Mark My Words

Of course, I do not forget the lessons etched in the tablets of great PR practice. After all, I’m now a vintage publicist. Few today might recall the great Tylenol meltdown, but as the brand once again faces an existential threat, it’s worth remembering what time forgot.Back in 1982, when America woke to the horror […]

The all-consuming binfire on LinkedIn this week lit by Zoe Scaman centres on Stagwell’s work to help the Israeli government launder its image, sorry win the Hammas war. Well, of course. There’s always someone willing to spray Chanel on a corpse if the cheque is big enough. The oldest alibi in the comms trade is […]

Let me say it aloud: We face a crisis of trust in politics. It’s always the small betrayals that give the game away. Angela Rayner, both Deputy PM and Housing Secretary, allegedly dodging £40k in stamp duty. And a Prime Minister paralysed to act. You couldn’t script a better parable of political decay if you […]

The PR industry bubble loves to talk about itself. Gossip, awards, the next throwaway influencer activation engineered to blip on TikTok for 24 hours before sinking into the feed. Too often, the industry mistakes noise for impact. We live in a silo where the metrics matter more than the meaning.But,  history tells us something different. […]

The media can’t get enough of Gen Z’s obsession with analogue. Dumbphones, cassette tapes, and even playlists of gloriously bad ’90s music are trending as if they hold the secret to a better life. It’s everywhere TikTok filters, magazine spreads, curated “Y2K vibes” nostalgia packaged as salvation to an age suffocated by social media.But let’s […]

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, […]