Archive for November, 2008

Twitter has demonstrated its awesome power of its network in the ugliest of circumstances; the massacre in Mumbai has brought the networking, information sharing website right to the forefront of news gathering as the tragedy was played out on millions of people’s mobile phones and inboxes second by second.

CNN reported Twitter user “naomieve”’s response to the outpouring of information: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”

This is correct to an extent – certainly, news of the attack spread via Twitter far quicker than the old media could report on it, to the extent that immediate reports were dictated by the often conflicting information that was pouring out of Mumbai, twitted, re-twitted and passed around the world as fast as the eye can blink. But that soon gave way to traditional media headlines being recycled.

The astonishing speed and multiplicity of Twitter is also its weakness – the amount of re-twitted reports mean that it is impossible to tell what is an eyewitness account from a hotel and what is rumour or even mean-minded invention.

It is worth bearing in mind that it is a tool as useful to the terrorists as it is to anyone and to remember, as the old Second World War posters instructed, that “careless talk costs lives”. Twitter is an exciting tool and it’s now very much in the spotlight, at the cutting edge of communications. All that remains now is for all of us, from commentators to people in desperate situations such as those faced in Mumbai, to use it responsibly.

To read the full story from CNN click here.

Lists define PR – the industry loves and fears them. And when a researcher online takes and avid and assiduous look at brands and the dirt at their roots, there is nowhere to hide, as a list from the Multinational Monitor website proves.

“2008 marks the 20th anniversary of Multinational Monitor’s annual list of the 10 Worst Corporations of the year,” they say at the start of their fascinating article, entitled The System Implodes: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008. “In the 20 years that we’ve published our annual list, we’ve covered corporate villains, scoundrels, criminals and miscreants. We’ve reported on some really bad stuff — from Exxon’s Valdez spill to Union Carbide and Dow’s effort to avoid responsibility for the Bhopal disaster; from oil companies coddling dictators (including Chevron and CNPC, both profiled this year) to a bank (Riggs) providing financial services for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; from oil and auto companies threatening the future of the planet by blocking efforts to address climate change to duplicitous tobacco companies marketing cigarettes around the world by associating their product with images of freedom, sports, youthful energy and good health.
“But we’ve never had a year like 2008.”

It’s like I’ve been saying for a while – brands need to have core truths to their corporate story. The new age is about absolute responsibility for the actions and output. There is nowhere to hide. It’s astonishing that PR companies acting for big corporations feel that they can continue the old practices and try to spin their way out of issues that need addressing in a meaningful and difficult way. This activity is an egocentric misconception, and will lead to  paralysis.

When will they learn that a brand is no more or less than the makeup of stories that define fame and its reputation? WoM holds a powerful fascination but bestows an incalculable value  The story far exceeds what we in the business so chillingly call its ‘target group’.

The story of a brand is no more or less than the result of its fame: its reputation.  And like a reputation, it can be found in only one place: in the minds of people. This can be found in only one place: in the minds of people, driven largely by word of mouth and encapsulated by STORIES. Unless we embrace this idea, the moral ambiguity in marketing will undo the future development of brands. The 21st century is now about finding compelling stories for brands that have brand integrity and real substance themselves and most of all the people they are selling to. Any deviation from that and this is where they end up…

To read the full article, click here.

There’s a new player in town attempting to break in to what Toby Young calls the celebritariat, the fame class. She is Sarah Symonds and she has had her moments in the spotlight before – an affair with Jeffrey Archer and an appearance on Oprah plugging her book Having An Affair? A Handbook For The Other Woman.

In the book, she discussed “a friend” who was having an affair with a foul-mouthed celebrity chef. Now, she has revealed that the “friend” was in fact herself and that she had been having a long-term, on and off affair with Gordon Ramsay. The ingredients of a story that should run and run, you might think? I’m not so sure.

