Five things that happened in PR this week

Category: Digital PR

By: Tom Gibbon

November 18, 2022

Hello and happy Friday! We’ve decided it’s high time we started talking to you all a bit more often so welcome to the first of what we intend to be a lengthy weekly series of the best things going on in PR right now.

We’ve chosen a nice quiet week to begin with a little and not-at-all-controversial thing called the Qatar World Cup starting in a matter of hours. Plenty there to get the PR industry’s creative juices flowing, it seems, as our spin-through below shows.

First up, Specsavers, who unveiled the fruits of their search for England footballer lookalikes and have promised to take us all on a journey with their newly minted ‘Second Squad’.

Some of them are uncanny, others maybe less so, but it’s a great creative idea that speaks perfectly to the brand is a nice follow-up to their optician’s board-themed ‘It’s Coming Home’ campaign for Euro 2020.

Paddy Power are pass masters when it comes to cheeky, attention-grabbing PR and they’ve done it again this week with a World Cup and Christmas double whammy.

Peter Crouch stars alongside Paul Potts as the star of the betting firm’s new ‘Crouchy Conducts the Classics’ festive album as football chants are turned into orchestral masterpieces. It’s a very classy touch too to give all the profits to Stonewall and aid their efforts to fight LGBTQ+ oppression in Qatar.


Staying on that theme, Pantone have brilliantly nailed their, ahem, colours to the mast here. Their ‘Colours of Love’ campaign has seen them producing t-shirts and other merchandise which are rainbows in disguise.

Using the Pantone catalogue codes for each colour of the rainbow, the idea is fans in supporting wanting to support LGBTQ+ rights can do so without running the risk of being extremely visible to the authorities.

Very clever, thought-provoking and positions Pantone even more as the absolute boss of all the colours.

Art of Football‘s collaboration with agency The Or to create the winter flag is just brilliant and proves they really can do it on a cold, wet Tuesday night in Stoke.

The novelty of a winter World Cup is something plenty of brands will be looking to seize on but they’ll have their work cut out to come up with a better, simpler idea than this. Love it.

We’ll finish things off this week with something non-football. Airbnb is such a massive brand it barely needs publicity stunts these days, but this is a nice touch that’s getting plenty of shares.

Co-founder Brian Chesky has listed his own San Francisco home on the site, taking it back to where it all began (although we’re pretty sure he’s in a slightly nicer pad now). As you’d expect, it’s fully booked for a long, long time.


Seen – or worked on – something we could be shouting about? Get in touch – tom@weareradioactive.com – and we’ll try and cover it. 

Interested in seeing what we can do for your brand? Let’s talk.

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