Dear producers, commissioners, writers and other masterminds behind ‘The Archers’.

Your programme is a great institution. It keeps the cognoscenti from topping themselves over the state of British ‘continuing drama’ and it remains perhaps our finest regional accent safari outside of the RSC. I’ve been a committed advocate for years- I was even a founding member of the Eddie Grundy fan club, having been convinced by John Peel and his producer John Walters.

This in mind, why oh why do you choose to deal in archetypes, clichés and flagrant misinformation? Why must your 5 million (million) listeners be poisoned with a hackneyed view of the PR industry? This is a radio 4 show with a demographic over a certain age- line up your listeners and you’ll find more agency heads per square foot than you will in the Groucho Club. Yet the entire dairy storyline parodies and stereotypes the communications process, incorporating social media, public debate and crisis PR into its field of misunderstanding.

I’m talking, of course, about PR guru Rufus, whose agency Moynihan & Parker (a name which somehow suggests to me nefarious Big Pharma contacts- always background check your associates, Brian) is helping to quieten the buzz around Ambridge’s new ‘Mega-Dairy’.  Rufus, to be fair to him, isn’t quite a champagne-swilling Patsy or Edina, but what he is is a little bit useless. He’s all talk. He’s the kind of person who consults the ‘water menu’ for longer than it takes to choose his food.

Much as it might pain some of the core audience to admit, your show actually enjoys a rich communications heritage. Conceived originally as an information resource for farmers in post-world war II ‘austerity Britain’, if introduced today it would be adorning the cover of PR Week and swamping Twitter for days.

My own professional concern aside, is it really helpful for your programme, which once took pride in dispensing helpful advice to beleaguered businesspeople, to advise against hiring a PR firm? Is it advisable to present entrepreneurs not only as part-dickensian megalomaniacs but as bullshit-merchants as well? When the British economy comes to its knees and we’re all living off roots and grubs in the woods, I’ll make sure I choose Ambridge as the site of my makeshift toilet. For shame.

Yours,

Mark Borkowski

Call me a cynic, but something rankles with me in this Greg Smith resignation furore. What’s unquestionable is that this man, formerly at the top of his profession (at least outwardly) has now rendered himself unemployable. The publication of his article and the resultant storm of comment combined in a perfect storm of PR disasters which led to the firm’s shares dropping by 3.4% yesterday.

We must ask two questions about his actions. The first: did he know? Is it conceivable that he thought, by printing an article in the New York Times, he would be hailed as courageous, his points would be intelligently and calmly digested and discussed, and then he could wander off to another firm more secure in its ‘culture’? Possibly, but there’s few who’d argue this point with any gusto. Choosing the NYT  seems pretty calculated- its audience of switched-on liberals could be relied upon to raise the requisite moral uproar, and its much-touted online success near-guaranteed a significant reaction on twitter.

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Mark will perform a brand new talk on the concept of adventure capitalism- from Kittenger to Ken Dodd, from Pony Express to Startup Billionaires- as part of London’s first festival of Solo Theatre. Joining an illustrious bill of star performers from stage and business alike, Mark will explain and elucidate how to preserve a sense of purpose and suppress the bullshit in the world of extreme entrepreneurialism.

Mark is to speak at Unilever’s forthcoming event, ‘telling stories in a digital world’. Enlisted for his famous- and occasionally infamous- track record of creating stories which inflame public conversation, Mark will be advising and educating global marketing teams on how best to craft brand stories through digital platforms. In the new economy, information arises and alters at an incredible rate. Mark will demonstrate how to form, shape, deliver and respond to these digital stories.

The event will take place on Tuesday 22^nd May at 11:20

As part of the Cheltenham Science Festival, Mark will be taking part in a panel discussion, titled ‘Marketing the Apocalypse’ and chaired by comedian and popular commentator Marcus Brigstocke, on the marketing methods of environmental movements. Alongside prominent environmentalist Tony Juniper and Climate Scientist Mark Maslin, Mark will lend his insights on the importance of creative communications strategies in the new economy to this uniquely pertinent and highly controversial debate.

The event will take place On Thursday, June 14^th, 2012 at 12:00

Today’s prince Hazza/Usain Bolt story is remarkable in demonstrating just how far the royals- and prince Harry in particular- have come, PR wise, in an infinitesimally small space of time. The pair’s ‘race’ was gleefully picked up by scribblers across the tabloid and broadsheet press- all of whom absolutely fell into line with what must have been a palace PR agreed interpretation. Harry’s banter-fuelled premature start and Bolt’s quasi-ironic deference combined to create a feel-good, saccharine masterpiece of a stunt.