The scenario of the kiss-and-tell hooker is a well-rutted field – remember David Mellor’s downfall at the hands of Antonia de Sancha and Rebecca Loos’ attempt to sell herself as the mistress of David Beckham? Both women were accepted into the media maelstrom of the celebritariat without a second thought. Not so with Sarah Symonds.

Her stab at fame is essentially a DIY job; she tried to find representation with Max Clifford but he passed up on the opportunity. There is, it seems, little appetite for a DIY Rebecca Loos at the moment, no secure place in the pantheon for kiss-and-tell mistresses.

What it boils down to is that, in these recessionary times, there seem to be a lot less blank chequebooks floating around just waiting for mouths to open. Added to that, we are currently seeing the public direct their ire at people who disrupt the status quo, as has happened with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s lewd phone calls to Andrew Sachs.

I would suggest that the public response is likely to be less than rapturous towards Symonds. Certainly, since the story broke in the News of the World yesterday, there has been a welter of press pointing out the stoical response of Gordon Ramsay and his family. It was a classic display of marital strength from the chef and his family; they went shopping and posed, smiling, for the cameras One of their spokespeople was quoted as saying: “There is no comment to make at all. They had gone to Harrods for some Christmas shopping and I think to get some things for lunch. Everything is fine. Life is good and business is good.”

I would suggest that Symonds is going to have to work extremely hard to make her break into the celebrity classes. The fourth estate is likely to be concentrating its resources on bigger game for a while and the public clearly want celebrities who conform to the illusion of stability in these uncertain times. At this juncture, the woman who writes handbooks on how best to keep a married man and outs beloved celebrities as cheaters is much more likely to fall foul of the British public than the man who allegedly cheated, especially if his family stands with him.

Whether or not Ramsay and Symonds had an affair is beside the point; if she is going to achieve what she wants, then there is no doubt that Sarah Symonds has an extremely steep hill to climb.

I have been critical about Burger King’s PR efforts in the past, but their latest stunt, which started in Chicago and is currently working its way across America, is generating some interest from PR blogs. Burger King have been dropping wallets in the street for people to find. When opened, the wallets are found to contain a driver’s license made out to the Burger King corporation, a note saluting the finders for being good Samaritans, some cash (between $1 and $100) which they are instructed to keep, a Burger King gift voucher and a map showing the locations of Burger King stores.

It’s a brilliant word-of-mouth stunt, but it’s interesting to read on the So Good blog that it’s widely perceived as original. Only a couple of comments suggest that this is not the case – but all they say is that Macdonalds pulled a similar stunt a couple of years ago. But all of these miss the point. As I have shown in The Fame Formula, this sort of stunt has a long and involved history, stretching back at least 100 years.

Whilst Burger King have put a delightful new spin on the ‘drop something and get a reaction’ stunt, it is worth mentioning that the great stuntster, Harry Reichenbach, who I have written about in The Fame Formula, was in on the act 90-odd years ago. He placed a wallet stuffed with cash in the way of an attractive young woman. The wallet also contained an address; that of a movie executive. The woman then took the wallet to the exec, who was so impressed with her honesty and beauty that he gave her a part in one of his movies. Reichenbach took this heart-warming story to the press who went wild for it.

It just goes to show that no idea is original – indeed, Reichenbach, who learned his craft on the carnival trail in the very early 1900s, cannot have failed to pick up on the routine stunt of dropping free passes to carnival shows among the crowds.

I am not suggesting that the original stunsters are better or more original – just that ideas are interconnected. Where Burger King have succeeded with their wallet drop is in finding a relevant modern idiom for an old, old stunt.

It’s also interesting to note that the press hasn’t picked up on this latest stunt yet, only the bloggers. As the media cycle spins ever faster, perhaps that’s exactly what Burger King were hoping for. In a world where there is so much instant news access and a press that is increasingly suspicious of stunts, it seems to me that Burger King were hoping for the online community to take up and relish this stunt; more and more, the bloggers are the people dictating a stunt’s success.

