Paul Hucker and the Free Publicity.

In 2006 Paul Hucker took out a £1m insurance policy to protect himself from "trauma" should England be knocked out early in the competition.
You can find the news report here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/4968092.stm

Now that is a nice, light-hearted jovial story. Wacky world cup fan takes out an insurance policy because he'll get depressed and be traumatised if England go out.
But let's look a little deeper, because what is actually going on here is a bit more sinister than just a throwaway piece of nothing-news.

A quick (it literally took me 20 seconds) Google search of Paul Hucker reveals that he is a public relations man. Delve a little deeper and you find that Paul Hucker took out an identical policy which also made the newspapers in 2002. You can also find Mr. Hucker's name attached to a testimonial about how the insurance was so good for him on the company's website.

The reality, of course, is that there is no "£1m trauma insurance" provided by British Insurance. It was just a PR stunt, and the journalists lapped it up.

Paul Hucker's PR company mailed out a press release to the news teams telling them how a man had taken out a bizarre insurance policy against England being knocked out early in the World Cup. They proceeded to run the story, believing it to be a piece of human interest news. Clearly they didn't bother to check, because if they had, and were able to put 2 and 2 together, they would be quickly have worked out that this was simply a stunt to get British Insurance some free publicity.

British Insurance had clearly employed Mr Hucker's PR firm, and instead of running some advertisements (that cost money) or lower some prices (which loses you money), the firm came up with something a bit more novel. Because of this silly, and not even true piece of news, British Insurance is mentioned in the article on the BBC. I'm confident that British Insurance is probably named in pretty much every article you could find on the story. Now that is the kind of publicity you can't buy, but oddly enough you can get for free.

Don't believe everything you read in the papers, or on the BBC news.