Archive for January, 2009

The Financial Times report on a blog that’s gone viral, complaining about the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow, apparently written by a creative at WCRS advertising agency. They asked me for my take on the matter.

“…some bloggers … suggest it was a viral marketing campaign by Virgin, a charge the company strenuously denies. Others believe it to be a shameless bit of self-promotion by the author, Oliver Beale, who happens to be a creative at advertising agency WCRS. But both Mr Beale and the agency seem keen to distance themselves from the e-mail.

“Mark Borkowski, public relations expert, believes it would be a foolish company that risked a viral campaign like this one. He suggests the contagiousness is down to more than providing light relief from a gloomy climate: rather, people feel frustrated at their complaints being ignored by companies, especially banks.”

To read the full article, click here.

Dear old Brad Pitt. In an interview with Newsweek in the US this week, prior to the three-ring Oscar hoopla, the star says he’s sick and tired of the media focus on his relationship with Angelina Jolie. The actor hammers his point home throughout the interview, clearly believing the odd notion that his private life is totally separate from his career. “The publicity machine is out of control,” he tells the magazine. “It’s everything we didn’t sign up for.”

Brad Pitt and family

Are you listening to your PR minders, Brad, or are they telling you want you want to hear? Here’s a question for you to answer. If you wanted to send out a signal that you were a very different celeb, why did you sell the first photographs of your twins? If you facilitate a $14 million contract (which is what the photos of the twins, then less than a month old, reportedly fetched) with devils like People magazine and Hello! magazine, what do you expect?

Come on, Brad; you were paid a king’s ransom for the photo rights – this indicates that you are playing the game. OK, some of the fee was purportedly donated to African charities but the process of monetizing baby pictures is going to causes problems. If newborn infants are thrust into the spotlight to make money, you can’t expect the media to leave you alone to play happy families.

Old Hollywood legends were much better with sound bites and showbiz wisdom. Undoubtedly crafted by a publicist, David Niven’s words should echo through to Brad: “Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don’t take anything too seriously, it’ll all work out in the end.” More pertinently, Clark Gable once remarked to Niven that, when it came to the contract between a star and his public, the public had read the small print and the star hadn’t.

Brad should remember that being famous has its costs. Disconnection with the audience is a real threat and remarks such as the ones made in the Newsweek interview are sure to wind the media up. Newsweek are a conduit for all the love that has been directed towards Brad Pitt over the years, but all takes is one insignificant violation of the contract that Clark Gable mentioned and the adoring crowds can turn, all too quickly, into a baying mob.

The Fame Formula Paperback launch
including a showing of Nothing Sacred (U)
Wednesday, 29th April, 7.30 p.m.

Riverside Studios, Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London

Mark Borkowski celebrates the life and work of legendary Hollywood publicist Russell Birdwell at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith on April 29th to launch the paperback of his book, The Fame Formula.

A talk at 7.30 p.m. will be followed by a showing of the long-unseen Carole Lombard screwball comedy Nothing Sacred (U), which Birdwell promoted, at 7.45 p.m.

Nothing Sacred is one of the great screwball comedies. Journalist Wallace Cook (Frederick March) brings Hazel Flagg (Lombard) to New York, believing that she is dying of radium poisoning, so that the paper can use her to boost circulation. The screenplay, co-written by Ben Hecht, glitters with the gleeful cynicism that marked out his later films, The Front Page and His Girl Friday.

To buy tickets or for more information, click here.

Every new head of a public institution leaps up to sit at the head of the table humming a new tune and Sir Paul Stephenson is no exception. The new ‘super-cop’ who is taking on the poisoned Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police chalice, spat in so publicly by the bumbling Sir Ian Blair, has given an inaugural press conference setting out his stall.

The media takeaway is that he is no celebrity cop. Unlike his predecessor, he claims that he is going to get on with the job. There’ll be no TV appearances, just the old, traditional values of public office.

Wake up my friend, this is the 21st century!

You have to be in the public eye and win their confidence. You might have hopes for anonymity but–neat PR sound-bite aside–surely you realise that the 24/7 news churn demands more? We don’t expect the three-ring Blair show, but we need transparency, a chief who can communicate with the media and the masses and can offer up a valid presence in a city that faces some major challenges for the constabulary in the coming years, especially as the prospects of civil unrest in the next couple of years look ever more likely.

The ghost of Barnum is stalking TV land, as a new show displaying the dark and slightly freakish side of celebrity seems to be proving: Living TV’s Rehab. And some less-than-A list celebrities are queuing up to take part. One, who was turned down, was apparently eager to get on the show and discuss their sex addiction, but Living TV seems to have repulsed this entrant in favour of more damaged celebrities.

