So... now I know:

Rentokil: Kills bugs.
RMS: Marketing firm in high profile campaign.

Without this post, I would have been in the dark!

I had no idea this was a bug killing company - the local Rentokil is a office plant company. Pay a fee, they keep live plants in your office. Rent To Kill Plants. Sheesh.

Americans may need a heads-up:

In the UK, they are very strict about using facts in advertising.

Even terms like "best" and "greatest" actually have to be proved to apply to your product or service before they can be used.

Sadly, I suspect it's party because the UK Advertising Standards Authority is VERY strict about ads having to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful" that PR companies issue dodgy press releases instead, knowing that lazy journalists will print them credulously. That's not advertising, so it's not covered by the the ASA's code.

#Sigh#

RMS' "no lies, no fluff, no empty promises" is true, but incomplete. The bit missing off the end is "...to our clients. The public, we'll happily screw"

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising, kill yourself."
Preferably with Rentokil rat poison.

I don't think the Daily Mail can be remotely called a 'quality daily'. Their publishing of this story (well, PR release) without any investigation is further proof.

@regordane
"Sadly, I suspect it's party because the UK Advertising Standards Authority is VERY strict about ads having to be 'legal, decent, honest and truthful' "

The ASA may be strict when it feels like it, but it's pretty much toothless too with no legal powers, and instead relies on naming and shaming.

And in the case of 'unlimited' broadband in the UK, the ASA were less than strict about the definition and common understanding of the word, until a critical mass of complaints against the ASA's failure to condemn.

The best a bit about this was how they dealt with the backlash online, it was epically bad. All the attention they were getting drew attention to a rather interesting social media policy on their blog. I wrote about it here
http://www.fifthestate.co.uk/2010/03/ben-goldacre-vs-rentokil-part-ii/

but if you just want to see their god awful social media strategy for yourself, look here

http://www.rentokil.com/blog/why-is-rentokil-following-me/

oh god, it's epic.

However, they probably have a point about bugs in public transport, or public anything for that matter. E.g. telephone boxes:
http://straysnippets.blogspot.com/2010/03/this-telephone-is-bugged.html

Ruth Shearn (the "Love it, love it, love it. Three things." author) forgot to mention:

Also will make the public wary of using public transport and will have damaged the reputation of public transport companies that they could let so many bugs live to be counted. Which has possibly more negative impact than the meagre benefits she lauds, of marginally bigging-up Rentokil's scuzzy reputation.

Perhaps a London transit company could sue Rentokil for the 37,629,500 pounds in lost revenue this false bad publicity has cost them (using a number they arrive at via a similarly theoretical model).

I just read Ben Goldacre's book "Bad Science" it was very good.

It will put one in an irretrievably skeptical mindset for a few weeks but I think that's a good thing. (Yes I am THAT kind of pain in the ass.) The book isn't available in any form in the US but can be imported from via Powells or Amazon UK or the Audible version can be downloaded for the kids who know how to hack the proxy servers etc. .

Anyway he would make a great guest contributor.

Btw I am not his mom or anything i just liked the book.

RMS's analysis of the PR stunt is Strange: my impression of Rentokil now, is that they're liars that can't be trusted.

I mean, if they're prepared to lie about the number of bugs on public transport, maybe they'll be prepared to lie to me about the extent of my infestation, and charge me more that I need to pay to have it removed.

I like rentokill's recovery there (last link in OP). They are VERY open, which is exactly what I'd want to see.

Also, their apology was fairly good, as apologies go.

Let's do the checklist.

- A detailed account of the situation. Check - not fully detailed, but it's obvious from the post that they vastly overinflated infestation rates in public transport, in PR to the press. Importantly, they DO give all the facts needed to see just how wrong they were, and how they got there. I like. I'll give a full mark on that one.

- A statement of regret - Check. They apologised for what actually happenned. "We’re really sorry that the numbers that appeared in the media were wrong and misleading...". Not "We're sorry people were offended" or anything. Actually addressing the specific complaint. Full mark.

- A form of restitution whenever possible - Eh. They could have advertised their wrongness more heavily, but that would be a bit bonkers. I'll give the point for that one.

- A promise that it won't happen again - Yeah, "...and we’ve put in place a number of measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again." But I'll only give a half point on that because they don't say what measures they were. Could just have been an email to the ad company asking them to tone down the fiction a couple notches.

- Acknowledgement of the hurt or damage done - No, not really.

- Taking responsibility for the situation - Not really. Passing the buck to press and the PR firm.

- Recognition of your role in the event - Not really. They just claim they were asked for a worst-case scenario. They don't accept any responsibility for checking on what their data was being used for, nor for making sure their ad agency wasn't misrepresenting them. They only admit blame in passing, by saying they put measures in place to fix.

Overall, half marks. Better than most, I think.

Main thing I liked was the openness of where the figures came from. Also: "in our experience, it is very rare to find heavily infested buses, trains or other forms of transport in the UK. Standards will vary around the world but UK standards are very high."

Nice. Not great. But nice.