Our monthly PR Winners and Losers review spotlights those who have pulled off a fresh PR masterstroke, and those whose efforts have fallen short. This month’s edition is written by Megan Leeming.
Staying Fresh
The TikTok PM gives a masterclass in targeting hard-to-reach audiences
Andy Burnham may be the first UK prime minister to truly understand how social media can be used to build a personal brand.
In the hours after taking office on 20 July, Burnham published a series of videos on TikTok and Instagram that took a less polished (but more direct) approach to traditional political messaging.
Symptomatic of the change in media consumption, Burnham’s strategy of apparent authenticity and spontaneity, characterised by light-hearted short-form content à la Zohran Mamdani, is designed to reach voters who don’t engage much with traditional media.
Considered alongside partnerships with online influencers, such as TikTok Creator of the Year Max Klymenko and Olympian Sir Mo Farah, it is clear that Burnham can get his message in front of far larger, far younger audiences than many of his predecessors.
View this post on Instagram
As his premiership progresses, it will be interesting to see whether the audiences that have supported him so far remain engaged – and how he responds if online sentiment turns.
Count Binface shows how political satire can cut through the noise
Burnham may be rewriting the political playbook inside No. 10, but the summer’s most effective political disruptor came wearing a bin on his head.
Count Binface emerged as an unlikely rival to Nigel Farage after the Reform UK party leader unexpectedly resigned, only to immediately stand again in the resulting by-election.
While Farage may have hoped a change in focus would distract from growing public interest in his finances, the resulting media coverage has kept the issue firmly in the spotlight.
However, the winner here is the ‘galactic space warrior’ who has captured the public’s hearts and minds.
Binface’s 20-point manifesto is a strong example of purposeful narrative building, balancing his usual outlandish policy commitments with some decidedly pointed local ones: pledging to “spend more time in Clacton-on-Sea than in Washington DC”, and “not accept £5 million gifts from crypto billionaires”.
✅ Touring Clacton
✅ Visiting local businesses
✅ Listening to constituents’ concerns
✅ Hi-vis vest
Make your Vote Count!#VoteBinface #Clacton pic.twitter.com/MbK4xiTe9c— Count Binface (@CountBinface) July 30, 2026
Perhaps we should expect nothing less from the man behind the bin, Jonathan Harvey, who cut his teeth as scriptwriter for The Thick of It and Have I Got News For You.
Anyone else waiting for Binface’s The Rest is Politics interview?
Nolan wins audiences with a familiar story made new
From one man in oversized armour to another, a final honourable mention is given to the promotion of Christopher Nolan’s new star-studded blockbuster The Odessey.
Despite becoming a lightning rod for a variety of political and cultural grievances, the film is a critical and box-office hit, and an online sensation.
Nolan’s Greek epic proves once again that the right story, told the right way, can resonate with audiences more powerfully than even the loudest critical voice.
Gone Stale
OpenAI struggles to get story straight following attacks
The revelation that one of OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents had escaped its closed environment and attacked another company would ruin the day of any PR team.
However, what followed was an excellent lesson in crisis management – until it wasn’t. In a statement published on 21 July, OpenAI shared a detailed explanation of the attack, took accountability and outlined mitigation measures.
This was a transparent and honest approach that effectively addressed the incident and limited speculation.
However, this position was weakened a week later when a revision revealed that four other companies had been attacked and the incident was not the standalone event as originally claimed.
Combined with Reuters’ reporting that OpenAI didn’t notice its rogue agent for a week (an allegation that OpenAI disputes in part), this revision shifted the company’s public position from proactive incident owner to one that appeared to be playing catch-up: a potential credibility problem in the making.
Anthropic under microscope again for book destruction
As OpenAI faced questions about where its models went, Anthropic faced scrutiny over where its training material came from.
Final approval of Anthropic’s $1.5bn copyright settlement returned attention to how the company assembled its training library; documents released revealed that Anthropic had not only accessed pirated digital works but also purchased millions of physical books and destroyed them during the process of training its models.
While the story was originally covered by the Washington Post in January, this coverage breathed new life into it, and Anthropic faced public ire over the optics of pirating or physically destroying human-written books to train artificial intelligence – a practice that another AI CEO was quick to distance himself from, sort of.
I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 27, 2026
Elon Musk faces hard questions from The Economist
Elon Musk also faced challenges of his own in July.
In a rare sit-down interview with The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Musk shared his views on a variety of topics, ranging from his time with DOGE to the future of AI.
With the full 90-minute discussion available online, the SpaceXAI CEO received a crash course in the key difference between a traditional media interview and a more informal podcast or online chat show appearance – uncomfortable, hardball questions.
The discussion became increasingly combative as Beddoes challenged Musk over his amplification of misinformation and support for far-right political movements.
Since the interview, Musk has lashed out in a series of personal attacks, calling Beddoes a “traitor to the West, plain and simple,” a “woke NPC with zero self-awareness” and an “unthinking NPC” (NPC here standing for ‘non-player character’).
Whatever you may think of Beddoes’ approach, responding to a difficult interview by attacking the interviewer is a risky choice. In this case, it has shifted more attention to the story and expanded the focus from Musk’s answers to include his temperament, adding even more newsworthiness to something he may have preferred the public ignore.