Not that that is always the case, of course. The people behind next year’s This Diary Will Change Your Life got themselves a lot of coverage in The Sun and the Evening Standard with an elegant stunt involving sticking a man to a billboard to promote the idea that the diary is for people stuck for Christmas present ideas (see picture below).

Again, it’s not original – Solvite Wallpaper Adhesive did something similar a while ago, pasting a man to a billboard and flying him around atop a helicopter for an advert – but both this and the Burger King stunt prove that if you are willing to play with an idea, to have fun with the product, then you are going to get it noticed.

And that’s always what good stunts have been about; a playful story that gets people thinking about the product they are promoting in a new light….

I’ve just been sent a copy of the free Belfast cultural paper, The Vacuum, which features an article on the great Jim Moran, citing The Fame Formula as the major reference. It’s good to see that, in the wake of the book’s publication, the word about some of the lost greats of the publicity world is spreading.

Only nine years ago, Moran’s death was passed over unremarked in the British press; such people didn’t matter much outside America, it was presumed. But the major publicist-generated story of the day was the manufactured affair between Chris Evans and Geri Halliwell – proof, if proof were needed, that the art of the stuntster was alive and well in Britain and that the influence of Moran and his fellow stunsters, who created the Hollywood publicity industry, lived on, even if their names had vanished.

It’s very good, then, to see this article commemorating Moran’s inventive and eclectic life, which is part of the promotion for an exhibition organized by the Factotum arts project at Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery at 23 Donegall Street, Belfast. The exhibition, A Century of Spin, “explores the genre of publicity photography, its function and tradition. Although rarely exhibited in a gallery context, this form of photography is pervasive and plays a significant role in the way that we understand our contemporary world from politics and news media to advertising and tourism. The exhibition includes photographs and printed ephemera from different periods in the 20th century and draws material from a range of image collections in Northern Ireland, the UK and US.”

To find out more about A Century of Spin, click here.

When I saw the news that John Sergeant had apparently fallen on his sword and retired gracefully with a bow from Strictly Come Dancing, I initially thought to myself ‘What a magnificent publicity coup!’ With a little time and distance from that first reading, I have changed my mind – I am no longer convinced that Sergeant left the show willingly and, whilst the publicity is excellent for him, it would probably have been better had he stayed the course. Or had been allowed to stay the course.

Consider this; John Sergeant was clearly enjoying himself. His dancing was improving and he was clearly enjoying the onrush of cult status his continued survival on the show brought forth. Certainly the audience were relishing him – he may have scored consistently low with the judges, but each week there he was again, shuffling around the dance floor with a look of steely concentration in his eye.

The public tend to treat such shows as popularity contests rather than talent contests, and Sergeant’s slightly bumbling, hope-for-the-best dance persona was a natural winner in that context. I’m also certain that there were a large number of viewers voting for him who were simply delighted to see a more elderly gent shuffling through the numbers next to the bright young things you get everywhere these days; these voters are the same sort of people who registered their disapprobation with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand recently.

But there was clearly an enormous revolution amongst the judges and producers of the show and I would suggest that they pushed John Sergeant onto his sword. Why would he want to leave the show, after all? He was making a name for himself outside the political and journalistic circles he was best known for, an excellent example of the process I describe in The Fame Formula, wherein, to stay famous, a person has to come up with a new string to their bow every fifteen months.

It’s not as if, in these cash-strapped times, every talent show contest winner is going to make an enormous impact overnight. Last year’s Strictly Come Dancing winner, Alesha Dixon, has not been propelled into the celebrity stratosphere, as one might have normally expected – although this may change in the wake of her forthcoming album release.

John Sergeant, however gracefully he may have departed – in stark contrast to some of his performances on the dance floor – can surely not have wanted to go. His insistence that it was time to go before the joke wore thin was a definite publicity coup – he admitted his failings and got on with it – but the fact that he said “it’s like when you decide when you leave a party, and the time to leave a party is before the fight starts, and I think that’s really what’s happened on this occasion” is most revealing. The producers were clearly attempting to protect the Strictly Come Dancing brand and, if he had not gone, things may have become ugly.

