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This Week’s PR Winners & Losers

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By Felicia Knight

It’s been such a good week for it, we thought we’d return to that favorite format of PR bloggers, the listicle. Here are this week’s Winners & Losers.

Winners

  1. New England Patriots

With Tom Brady warming the bench under a dubious suspension and Rob Gronkowski out with a hamstring injury, the Patriots—the team everyone outside of New England loves to hate—led by second string quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, beat the heavily favored Arizona Cardinals 23-21.

  1. New England Patriots (Hey, we’re a New England Public Relations firm)

Because this may be one of the best things we’ve seen this week.

  1. David Ortiz (It’s important to stick with a theme)

The beloved Red Sox DH hit his 536th home run to tie with Mickey Mantle.

Losers

  1. The Galaxy Note 7

When a consumer product spontaneously explodes, that’s never good. While the combustible phones were recalled several weeks ago, this week, it was determined that a manufacturing flaw in the battery is the cause, allowing for another whole news cycle of news detailing the recall and the dropping stock prices.

  1. The Sugar Association (and Harvard University)

Who says saturated fats are bad for you? Turns out, the American sugar industry paid scientists at Harvard to publish a study that took any blame for ill health effects off of sugar and pushed it on to saturated fats. That’s not to say that a diet of burgers and fries is heart healthy, but the revelation of the flawed study suggests, “five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.” The sugar industry took a very low road toward winning the public relations war.

  1. Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo will pay $185 million to the federal government plus restitution to customers after years of pushing customers into high penalty, costly financial products that they neither needed, nor requested. But wait, there’s more! The executive who heads up the community banking division, Carrie Tolstedt, who in part oversees the retail banking and credit card operations part of the company, which was responsible for the fraudulent accounts is retiring—and taking with her a $125 million payout. Can you say, “poor optics?”