The good, the bad and the ugly – July 2014

Another month, another round of funny, awkward and brilliant campaigns. With summer in full swing, unsurprisingly sunshine and holiday breaks have been the order of the month for many brands. Here is where we should insert a witty pun about summer holidays, but there are so many summer puns to choose from. Summer good and summer not.. Geddit? No? Okay, never mind.

Taken from our Oh Holy Shet! Tumblr – here are some of the best and worst. Warning: Some of them are especially cringey.

Oh holy shet!

As part of its latest campaign Three released a spoof apology letter to the public, taking responsibility for all of the sunsets and cocktail photos clogging up our social media feeds. Which, when you’re sat in the office, is pretty annoying. It stood out from the crowd as a good campaign asking those on holiday to “please brag responsibly”.

However, it was Virgin Holidays whose reaction made us laugh most. Virgin hit back at Three telling consumers that they should in fact not be sorry for all of their photos and “show off with pride” instead, telling us that we all look delicious (which is always nice to hear). Sorry Three, but we think Virgin has trumped you with this one. Lifes a beach.

Result? Scorcher.

Well done internet. You really smashed this one. A sad story turned into a touching one when Nathan Steffel sadly lost his six week year old daughter to liver tumour. Nathan regretted that he had no pictures of his daughter without all of the medical tubes in, and put a request in for people of the online world to help take the tubes out of the image, using programmes such as Photo Shop. The response was incredible. Thousands of people had a go, resulting in a very happy dad.

As far as we’re aware, no brand was behind this one but it deserves a special mention for pulling at our heartstrings.

Result? Heatwave.

Oh… holy shet

But holidays don’t always go to plan (losing your baggage is not exactly ideal). Especially for those at Barcelona Airport a few Saturdays ago when two planes almost crashed into each other on the runway. Oops – not looking good for the Air Traffic Control Team. To make things worse, it was all caught on film by an “aviation enthusiast” I’m sure this won’t panic thousands of holiday makers travelling to Barcelona this summer.. Surely not..

Result? Drizzle expected.

This was one social media disaster that did not go unnoticed last month. It all started when The Associated Press tweeted the above. Doesn’t sound good does it? This tweet resulted in a HUGE backlash (as you can imagine) on Twitter, with many horrified people retweeting the news like crazy.

And then The Associated Press tweeted again…

Cue the second wave of Twitter abuse.. Starting with rude remarks such as “someone’s getting fired” and “*slow clap*”, and snowballing into a punctuation and phrasing debate.  Awkward.

Then cue the third wave of users late to the party, who started to retweet the original tweet from The Associated Press. It blew up very quickly.

Result? Thunder and lightning.

What’s been your favourite campaign from July? Let us know by tweeting us @Harvard_PR, or commenting below.