Up the Creek!

2025 Reputation Awards

The 2025 Annual Reputation Eye awards, with the coveted Golden Eye for the organisation that’s managed to emerge from crisis smelling like roses, and the dreaded Brown Eye for the PR fail of the year. Contenders include perennial favorites, Optus, the BOM, several badly behaved bosses and the IVF clinic who put the right baby in the wrong body.

AI’s assault on jobs and reputations

Up The Creek! explores the growing industry and reputational impact of AI, how the new media public interest defence will halt defamation payouts and the perils of marketing sponsorships.

Pollies, pedophiles and privacy

Do politicians deserve any right to privacy, how the other internet giants pulled YouTube into a social media ban on children, and the reputational risk of attending a Coldplay concert, all in the latest episode of Up the Creek! Crisis experts Mark Forbes and Ben Haslem discuss the disappearance of privacy, with the Coldplay Kiss Cam that had the world, and Gwyneth Paltrow, talking. They discuss how a Victorian Liberal leader was effectively accused of beginning a relationship when his now wife was 17 and he was her tennis coach. A defamation case is looming.

Environmental 'law-fare’ on battleground gas

In the latest episode of Up the Creek!, Icon Reputation Director Mark Forbes and Benjamin Haslem are in the trenches dissecting the gas lobby's attempts to turn the courts, and public opinion, against the greenies. Meanwhile, Rio Tinto is attempting reputation recovery by sponsoring Aboriginal activists, and how the AFL has flipped Tasmania’s political scene on its head.

Campaign disasters and a word for the Wise-Tech

In our new podcast Icon Reputation Director Mark Forbes and Benjamin Haslem to unpack where the Federal election was won and lost, How comedian Austen Tacious’s direct approach to tour PR earns the ire of the ABC, and how tech giant WiseTech’s problems are a throwback to scandals past.