PR people can ponder the publicity coup aspect all they like, but the truth of it is surely that the public have had the ability to decide the show taken away from them in the name of brand protection.

The Borkowski poet in residence imagines what Prince Charles would like for his birthday…

I’d like tea with Lord Mountbatten
I’d like a gin with dear old gran
I’d like a brand new book by van der Post
I’d like poetry to scan

I’d like a son who didn’t dress up
like Max Moseley just for fun
and a chance to stop my sons’ lives
from appearing in The Sun

I’d like my plants to answer back for once
and tell me what they feel
I’d like houses built from Portland stone
and not from glass and steel

I’d like a handy time machine
to take me back to 71
so I could marry Camilla then
& have her as mother to my sons

I would like a peaceful life
for the press to bugger off
I’d like them to stop presenting me
as an out of touch old toff

But I would give that all up
if mother would just say
‘Charles it’s your turn to be King,
I’m stepping down today’.

The Best Gift by Adam Horovitz [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What is the best present could Prince Charles hope to be unwrapping on his 60th birthday, today? He will get many, but I suspect that the period of calm that has prevailed at Clarence House over the last five years, interrupted occasionally by the binge drinking bouts and going-to-parties-dressed-in-Nazi-regalia adolescent antics of his 20-something sons, is the one he will be valuing most, as it will allow him to celebrate his birthday in relative peace.

For decades, the Prince, as part of the Royal Family, one of the biggest brands going, has suffered the slings and arrows of outraged and outrageous press coverage. He was, for a long time, damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. But things have changed of late; the Prince and, more importantly, the people he has surrounded himself with, have reengineered his public, charitable and state image and reinvigorated the Duchy Originals commercial brand as a going organic concern, despite the occasional hiccup over high salt and fat content, which has seen the Prince marry successfully his public and private concerns.

It’s a long time ago, now, since the Gymkhana days of the 1950s, when the Royal Family were closed for business at the weekend, and it is strange to think that there really was a time when one could phone up on a Friday at 5 p.m. and find that the pearly-necklaced debs who ran the public face of the Royal Family had all shuffled off to Gloucestershire and would not be back in until Monday.

That changed with the arrival of Princess Diana and the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981. Diana’s cataclysmic arrival marked a sea change in the press – it was the beginning of the soap opera days and it took decades for the Royal Family to understand what had happened, let alone begin to cope with the consequences. It marked the beginning of the Heat and Closer era, where an unhealthy interest in the minutiae of a celebrity’s life was the order of the day.

The Royal Family simply couldn’t cope with this massive increase in daily interest; nor could they cope with a press who were less and less willing to kowtow to their way of running brand Windsor. Suddenly men like Kelvin Mackenzie at The Sun were refusing to play ball with brand Windsor’s cosy PR agenda. Princess Diana and, later, Fergie were “hold the front page” news. As a consequence, Diana and Fergie got to grips with the new PR agenda far more quickly than Prince Charles and the rest of brand Windsor.

This just amplified in the wake of Charles and Diana’s separation in 1993. Diana was a masterful player of personality PR, as the interview with Martin Bashir proved. Revelation after revelation tumbled like lead onto the head of Charles – his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles being the most damaging one, along with the reaction to Diana’s death from the Royal Family, which was out of step and out of tune with the rest of the country.

Since then, the people behind brand Windsor and particularly Prince Charles have been trying to re-brand their clients and understand how modern PR can be made to work for them. In the last 10 years, most celebrities have come to recognise that they are brands, but if you’d said that in the 1980s you would have been ignored and, in the case of brand Windsor, laughed out of court. It helps that the heir to the throne has always engaged in good works, but resentment, for many years, was never far from the surface of the popular press.

The last five years have seen something of a sea change in the perception of the Prince and his dealings with the world. His sons are part of this – apart from the odd fancy dress faux pas, they have inherited their mother’s easiness with the press. But the real power behind the man one step away from the throne is Paddy Harverson, who was appointed communications secretary at Clarence House in 2003.

