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Writer's pictureNeil Mckeown

Bat signals, yoga and rubber Johnnies - PR ideas that never happened

Updated: May 21

Umpteen years working in PR has seen loads of ideas get torpedoed. Most deserved it but here are a few that could have made it.


A bowl of salad


  1. Getting people in a call centre to wear those Victorian-era ballgowns to show how they were social distancing. This was during the weird period when we were half in/half out of lockdown. The time when just being able to go for a pint - indoors! - felt like a week in Vegas.

  2. Ancient salad in a bag. A client was working on a system of preserving food for absolutely yonks. They had apples in almost airtight warehouses and other salad in conditions which escape at the moment. L story S, we wanted to put together a load of these salads and send them to science editors with the note 'This food is all two years old. Scan this QR code to find out how we did it.' Words to that effect anyway.

  3. Henry VIII bat signal. There was work going on - could still be - at the Old Royal Naval College where a team of underground scanning geniuses had discovered that Henry's old tilt yard (where they did the jousting) was actually in a different spot to what had been believed. Further work had found the site of where Henry had done some of his carousing as a young fellow, underneath the floor at the north east bit of the University of Greenwich. Among the ideas discussed to push this out was making a massive QR code with a picture of Henry's head on it, which would then be beamed on to the sky above Greenwich.

  4. Mass yoga in the call centre. Irritatingly someone else did this on Tower Bridge a few months after ours got ignored. The idea was, it was a mega busy day ahead for the call centre workers so we'd get some guru in to do a session so they could get all loose and/or groovy ahead of being flogged like dogs for eight hours (just kidding).

  5. Branded condom drop on the Love Island. This was way before they got their own 'sheaths' on the scene and I'm surprised no one has done it. Quite simple, get a helicopter over the set/villa/resort/compound and drop a ton of nodders on the writhing beauties below. Dropping a massive cap in the pool would have been a non-starter but this one could have been quite easy.


That's off the top of my head for PR ideas that never happened. What about you - which ones got away?


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