debacle.

Mattel packaging misprinted the movie site's URL, www.wickedmovie.com, sending consumers instead to another site's domain. Unwitting users would still have found copious plastic, lots of toys and a fair few Barbies but there the similarities with Mattel likely end as www.wicked.com is a hardcore porn site. Horrified company bigwigs were quick to publicly apologise for the, ahem, “cock up”, but the eminently shareable nature of the story saw the gaffe hit headlines around the world mid November ... and no doubt a few dads who were supposed to be buying cinema tickets caught with their pants down. Whilst the PR debacle likely made heads roll at Mattel, a family friendly company who typically try to distance themselves from BDSM, ATM, DP and certainly DVDA, the porn site in question saw its highest traffic in 12 years, so at least there was a happy ending.... or ten...

At a press conference for the Euro 2020 competition, Christiano Ronaldo took his seat at the mic to be met by two carefully positioned bottles of Coke. A 500ml bottle of Coke contains around 54g of sugar, a staggering 13.5 teaspoons of the stuff (roughly equivalent to half a builder's tea)
Ronaldo, who evidently didn't become one of the greatest players of all time by guzzling fizzy death-juice, removed the drinkable adverts with a look of mild disdain, instead endorsing simply drinking rain by holding up a bottle of water and saying the word “water” in Portuguese. (who needs copywriters??!) Coca-Cola, a major sponsor of the competition, took a hit to their bottom line, swiftly losing $4 billion in market value. Don't cry (water) for them. It's December now and those lorry ads will be back on TV filling the company coffers. Sing it now... “Holidays are coming, holidays are coming....”

Britain's Got Talent breakout Susan Boyle scored something of an own goal when promotion for her new album in 2012 promised instead something much more risqué. By trending the ill-thought (or geniusly trollish) #Susanalbumparty, someone in her PR team was promising the type of release the 51 year old church singer was probably not looking to provide.
Though the unfortunate word order was swiftly spotted and errr... rectified, the internet had an absolute field day as many of us were left with images we were unable to scrub from our minds.

In 2017, model, visionary, “genius”, Kendall Jenner took serious heat alongside Coke's competitor (there's no competition though...) Pepsi. An ad featuring the Kardashian abandoning a photoshoot to join an activist march calling for peace and unity ironically caused nothing but anger and division. In the tone-deaf paean to entitlement, the beautiful, rich white girl offers a police officer facing down the protests a can of Pepsi.... He smiles. The world is fixed.
In an outcome that made Kendall do horrible crying on her family's reality show, the ad faced immediate backlash for its insensitive trivialisation of marginalised and embattle activists at a time when BLM protests were gathering momentum. Putting the drinks giant on blast on Twitter, Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, cracked, “If only daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi” Ouch.

In 1991, four years before the first coming of Christ Kendall, Gerald Ratner, the chairman of the incredibly successful populist jewellery chain Ratners caused protests amongst his own shareholders with some seriously ill advised comments at a conference of the Institute of Directors.
Speaking about one of their products, a cut-glass decanter set, he remarked; “People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."”
Noting one pair of earrings they sold cost less than a pound, “cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer's”, he went on; “but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings".
Treating the business conference as a roast for his company and seemingly the sovereign-wearing masses buying his cheap gold and the like, his comments instantly made headlines and coincided with a £500 million downturn in business, equivalent to more than £1 billion (or 15 Marks and Spencer prawn sandwiches!!) in today's money. Insulting their customer base, shuttering hundreds of stores nationwide and laying off thousands of employees, Ratner became the poster boy for costly foot-in-mouthism aka “doing a Ratner”.

Speaking of crap, when Canada's newly formed conservative party changed their name in 2015, the heat they took for their new moniker practically overshadowed the consternation at their right-wing policies. Party delegates at the United Alternative weekend convention officially named their new gang of wealthy, middle aged white men (shot in the dark) the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance. Unfortunately for them, when Party was subsequently added to the party, bemused politicians found themselves mired in CCRAP – conjuring images of someone with a mild stutter decrying the state of politics in the modern age. With the Canadian prime minister himself taking a public swipe first thing Monday, by the afternoon the CCRAP had been flushed in favour of the equally indigestible Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. An ironically prescient PR disaster and no doubt the first of a litany of political U-turns...