What struck me as incredible was this total confirmation of Harry’s newfound status as palace PR vehicle. Not 5 minutes ago, back when Wills was the nice-but-dim publicity even keel for the House of Windsor, Harry was a one-boy PR disaster. Of course, there was the uniform scandal (though perhaps that seems tame following the new heights to which Max Mosley took the genre), but it seemed every week there’d be some new splash of Hal stumbling out of Mahiki, sporting a pith helmet and waving a giant cartoon spliff.

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I was tipped off the other day to a scandalous instance of brand karaoke. As those readers involved with the marketing or events worlds, or anyone who simply likes going to gigs, may know, O2 are pioneers in the priority ticketing space. O2 Priority is a fantastically successful scheme (brainchild of the fantastic head of music sponsorship Jasmine Skee) which, when combined with highly impactful online material like Academy TV, is a recipe for inspirational ticket sales.

The other day, BT decided, bizarrely, to attempt to take ownership of this much-beloved brand, with promoted tweets advertising advance tickets to LondonLive for their customers using the hashtag #prioritytickets.

You can almost here the vast and ill oiled corporate thinking clunking into place. Twitter is just a great big maelstrom of noise, right? Everyone knows that. Therefore, if an organisation simply tunes in to a proven popular phrase, the people will follow like sheep. Sheeple.

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The Chisora-Haye post fight Brew-ha ha over the weekend was a stark reminder that the world of Boxing provides us with the clearest and noisiest examples of the many pitfalls open to the young sports star. The scuffle between the two men has seen papers of all stripes filled with talk of the ‘disgrace’ in which they’ve left the sport.

Of course, if boxing can indeed be discredited by an out of ring scuffle, its name is already irredeemably muddied. The Guardian and the Mail both took the opportunity to run in one form or another gleeful summaries of past dust-ups, from Tyson and Lewis back to the racially-charged mid 80’s scrapping of Mark Kaylor and Errol Christie. It’s now pretty difficult to talk about the noble sport of the pugilistic gentleman with a straight face.

Where once the great showman Muhammed Ali used pre show/off-ring hype like an artist, whether to catch George Foreman off guard in the Rumble in the Jungle or whipping up long term media coverage around his rivalry with Joe Frazier, the practice has become cheap and often counterproductive.

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On Tuesday I got involved in a good, old fashioned almighty Twitterstorm. Kicked off by the recent re-ignition of the age-old breast implant debate, it effectively centred around Newsnight, and the embattled Health Minister Anne Milton, besieged on all sides by parties with a variety of grievances.

Star of the show, however, was Naomi Wolf, who waded in calmly and with considerable dignity to point out that the dangers of breast implants aren’t exactly a surprise. As she said with delicious poise, ‘I wrote a book about this, which was reported in every major news outlet’. She referred to ‘twenty five years of data’, and told Milton, quite simply ‘if you don’t know this, you’re in the wrong job’.

As I subsequently tweeted, we should pity as much as we chuckle at the poor ministry PR pixie who seemingly failed to even google the issue before her boss went on air- bright eyed interns everywhere take note. However, there is something far more sinister than ‘Thick of It’-esque bungling here.

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I bumped into someone the other night who described themselves as a ‘media relations director’ for a PR firm. It got me thinking- in my agency’s previous incarnation I employed someone in a similar role, and was generally pretty pleased with the results. However, with the role of PR in relation to the media- and the media itself- changing at a frightening rate, the existence of such a role led me to think about the changes in modern journalism, and their meaning for the PR world.

The death of print journalism in its current form is a fact- the industry is in freefall. This continuous groundswell, augmented by the firestorm of Leveson, has turned the public- by and large- furiously against the journalistic profession. As the prevalence and standing of conventional print media declines, the PR industry will necessarily morph over years and decades into a hybrid beast, incorporating networking, influencing and social media as its key tenets.

Media of all kinds are almost by definition dominated by curiosity and novelty, with timeframes set by miniscule attention spans. Yet despite the undoubted importance of considering what’s next, we mustn’t forget the importance of what is, what we have already. While I’m aware there are many in the industry ready to gleefully welcome a lobotomised, castrated press, I can’t imagine anything more tragic.

From a PR perspective, no amount of saccharine, tame coverage can beat the engagement and story value brought by a great independent journalist getting behind you. A journalist willing to blandly spew out whatever a PR tells them may bring column inches for the client, but their copy won’t generate actual conversation. A fantastic journalist who gets truly excited by the recommendation of a trusted publicist will be the one to make or break a meme.

Aside from anything else, those with dedication to fact and authenticity- and the training to pursue it- will always be needed as mediators. Even in a world dominated by the chattering of the masses, someone needs to be present to sift through the torrent of useless information to find the gold, not just in terms of the truth, but in terms of what’s genuinely exciting, truly valuable.