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 […]
More on Jonathan Ross and the BBC scandal
A couple of news snippets on YouTube in which I comment on the ongoing crisis at the BBC.
Pulling the pluggers
In these difficult times, spare a thought for the unsung victims of the media song and dance surrounding Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s prank calls to Andrew Sachs; the pluggers. Now that Ross’s shows have been cancelled for the foreseeable future, the pluggers for any number of stars are without two of the most popular […]
Where next for Brand and Ross?
The suspension of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand by the BBC over their boorish and lewd phone call to Andrew Sachs is a definite case of the BBC finally sitting back and taking a look at their media stock after a week of keeping its collective head in the sand, Suspension is the equivalent to […]
The times they are a-changin'
The hoo-ha over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s pre-recorded assault on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs has spilled over into a debate in today’s Times about whether presenters will earn as much money in the predicted straitened times post credit crunch and the global impact of such anarchic behaviour in a more tight-fisted entertainment world. […]
Zen and the art of Russell Brand
If you are surrounded by the press, being bombarded by difficult questions about something you’ve done, something that you may or may not be ashamed of, but are definitely unwilling to talk about, there is a new model of zen-like avoidance technique, thanks to the ever-inventive Russell Brand. Click here to see Brand say absolutely nothing about his involvement […]
Is all publicity good publicity?
Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand have sparked a lather of frothing outrage with their series of lewd messages on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, who starred as Manuel in Fawlty Towers, detailing an alleged sexual liason between Brand and Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baille (click here to read the transcript). I feel some sympathy for Sachs and […]
With a Bang and a Wispa
Luckily, someone at the PR Week Awards was on hand with a camera to capture the Borkowski team’s exuberant stage invasion post the announcement of the team winning the Campaign of the Year Gold Award for the Cadbury’s Wispa campaign. The footage below proves beyond doubt that the only thing to go quietly to the […]