The Next Big Forgettable Ephemera Thing
A fascinating article in yesterday’s Guardian, marking the rise and rise of TV merchandising, which started out by accident thanks to Mattel bringing out a range of toys to coincide with Conan the Barbarian that it couldn’t sell, forcing the company to create He Man and the Masters of the Universe and a plethora of […]
Bad Santas
Three out-of-work, recession-hit Santas were employed by Borkowski for a simple photo shoot for the company’s Christmas card, due to take place this afternoon. Unfortunately, they got thoroughly drunk beforehand and are currently rampaging around the streets of London. Fortunately, we had a video camera on hand and have been following them as they shout, […]
The new transparency
I was interested to read the latest Bare Feet Studios blog by Roxanne Darling on the need for transparency and new, big, clear thinking in advertising; it chimes in rather neatly with my views on the way PR should work in the coming years. “This post is part of my desire to both shine light […]
To Celeb, Perchance to Dream
I hear that Channel 4 has signed bed shop Dreams to sponsor Celebrity Big Brother, which returns to our screens next month for the first time since 2007. Celebrity Big Brother was “rested” last year following the Shilpa Shetty racism row, so it will be interesting to find out if the show can still interact […]
Too Many Fingers in the Pie
I was sent a beautiful and astonishing graphical representation of the cost of the bailout of the American economy yesterday – one that made my jaw tap my laptop’s keys and type out an expressive gasp of consternation when I saw it. The pie chart in question, below, was posted on the voltagecreative.com blog and […]
Arresting Change
Reading George Monbiot’s comment, in today’s Guardian, discussing the flurry of misinformation about climate change, I cannot help but think that the biggest global budgets, for corporations whose profit-making capabilities are threatened by the need for change, are thrown at secret briefs to the global PR giants, whose only remit is to sow confusion and […]
Recession and the Shannon Matthews case
In the hoo-ha surrounding the Shannon Matthews case, I find myself wondering about her mother’s motivations behind kidnapping her own daughter. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, even among the most morally dubious of people, and given the amount of attention and sympathy – from most quarters anyway – that the McCaan’s received, it […]
Christmas Axe Heroes
Christmas is fast approaching and the battle to be top game dog is at its most intense, with the R word hanging over most products and retailers. Confidence is key – keep the stores upbeat and they will support the product on the sales floor. And nothing bespeaks confidence quite as well as good promotional […]
Richard & Judy: The Cable Crunch
The Independent reported yesterday on the decline in ratings of Richard and Judy since their move to cable and asked me to comment. Here’s an extract of the article, entitled Turning off Richard and Judy. “They have spent the best part of two decades as Britain’s most unlikely TV power couple. Now it seems the […]
The Power of Twitting
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 […]
The Heart of the Brand
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 […]
The kiss-and-tell recession
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 […]
John Sergeant retires hurt!
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 […]
The re-branding of Prince Charles
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, […]
The Twitter Agenda
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 […]
Selling Excess Daily Mail Style
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 […]
The Un-Spun Sarah Brown
The cynics are suggesting that Sarah Brown’s PR experience and guile was ably deployed to pilot her husband, Gordon Brown, through the rapids of a tricky by-election. OK, the first lady has a history of working in PR; in a previous life she was a capable operator in the art and publishing world. But she […]
Pissed Brummie or another fabulous nobody
Why You tube is a beautiful thing – the birth of another fabulous nobody
The Obama Project
When I first visited New York 32 years ago, I was strongly advised against walking through Harlem. 40 years ago, Martin Luther King was assassinated for daring to dream about racial integration. 13 years previous to that, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus and tipped the […]
What It Means For Talent
On Friday morning, hours after Lesley Douglas’s resignation, the controllers of all the BBC radio and television networks were called together, and asked to look carefully at everything they were broadcasting. “We’re all jumpy. We’ve not been told to change or become more conservative. But we are being encouraged to talk about any shows which […]