Parting Shots (The Drum)
As Sir Elton John and his publicist say their goodbyes, I ask if the role of PR is underrated. http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2015/12/18/parting-shots-sir-elton-john-and-his-publicist-say-their-goodbyes-role-pr
Mark My Words
Donald Trump: The Dame of Panto Politics
Donald Trump is a festive panto that has gone on past its season. He struts from podium to studio with the self-sacrificing gall of a celeb foregoing Beverly Hills for a stint of Mother Goose at a dreary middle England theatre. With each of his bombastic interventions there’s always the sense that he’s disappointed we […]
What’s left of the propaganda powder keg?
In any move to war we get bludgeoned with the inevitable metaphors of motion. Whether it’s a strategic progression or headlong rush, a targeted advancement or mission creep, there is no turning back from the march of predictable language. Interestingly, in his seminal manual on how to hack our psyche’s mainframe Edward Bernays also captures […]
Mark My Words named PR blog of the year
Last week Mark My Words was awarded Vuelio’s PR and Marketing blog of the year. Thank you!
Little Red Lines
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This is how shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s whipping out of Mao’s Little Red Book went down in the Commons yesterday. Critics, on both sides of the house, have lambasted the former backbench romper stomper for quoting from a genocidal dictator. McDonnell argues this “flamboyant gesture” was required to […]
You can’t get better than a PR quickie
The formula for the Christmas Ad is out and even PRs are having a go. John Lewis’s Man on the Moon and Sainsbury’s Mog the Cat may have been beamed out into the national conversation courtesy of big budgets, social media overkill and appearing on platforms that still demand attention; but a bundle of Christmas-themed […]
TV Adverts
From the infuriatingly catchy to the plain bizarre Mark joins Adrian Chiles on Five Live to discuss the value of TV adverts- past and present. Alongside branding guru Robert Bean and Go Compare’s opera singer Wynne Evans Mark explores how, from Andrex to John Lewis, classic TV ads inject a brand into our cultural bloodstream. […]
A World without PR
In this month’s PR Week I ask what a World without PR would look like and basically imagine myself out of existence….. http://www.prweek.com/article/1371355/mark-borkowski-brave-new-world-without-pr
Dreaming of Christmas 2016
You could power much of the national grid on the hype that’s been fissioning on social media. We’ve been drip fed on teasers and speculation has been rife. It isn’t a new Star Wars or Bond. It’s November 2016 and we’re watching the latest John Lewis Christmas ad. Could it possibly top the previous year’s […]
Corbyn and the PewDiePie effect
“Once the press officer becomes the story, it is the end of the press officer.” This was the verdict of one of David Cameron’s inner circle on Andy Coulson. For Seamus Milne the knives were out from day one. Jeremy Corbyn’s new PR chief- branded “fascist” and “odious” on Twitter and treated as “a man […]