A good day to bury bad news for Royal Bank of Scotland, Tesco and Dettori – Osborne gives brands a chance
Following the delivery of the autumn statement yesterday, I will let far loftier and more intelligent members of the public relations community deliberate the ups and downs of the financial plight that we face. Let us not forget that, courtesy of PE clashing with extra maths lessons and an underage accidental drinking faux pas in a mate’s garden, I failed maths GCSE five times. (I got there in the end BTW.)
Frankie Dettori: not a brand, but the "jammiest dodger" of the day
Moving quickly on, one of my favourite hobbies around budget and autumn statement time is to see who is sneaking out bad news, hoping that it gets ignored and goes unnoticed while the big media concentrates on the money situation.
Fortunately, I have kept my eye out for such instances and also, yes, I know I need to find a new hobby.
Eyes down, looking in, who tried to sneak out some badness yesterday?
First up, and the biggest culprit, has to be Tesco. Now, Tesco is a mighty public relations machine; in fact, I am very much in awe of what they do and how they do it.
A mate of mine works for one of the very many consumer agencies that Tesco retains and they were telling me that for the one relatively small division of the grocery giant that they represent, they have to get national coverage, of some sort, EVERY single day. This is just for one small division of Tesco.
Anyway, you get the drift: Tesco knows what it is doing. So, they must have known that shutting down its American operation, quietly ensuring that the boss of the said American division got to spend more time with his family over Christmas and doing all this on the day of the autumn statement, was going to raise a few eyebrows.
Sadly for Tesco, they are fricking massive and there was no way that this was going to go undetected, so most media ran the story. Fair play to them though, releasing on the same day has massively reduced the scrutiny they faced. I doff my cap to you Tesco.
Now, on to something slightly odder involving the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). News came out yesterday, via a conveniently timed leak to The Sun, that all 440 of its mortgage brokers were off for some training and all mortgage sales were being put on hold.
I am guessing that it may have been Men in Black (fine film) -esque training, i.e. they all stood in front of the mind-loss gadget and Mr Hester pressed the “forget everything” button.
The Sun immediately speculated that this was to head off another mis-selling scandal. There is no doubt about it: if this story had emerged on any normal news day, this would have dominated the news agenda and more questions would have been asked.
The first question being: is it true that only VIPs and MPs were allowed to apply for mortgages during this time, to head off anything getting out to the media?
The 82% government-owned bank surely had some top-level advice on how to handle this news and, were I a braver man, I would declare government-involved PR shenanigans.
Finally, not corporate, not any form of business actually, but the jammiest dodger of the day has to go to Frankie Dettori, found guilty of having a “metabole of cocaine” somewhere about his blood stream and, as such, getting a six-month ban from riding the gee-gees.
The dopy drugs body could have made an example of Dettori by ensuring they released the info on a slow news day, thus gaining maximum impact, but no. They announced the news yesterday, meaning that the world’s favourite jockey and his amazing personal media profile gets to ride again with minimum damage.
Spotted any dodgy corporate goings-on in the PR world, why not tweet me up on @10Yetis? Snitch DMs are welcomed and will remain anonymous.