So Peter Sellers’ daughter Victoria is in, combating drug addiction, alongside the alcoholics Les McKeown from the Bay City Rollers, Robin Le Mesurier, son of John Le Mesurier and Hattie Jaques, and Rowetta Satchell, former X Factor contestant and a number of others, including Alicia Douvall, who is fighting body dysmorphia and Cassie Sumner, who is struggling to beat bulimia.

It’s outrageously exploitative of these sad and, ultimately, unfortunate fame seekers – we get to watch their pain in what was once the last refuge of the famous or the wanabee famous. Rehab was the one place in which their putative mystery could be preserved, the one place they could hide, if only for a little while. Strip that mystery, that hiding place, away and what is left of the celebrity?

This is car crash television of the highest order – and it seems unlikely that many of the participants’ careers will survive the experience. This Rehab could damage them for life and Living TV are doubtless loving every moment – but it could well be a case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Listening to Mark Thompson on this morning’s Today programme, justifying the corporation’s decision not to allow the broadcast of an appeal on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee for Gaza, I was distressed. The thrust of his argument was that he didn’t want the BBC’s impartiality being damaged. I am not sure about the semantics but I fail to grasp how is the BBC’s impartiality would be prejudiced by asking others to raise money for the victims of an act of war, by a state using the most lethal arsenal of weaponry against a defenseless population.

The only crumb of comfort is that the appeal has probably benefited from the barrage of publicity surrounding the discourse. After endless debates on TV and radio and acres of print generated in the newspapers, the issues of the appeal have been distinctly elevated. My belief is that the oxygen of publicity and nature of the outrage will most likely motivate and inspire more people to donate and help the appeal.

Vivid and arresting images are commonplace in the sort of appeal films that follow a humanitarian crisis. Unforgivably lurid imagery of the awful damage poverty, starvation and war in every appeal for 30 years means that it’s possible that the viewer is anaesthetised to the impact of this genre of film.

The perception of this type of broadcast is that, thanks to the ubiquity of the imagery, it lacks impact and the intent to shock is muted. If this is the case, then the fact that the BBC are still not willing to show the Gaza appeal – a move that Sky are supporting as well – may well result in the general public responding to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza in a more expressive, compassionate and positive manner than they would have done if it had been shown.

There’s a short review of The Fame Formula in the Financial Times on 23rd January. Stephen Cave also discusses Fame by Mark Rowlands and The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption by Daniel Herwitz.

“It’s these myths [of the iconic early Hollywood stars] that are exploded by Mark Borkowski in his jolly romp The Fame Formula: How Hollywood’s Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry.” writes Cave. “His book celebrates the publicists – the myth-makers who turned Hollywood’s patchy raw material into household names. Running his own PR firm, Borkowski has an insider’s eye, and his book is full of revelatory detail.

“Some stunts he describes have already passed into legend: Fox studios insured Betty Grable’s legs for $1m in 1943, while the three-year hunt for the girl to play Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind was “arguably the most influential publicity campaign of all time”. Borkowski particularly revels in the antics of maverick publicity agent Jim Moran, who led a real bull through a real china shop to promote a musician’s flagging career, and had to be stopped from using dwarfs on kites to fly ad banners over New York’s Central Park.”

To read the full review, click here.

Gordon Ramsay’s given up his flak-managing flack Gary Farrow as part of a series of moves that see him scaling down his spending and financially restructuring his massive empire under the management of his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson.

This may come as something of a blow for Farrow in these recessionary times; his skill with crisis management has seen Ramsay through some hard times, not least the revelation of an affair with Sarah Symonds last year, but it’s the sort of thing that should come as no surprise to a seasoned publicist.

It’s the sort of move that has happened time and again, as I have described in The Fame Formula. An early example is the relationship between Harry Reichenbach and Rudolph Valentino. Reichenbach discovered Valentino, pushed him on movie executives and encouraged them to see beyond the cauliflower ear to the essential star within. Valentino, with Reichenbach’s help early on, went on to become one of the great screen presences of all time.

Eventually, a time came when Valentino began to resent that he was spending money on publicity when he – and particularly his wife – thought that his image could be managed in house. Valentino’s wife took on the role of managing the star’s career. She vetoed all the publicity work that Reichenbach, then working for Paramount, offered her and struck out alone, even though she did not know how to go about managing a star.

