Corbyn's Labour manifesto: when is a leak not a leak? (The Drum)
Jeremy Corbyn has always insisted that Labour policy be decided by consultation and debate. With the leaking of a draft of the party’s manifesto, Labour has launched its most ambitious act of policy crowdsourcing. As a pundit pointed out, leaking the manifesto is probably the surest way of getting the media to seriously read it. […]
Brad’s second coming
Antiquity had the crucifixion. The French Republic had the Guillotine. For us the arena for bringing down the high and mighty is the tabloid mud pit. Lucky for our modern Dauphins reputational execution is not as lasting as actual decapitation and a second chance is always on the table. In his tell-all interview with GQ […]
The myth of the vote winning slogan
Gallons of intellect, insight and idiocy are poured into election campaigns- all in search of a magic slogan that will catapult a candidate to victory. The amount of money sloshing around in the election market reflects the mythology that has been built around the campaign guru. The power of a phrase to win is often […]
GE2017: A campaign of re-heated leftovers
If you’re looking for a good word of the day, try apanthropinization. It means to rise above or resign from one’s narrow concerns and worldly worries. Over the next six weeks of what looks set to be a dreary election campaign we will all be needing some of that. We’ve moaned about the lack of […]
Give corporate communicators a break- failure starts and ends with leadership
Cometh the PR crisis, cometh the troll. In the past week we’ve had an Easter bumper pack of public relations blunders for the twitterati to sink their teeth into. The mother of all has been the United Airlines fiasco which saw a passenger “re-accommodated” in a “de-planed situation” after he refused to be “auto-volunteered” off […]
Pseudo news is no response to fake news
Each day Whatsapp and Messenger process around 60 billion messages. We’ve never been more communicative- and the burden for instant response has never been greater. It’s quaint then that the main news story of the week has been the delivery of a single letter. Since the declaration of Article 50 was signed by the PM […]
Social media giants need to bulk up narrative in questioning times
Next week Theresa May will be writing to the European Council to declare her intentions to initiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. The resounding message of last year’s referendum –for right or wrong- was the country’s desire to ‘take back control’. The message was an alluring one. We have long been told we live in […]
Unfriended: What Facebook tells us about PRs and the media
Search current articles on Facebook and you’ll find pages and pages on its exciting new messaging app. What is clearly a Snap Chat rip-off, the app allows users to share photos and videos that vanish in 24 hours. That this news itself comes little more than a day after a BBC report into the social […]
Best Picture mix-up is the best PR stunt Oscar’s ever pulled
In a night of surprises the greatest revelation of the 89th Academy Awards was that Pricewaterhousecoopers plays a leading role in counting voting. If anyone ever queried the involvement of accountants in Hollywood the Best Picture mix-up has provided sufficient ammo. The knee-jerk statement of regret from PwC, coupled with the obligatory promise to investigate […]
Brands all over the world are praying that Trump attacks them
Donald Trump may have only been in office for three weeks, but he’s already started to work his entrepreneurial magic. Taking to Twitter to lambaste Nordstrom for withdrawing his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, he unleashed an outpouring of consumer love. The store’s stock finished the day up 4%. Meryl Streep’s performance in “Florence Foster Jenkins” […]
Brand Beckham will take more than a minor email leak about knighthoods to bring it down.
No one likes a show-off. Even if you’ve won 19 major trophies in a 20 year football career and have reinvented yourself into a $1bn empire spanning fashion, music and film, it isn’t a good look to cry out for recognition. Yet any obituary of Brand Beckham in light of the email leak is […]
The Truth Behind the Beyonce Pregnancy Photoshoot
Above all else an iconic image is an expression of power. Think of Korda’s photo portrait of Che Guevara –starting life as propaganda for a dynamic young radical it wassucked into the incredible merchandise mill of capitalism. When Korda first photographed the Argentine radical we were exposed to at most 500 images a day. In […]
2017 exists in an augmented reality
La La Land –the new musical by Damien Chazelle that has got audiences feather stepping out of cinemas- opens with a traffic jam on a freeway ramp. For a glorious moment the honking drone of commuters is suspended for a sequence to rival great dance numbers from Top Hat to Thriller. What makes Chazelle’s film […]
Who killed the newspaper critic?
Newspapers have been shedding their arts reporting for decades, relegating reviews to dispensable supplements and buried middle-pages. Depressing reports such as last week’s piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the disappearance of full-time arts staffers are a familiar sight. If the professional reviewer is an endangered species then the rise of the blogging geek […]
PR in 2017: buy a bunker
In PR we talk about reaching out and cutting through. We craft messaging that will engage that poised and docile mob we call ‘the public’. In 2016 –a year of Trump and Brexit, outrage and division- this pursuit has never seemed harder. The year will be remembered as one where the mighty fell, the great […]
What's the value of values?
Whether it’s a burka ban in Germany or Trump’s plan for an overhaul of America’s trading relationships much in politics is justified on the ground of ‘our values’. They can be liberal or American, Enlightenment or corporate- what matters is that they are ours and we have to defend them. As analysts of political discourse […]
What now for the liberal elite?
Between the shock of Trump and the likely pummeling of the Italian establishment in the country’s constitutional referendum on Sunday the metropolitan liberal elite have received a small boon in Richmond Park. While the defeat of a Tory former wunderkind is an odd platform for restoring order, the bi-election had become a proxy war between […]
Theresa May would be missing a trick not to make Nigel Farage our next man in Washington
Is the thought of Ambassador Farage really beneath contempt for Theresa May? Undoubtedly, the interim Ukip leader would be a live wire. Foreign Office mandarins, already on tenterhooks about Foreign Secretary Johnson, would be livid. But the potential benefits outweigh the risks. If Trump has transformed politics once and for all into reality TV, then diplomacy by selfie and proclamations […]
Fantastic Lies and Where To Find Them
The response of the established media to reports that the majority of stories shared on facebook during the US election were stonking great lies has been the predictable bellow of I told you so. According to the holier-than-thou op-eds this is clearly the fault of the news gathering public for shunning proper paywalled journalism. Yet […]
The excellence of festive campaigns should teach us that brand engagement is not just for Christmas
PR is deployed to whet consumer appetites by leaking morsels, as if we couldn’t picture what is in store for us. An adorably toothless child in a well-furnished house befriends a fantasy figure with a particular cause for sadness. The figure is a metaphor for the magic of childhood refracted through a wistful gauze of […]