There is no doubt that the Prince has needed people around him who recognise the importance of the brand, given the changing nature of the press and the rise of the importance of branding. They had to find someone they could trust, someone who was not part of the Royal Family’s usual coterie, so they brought in Harverson, whose reputation as a man who could make the best of troublesome situations preceded him. Working for the Royal Family is not the most rewarding job in PR. They needed someone with the skill to manage the most difficult of situations.

Harverson is certainly a man who understands how to manage difficult brands, supercharged egos and constant press attention – he left his job as the FT’s first sports correspondent to become the inaugural communications director at Manchester United, arguably the second largest British global brand after the Royal Family and equally full of different, difficult and diverse characters. He oversaw the departure of David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand’s drugs test and a great deal more in his three-year tenure at the club. Since 2003 he has set up an entirely new era in communications for Prince Charles and his sons, whilst maintaining a discreet low profile, again in a post especially created by Clarence House for him.

It was an inspired choice; in the last five years, he has managed the press relating to Harry’s Afghan trip, William’s relationship with Kate Middleton and, most importantly, the slow embrace by press and public of Camilla Parker Bowles in the run up to and wake of her marriage to Prince Charles, keeping a careful eye on breaking stories all the while.

Much of the antagonism towards Prince Charles and Camilla has dissipated on Harverson’s watch. Although there are still problems – as one might expect from the Royal Family – the focus has shifted away from them – the press now deals more with a prince who has married the woman he truly loves, whose work with the Prince’s Trust is much admired, whose opinions on green issues are, on the whole, respected.

Make no mistake, there will always be problems – Harverson has two boisterous, highly privileged young men to deal with and the honeymoon period of Charles and Camilla’s reintegration into the public’s affection is definitely over. If Prince Charles is to take the crown he needs to avoid the elephant traps that will always be there, waiting for him.

With Harverson looking out for him, however, Prince Charles has finally become the sort of man the British public might accept as their next monarch – quite a feat, given the travails of the 1980s and 1990s – and that really must be the best present a PR man can give. As long as Harverson keeps a weather eye out for the traps and doesn’t leave, everything will be fine, barring some horrendous revelation. Harverson would, without doubt, be a tough act to follow.

I’m intrigued to see that I have been placed in a poll of influential PR Twitterers, intrigued and a little surprised. This is because I didn’t join Twitter to become part of the PR churn that pings out statistics through the site; I joined more to allow anyone who might be interested an insight into my personal, internal workings.

My Twitter is, essentially, there to allow me a space for offbeat ramblings, to give those following me an idea of what I’m reading, thinking and doing and to offer a wider understanding of what drives me. I don’t particularly want to be part of the Twitter PR agenda. This blog is the space I’ve chosen for that.

The Daily Mail today extended their puritanical approach, newly fired up and raring to go in the wake the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand hoo-ha, to Carnage UK, a company which promotes themed pub crawls for students in university cities in which the students dress up in outrageous costumes, coat themselves in vulgar slogans and drink themselves insensible through a number of pubs. The Norwich event, which has evoked most ire in the paper, was in “Dirty Porn Star” fancy dress.

The article, entitled Degrees of Excess, is long, outraged and thoroughly illustrated. Some will read it as an attack on the company, but others will see it as advertising. The approach the Mail have taken is likely to create an own goal for the paper – it will almost certainly suggest to a large number of students that here is an opportunity to have fun.

The Mail, unwittingly perhaps, are selling the Carnage UK brand as the perfect pre-packaged rebellious night out for young students. The more the older generation froth at the article, the more likely it is to appeal to their offspring, who, like most young adults, are always looking for ways to rebel.

It was ever thus – the new puritanical approach is just business as usual. Outrage has always engendered publicity for the people the outraged would like to condemn. From PT Barnum to OZ magazine, it has been fulminations in the press that have given such happenings the oxygen of publicity.

To read the Mail article, click here.