Fresh eyes
PR winners and losers review – October 2025
October 30, 2025
It’s time for our monthly PR winners and losers review, where we applaud those who pulled off a fresh PR masterstroke and those who have had a PR stinker.
Staying Fresh
Böcker “moves fast” on Louvre heist infamy
A contender for quick-witted PR campaign of the year comes from German company Böcker which found itself at the centre of the story following the French crown jewel heist at the Louvre-museum in Paris.
The family-run company saw from news footage the aerial ladder used by the thieves to access a first-floor balcony (and make off with Napoleonic jewels worth £76m) was one of its own furniture lifts – sold to a French hire company in 2020.
After the shock wore off, and when it became clear nobody had been hurt during the brazen heist, the company’s marketing chief, Julia Scharwatz, and her third-generation CEO husband Alexander Böcker, realised the global coverage was too good a marketing opportunity to miss.
The company launched a tongue-in-cheek social media campaign the next day with the tagline “When you need to move fast”. It boasted its incline ladder could carry “up to 400kg of treasures…as quiet as a whisper”. The post amassed millions of views and thousands of comments on Instagram according to the company.
It was a high-risk marketing move that worked only because no staff or members of the public were harmed. Scharwatz said the response to the campaign had been overwhelming and “99 per cent positive” with “a few new enquiries” coming in for its furniture lifts.
Sheffield Wednesday FC look to the future
For any football supporter, news of one of the UK’s oldest clubs being placed into administration is never a good thing. However, over the past week, the club’s staff and fans have sought to turn the difficult financial situation into a positive.
The decision to appoint administrators effectively ends the leadership of owner Dejphon Chansiri, whose relationship with Wednesday fans has declined over recent years. Within an hour of Friday’s (October 24) decision, seats spelling out ‘Chansiri’ were being removed from the club’s stadium in a symbolic and public act by staff.
Meanwhile, fans took to social media to share their joy to ‘have their club back’. Many who were boycotting matches and the club shop have returned in droves, contributing over £500,000 in just five days to help steady the club’s fragile finances.
Wednesday’s media channels have reflected this sentiment, including publishing player quotes about ‘new life’ in the club. Sheffield Wednesday’s staff and fans deserve credit for their collective effort in presenting administration as a step in the right direction.
Gone stale
AWS and Microsoft outages show fragility of global internet services
The mass outage experienced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) on October 20 and the issues experienced by Microsoft Azure on October 29 showed once again just how reliant we all are on handful of big tech companies for our access to the internet.
From banking and messaging apps to gaming and social media platforms, the AWS outage disrupted the services of more than 1,000 companies and impacted millions of internet users. Reddit, Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Lloyds and Halifax, were just some of the household names to experience issues.
In another major outage, Microsoft experienced problems of its own on October 29 when its Azure cloud computing platform went down, with the issue again affecting major banking providers like NatWest and gaming services like Minecraft.
The apparent cause in both cases was DNS (Domain Name System) errors – one of the most common issues affecting internet services and something which is sure to have caused deep embarrassment for both AWS and Microsoft, as well as the many businesses that rely on them to power their services.
As well as keeping PR teams around the world busy, the outages have also raised serious questions for governments, particularly in Europe, on why so much of our global tech is dependent on a handful of US companies.
