Mark My Words

I’ve spent months journeying back through the archives to explore the power of the stunt, not the limp, performative vanilla stuff we see so often today, but the disruptive acts that carried purpose, planted seeds of change, and rewired the way society thought.In a confused and difficult world, it’s easy to sneer at disruption. But […]

We must ask ourselves: how would the heroic suffragettes or the remarkable Greenham Common women be regarded if active today? The answer is simple: they would be locked up. Just as they were locked up then. A century ago, women chained themselves to railings, set fires, endured prison and changed the world, and we celebrate their victories […]

A TechCrunch post grabbed my attention this week. It covered Elon Musk’s xAI launch of Grok 4. Just when you thought the AI hype cycle couldn’t get more feverish, along comes a chatbot so clever it consults its own maker, Elon Musk, before answering controversial questions. A machine with parental dependency. Imagine your toaster refusing […]

No kiss. Just a lingering hug. Nevertheless, your CEO and HR boss are caught on camera at a Coldplay concert. But in the court of public opinion, body language is guilty until proven otherwise. Cue peak Schadenfreude. And just like that, your obscure company becomes the star of a scandal no one cast you in. […]

From a creaking Dutch boarding house, stitched together with love, oddity, and the faded dreams of creatives, I’ve been watching Jeff Bezos float deeper into his own irony-sodden oblivion.Here at Le Domaine du Meunier, an ex-mill reborn by the mad brilliance of Ariane van Tuyll and her husband Coen, two Amsterdam visionaries who clearly value […]

Damn. I’m about to commit the cardinal sin. I just can’t help it. My feed is flooded with noise from Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. I know I shouldn’t cast any stones but screw it, here goes. Let’s talk about advertising.So we’re coming to the end of Cannes Lions week, the annual migration of […]

In a world buckling under chaos, spectacle, and weaponised noise, one truth cuts through: the most dangerous weapon today isn’t an AI weaponised drone. It’s language.Not the kind of 20th-century lingua franca of international relations that built bridges. The type that now distorts, seduces, and detonates. Language stripped of nuance, engineered for dominance in a […]

Robert Jenrick’s viral vigilante PR stunt on the London Underground – chasing fare dodgers like an undernourished Batman with a Westminster lanyard wasn’t law enforcement, but rather low-rent theatre. A self-shot PR spectacle staged in the fading light of relevance.This was really a display of political desperation to shake the nation out of its ennui. […]

And so, it ends. The reign of the Prince of Match of the Day is over, not with scandal or disgrace, but with something far more British: moral fatigue.Gary Lineker’s journey from national treasure to divisive conscientious objector is a parable of our times, where virtue, fame, and the cultish contradictions of the BBC collide. […]

I had an epiphany on Tuesday night, sitting in a packed room at Shoreditch House full of young, switched-on, emotionally articulate souls: scarred, and staring into the algorithmic abyss. They weren’t there for influencer bollocks. They came because the event’s subject mattered. I listened and I learned something.They came to hear Rosie Viva talk about […]

There’s a strange satisfaction in watching the mighty McDonald’s get nibbled at by a northern bakery that once sold four sausage rolls for a quid. Greggs vs McDonald’s: The Fast Feud Channel4 isn’t just a documentary — it’s a morality play for our times, with pasties as protagonists and PR as the real power behind […]

I’ve been continuing to ponder Prince Harry’s PR woes laid bare in his BBC confessional. When you repeatedly cast yourself as the eternally wounded, misunderstood prince, the public doesn’t lean in with empathy, they switch off. Or worse, they roll their eyes and reach for the popcorn.Harry isn’t losing because he’s being honest. He’s losing […]

The death of the Pope is more than a news story; it’s a moment to pause. A moment to consider the cultural value of humility, of grace. High-minded topics for a humble publicist.Whether you admired him or regarded him with suspicion, he embodied something increasingly alien to public life: the notion that transgression can be […]

So, did the Blue Horizon space trip break the glass ceiling — or just inflate another PR bubble? That’s the question I asked myself this morning, wading through the media tickertape fallout from the all-female space jaunt, fronted by Katy Perry, aboard a rocket carrying a payload of celebrities, selfies, and soft-focus sentimentality into the […]

Mark Borkowski is a highly acclaimed PR and Communications industry figure, renowned for his expertise and unmatched experience spanning four decades. His influence in the industry has earned him a place alongside figures like Alistair Campbell and in PR Week’s list of the 25 most influential industry figures. A sharp observer of the cultural zeitgeist, […]

There’s a strange new behaviour quietly sweeping through the body of modern business. It’s the quiet epidemic of the corporate mind.It’s not disruptive innovation. It’s not some bold new AI.It’s silence. Cold, calculated, and maddening silence.Let me take you into a scene: a client. Two months of deep strategic work. Narrative building. Positioning. The kind […]

Exclusive: The Duke of Sussex is facing a legacy-threatening moment of truth in the worsening rift over Sentebale, warns PR expert Mark Borkowski.Forget the endless carousel of Sussex fails. There are opinions galore about Sussex Netflix deals and Sussex “exclusives” feeding the algorithmic maw. But Sentebalegate is far more worrying. Strip away all that’s gone before and […]

It’s not Watergate—it’s something far more unhinged. Signalgate: a Trumpian soap opera scripted by Jesse Armstrong, where national security collides with reality TV energy, and everyone thinks they’re the smartest person in the encrypted room. This wasn’t clandestine espionage. This was a defence strategy kicked around in a Signal group chat like a bunch of […]

I have been a poorly boy this week. Somewhere between the Lemsip and the fevered doomscrolling of a bloke struck down by an unholy strain of man flu, a revelation hit me. And not the soothing, metaphysical kind. The Book of Revelation kind.Trumpets (and Trump-ets), beasts, AI fever dreams, Mars rockets, and the occasional false […]

A thought for Monday. When I wrote The Art of the Publicity Stunt, it wasn’t just a book, it was a manifesto. It was 1999, when the stunt was the tool of the maverick, the performer on the fringes who understood that attention wasn’t given; it was taken. The Borkowski way was about disruption, but […]