Since Friday is payday for many folks, we thought we’d share this funny cash-themed promo faux pas.

Ireland’s Central Bank has learned a valuable PR lesson: When trying to garner public favor and interest by honoring one of your country’s greatest literary figures with a limited edition coin, please, for the love of all things bookish, try not to misquote him.

On Wednesday, the bank announced the launch of a limited-edition ten euro coin to honor James Joyce, which features a portrait of the author and a quotation from his world-famous epic Ulysses. The words printed on the coin read: “Signatures of all things that I am here to read.”

Unfortunately, the actual quote is: “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” The bank added the word “that.”

The backlash was swift, prompting the bank to release the following statement in explanation:

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We have to tip our hats to Reebok today for taking the hint and dropping rapper/fake gangster/failed sneaker spokesman Rick Ross from its celebrity roster. In case you missed it, the company found itself in a PR bind when someone noticed that the lyrics to Ross’s latest single seemed to tell a tale of date rape via champagne spiked with ecstasy. Yesterday Reebok announced that, while they do not feel that Mr. Ross’s verse actually condoned sexual assault, the brand “holds [its] partners to a high standard” and believes that the rapper “has yet to display an understanding of the seriousness of this issue or an appropriate level of remorse” despite some desperate attempts at a last-minute apology.

This was a no-brainer for Reebok. Of course, the proactive individuals at UltraViolet who created the anti-Ross petition probably had a bit more to do with the decision than this humble blog, and we’re not the sort of people to take credit for others’ work, but we’d like to think of ourselves as members of the chorus.

On a final note, if Reebok or any other brand wants to hire a spokesperson with “street cred” in the future, they might want to refrain from choosing a guy whose entire backstory is a product of his own imagination. Just sayin’.

Oh my. Disgraced former Representative Anthony “I did not send pictures of my crotch to those women” Weiner has wormed his way into the headlines again this week with talk of a comeback, a return to the public spotlight or a “political rebranding”, if you will. In case you forgot or didn’t pay attention in the first place (lucky you), we have Weiner to thank for some of the best/worst puns in recent memory:

The big reveal is a TL;DR profile in this coming weekend’s New York Times magazine in which Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin review the painful details of the fallout and his plans for a new beginning in which he will rise from the ashes like a triumphant phoenix in boxer-briefs. It seems that Weiner entertains fantasies of running for mayor of New York City next year along with everyone else who lives in the greater metropolitan area.

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OK, so we understand why Rutgers decided to drop athletic director Tim Pernetti for choosing not to fire now-famous “bully” coach Mike Rice when he first saw the clips of Rice pushing and taunting his players while aiming quick passes at their nibbly bits. But we will say this: If you want someone to quietly exit stage left in order to reduce the intensity of the negative publicity (and we assume school administrators wanted Pernetti to do just that) then we would advise against giving him a deal cushy enough to inspire headlines well outside the world of college sports.

Upon leaving Rutgers, Pernetti will receive $1.2 million in “salary” plus a “car allowance”, two years’ worth of insurance coverage and a free iPad to top it off! Remember how everyone took the piss out of banks for giving their executives millions after they helped crash the American economy? Well this is not quite as bad as that. But it is still very bad!

Surely Rutgers could have come up with a better way to do this, right? We understand the need for a scapegoat, but if your organization is tied to one man with such a heavy chain then you might want to just relegate him to an HR position in a poorly lit basement somewhere, no?

PR in China: it’s a brave new world! Yet, despite all the talk of a dirty “black PR” industry and the impressive propaganda powers of a one-party government, damage control campaigns in the People’s Republic seem to be very simple. Based on the recent PR fails and recoveries of Western brands like Apple, KFC and Volkswagen, a big “yes sir” apology seems to be the way to go.

This issue is very relevant because, as the economy grows more global by the hour, every company that doesn’t sell artisanal pickles in Williamsburg, Brooklyn wants to build a strong reputation in China.

Here’s the backstory:

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A Target shopper recently noticed that the color of a grey plus-size dress was listed on the store’s website as “Manatee Grey” (and the image of a manatee may not be the most flattering one to conjure up when trying to sell clothing). To be fair, manatees are, in fact, grey — so while this incident certainly doesn’t demonstrate marketing genius, it’s not necessarily a major issue. The thing is, said shopper also noticed that same dress in regular sizes was listed as “Dark Heather Grey.” Aaaaand now we’ve got a problem.

Would-be Target customer Susan Clemens voiced her disgust on Twitter:

What the. Plus sized women get “Manatee Grey” while standard sizes are “Dark Heather Grey.” @target #notbuyingit twitter.com/suZen/status/3…

— Susan Clemens (@suZen) April 3, 2013

To Target’s credit, the retailer’s response was swift and appropriate:

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When we hear the words “deceptive marketing”, we generally think of campaigns that promote the blatantly false or grossly exaggerated “benefits” of a product (i.e. the butt-sculpting superpower of Sketchers Shape Ups or the death-cheating health claims of POM juice). In cases like these, the offending parties are held accountable by the FTC for intentionally misleading consumers. The public doesn’t like being lied to, and we rely on governing bodies and uniform regulations to protect us.

But what about the marketing we encounter every time we visit a grocery store? In our increasingly health-conscious society, more and more people are checking labels to make sure they are feeding their families the most nutritious, least harmful foods possible. But what many don’t realize is that labels reading “all natural” or “farm fresh” don’t necessarily mean what people think they mean; in fact, due to a lack of regulation, many such buzz words mean virtually nothing at all.

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We can’t claim to be any wiser than the brand strategists at Reebok, but we do feel quite confident in writing that it’s long past time for the company to address the controversy surrounding one of its celebrity spokesmen, rapper Rick Ross. The hubbub concerns these lyrics from Ross’s recent single “U.O.E.N.O”:

“Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.”

“Molly”, in case you missed it, is slang for ecstasy, and the verse quite clearly indicates that Ross slipped the drug into a woman’s drink without her knowledge and “took her home” while she was under its influence. There is literally no way to make these lyrics look good.

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Last week brought news of disgraced general/CIA chief and potential presidential candidate David Petraeus‘s first post-scandal appearance. Petraeus used a speech before a University of Southern California dinner honoring the military to effectively begin his apology tour. We and everyone else in PR are obsessed with damage control, and we feel like Petraeus got it right. Now we’d like to take a moment to relay seven lessons from recent scandal-wracked personalities who didn’t quite get it right.

1. Make it public — but not too public: Whoever told Arnold Schwarzenegger that appearing on every interview show ever to talk about his affairs and his out-of-wedlock child while simultaneously hawking his new book was very wrong.

2. Be humble. Seriously: Jonah Lehrer didn’t get the message that being a public intellectual does not allow you to avoid taking the blame for your own failings by over-intellectualizing the whole thing and pontificating about the why and the how. “I need rules because I don’t trust myself to not be arrogant”? Come on, man.

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BP (that’s “Beyond Petroleum” to you, sir) is in trouble again this week for doing the very sort of thing we’d expect it to do: using its spokesperson to rewrite nearly half of its own Wikipedia page.

The purpose of the edits was to play down the corporation’s horrible environmental record. And the accusation came only a few weeks before yet another hearing in which BP’s lawyer will try to argue that his client shouldn’t have to pay millions in “fictitious or inflated claims” related to the pending class action oil spill lawsuit.

So: move along, nothing to see here…

Of course it’s not all in-house: today PR Week reminds us that firms have been criticized for doing this sort of thing for their clients before.

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