The audience for Monsieur Beaucaire, the first film for which Mrs Valentino handled all publicity, was 80 per cent men when previous Valentino film audiences had been comprised almost solely of lustful women. This picture proved a failure, as did the follow-up, Sainted Devils.

‘In 1923, a thousand women swarmed around the Ritz-Carlton when I walked out of it with Rudolph Valentino,’ wrote Reichenbach. ‘But ten days before he died – he was eight years older then and already wore a wig – we went to see George White’s Scandals and nobody knew he was in the theatre. In his case, his wife was an anti-alchemist changing gold to dross. She handled the selection of his stories, dominated him and the studio and inflated his ego to the breaking point.’

There’s a definite risk that Ramsay, out of reach of the man who has guided his personal life through the press and who kept at bay the potential full impact of the Sarah Symonds story, will run into trouble again. His father-in-law has kept on Sauce PR, the firm that oversees event management, brand work and building the reputation of Gordon Ramsay Holdings, but seems to have forgotten that the man is the brand and the brand the man, something that Gary Farrow knows only too well. Without Farrow’s ministering influence, the rumours that surround Ramsay might well have sunk him years ago.

If Gordon Ramsay, in the face of mounting business problems and a recession, strays again, it won’t just be a personal crisis. The whole business is tied up in his image, and if the public’s perception of that changes, as it did for Valentino, then all is easily lost. Dispensing with Farrow’s services, which have kept Gordon Ramsay’s image magnificently afloat in the face of many difficulties, could well be a saving that will end up costing Ramsay and his company much more than mere money.

When über-chef Heston Blumenthal III was asked to wave his magic wooden spoon over the roadside diner Little Chef, I raised my eyes to the gods. ‘What a gift for the production company,’ I thought. ‘Brilliant fly-on-the-wall telly at the expense of a tired old brand; we’ll be chuckling all the way to bed.’

How wrong can an old git be? “Big Chef takes on Little Chef” has turned out to be a publicity coup. Middle class angst about the sort of food that Little Chef offer is in no way representative of what most people want. The reality is that there are a great many out there who want Little Chef’s menu to remain conservative and a great many more who just need reminding that the Little Chef exists.

Little Chef’s Ian Pegler demonstrated that he has a real understanding of his investment; this is a man who has an authentic passion for the chain. He clung on, as did his staff, to the traditions of the diner and fought tooth and nail against the vision of the TV show.

Despite Heston’s attempts at bringing his own brand values to spruce up those of Little Chef, the reality was clear – Little Chef’s fare has an audience who like the food and don’t want some media kitchen-luvvy fiddling with their comfort nosh. The programme became nothing more than a prime time TV advert for the stoic brand values of Little Chef.

The flailing Blumenthal looked on like some bemused foreign football coach forced to watch his Galácticos knocked out of the FA cup by a bunch of amateurs from the Middle Hellenic league. It was something of a PR reality check for the “wunderkind”, but more importantly, for the swish TV execs who didn’t get what they expected.

Channel 4’s rhetorical hyberbole gave its true intentions away – can a chef with a reputation for innovation transform the fortunes of the much-loved British institution? Well no, because Little Chef didn’t actually want to be turned around in the first place. All Ian Pegler wanted was to get as much publicity as possible – and Channel 4 walked straight into a case of “Little Chef shafts Big Chef”; David and Goliath played out with frying pans.

I am now off to my local Little Chef to sample the Olympic breakfast. Looks like it could kill me, but I will at least be able to slide into Hades on a slope paved with delicious bacon fat.

British Olympic gold medallist Rebecca Adlington will be announced as the new face of swimwear brand Speedo on Thursday, according to the Telegraph.

Adlington will join Michael Phelps, who won a world record eight golds at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as Speedo’s official face of the world’s biggest swimwear brand. Phelps has been sponsored by Speedo since he was 16 and received a $1 million bonus for winning over seven gold medals in a single Olympic Games as part of the contract.

After securing her medals in China it was predicted that companies such as BP and BT could offer Adlington up to £100,000 a year each to endorse their brands.

“[She] represents a fantastic opportunity [for brands],” commented PR and brand specialist Mark Borkowski after the Beijing Olympics. “She has become an over-night British figurehead.”

Adlington wore Speedo’s revolutionary LZR Racer swimsuit when she swam to two gold medals in Beijing, becoming the first British woman to win an Olympic swimming race in 50 years and the most successful British swimmer in a century. The 19-year-old from Mansfield already trains in Nottingham where Speedo has their headquarters.