Archive for February, 2009

I heard today that Howard Zieff had died – a name I’d not really encountered before, despite the fact that he’d directed a few breezy comedies like Private Benjamin, starring Goldie Hawn – but the obituaries made me sit up and take notice. It turns out that, when he started out in advertising, he was very much in the Jim Moran mold; a man who used wit to get people talking and whose campaigns kick-started the more realistic advertising and promotion of brands that has become so commonplace and important to modern advertising and PR.

Raised in the Bronx, Zieff’s major breakthrough was to use real people in the adverts he created, real people whose faces told a story every bit as clearly as the adverts themselves. His most famous advert was for Levy’s rye bread, which ran with the tag line: ”You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”

“’We wanted normal-looking people, not blond, perfectly proportioned models,’” he told the New York Times a few years ago. And normal for Zieff, who grew up in the Bronx, was a wide, multicultural mix. The Levy’s advertisements, therefore, featured an American Indian, a Chinese man and a black child.

“’I saw the Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central,” Zieff told the New York Times. “’The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my Midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.’”

Another of Zieff’s big, early campaigns was for The Daily News, which captured the spirit of Jim Moran on film; each advert featured a person reading the paper and becoming so engrossed that they accidentally did ridiculous things – a petrol pump attendant placing the petrol hose in his customer’s pocket rather than the car, for example.

He was also involved in bringing stars like Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman to the fore, thanks to his interest in strange and interesting faces rather than the perfection that was the norm of the time. Zieff, in the face of considerable opposition, created the template for a great deal of today’s advertising.

Modern advertising and PR, which has thrived on the witty, truthful and artfully homespun approach to promotion that Zieff instigated, often forgets one thing that he perpetuated, however; the determination to do something new and radical and his ability to get word of mouth out of it.

He created a buzz with his adverts using models from all cultures and walks of life, a stir that ran hand in hand with the mood of the times. He learned from the past and looked to the future, rightly assessing that in an era where Rosa Parks, JFK and Martin Luther King were changing the political landscape of America, brand promotion should not be far behind. He was always pushing at the boundaries to see where he could take his advertising next.

In an age of digital marketing and instant access to information, an age where that information is overwhelming, an age of recession, publicists and advertisers need to be taking the bold steps into new ideas that Zieff took or they are likely to be left behind.

It is no longer enough to rely on the ideas he created, which have become tropes and clichés thanks to their ubiquitous use. The past should be plundered, yes, but not for the ideas that have become stale with overuse. We should be looking at out of the box thinkers like Moran and Zieff and be inspired to think as hard, fast and wittily as they did, in the hope that we can create something new and exciting, something that will generate that holy grail of the publicity world; awed, surprised, astonished or even just amused word of mouth, something that people will talk about for years to come and that will, with any luck, become cliché in 40 years time.

Put any misgivings about Jade Goody’s Barnumesque three-ring Circus sideshow to one side for moment. Instead, focus on the silver fox who has been the undisputed ringmaster of recent events in her life; Max Clifford.

He may not be attired in a garish ring suit, but Max Clifford is clearly visible as the man, centre stage, pulling the financial strings. This is not written as a genuflection to the cult of Clifford, more as an explanation of the reality; he is doing something more than a mere job – he is reacting to the peccadilloes of the age.

Clearly it is necessary for him to either not care about Jade or refuse to be paid to do that job; to carry it off, he has to place himself into a zone devoid of any emotion. Max remains calm, confident and never flustered despite the slings and arrows aimed at him. His style of delivery has been criticized but it is deliberate, matter of fact. Max is a spokesman; he is doing a job that few can deliver. Reminiscent of a river pilot steering his charge through dangerous and congested waters, Max vigilantly avoids all the sandbanks that might scupper the good ship of any celebrity brand he is steering. Max has always functioned in the wasteland between public merit and clandestine vice, creating content for the curtain-twitching masses–none of whom will ever admit to their trivia addiction.

This weekend was a high water mark in the celebrity-obsessed world we have allowed to prosper. The enduring picture we have taken away from Jade Goody’s wedding, however, was not the pitiful Goody forcing a smile through the pain; it was Max, surrounded by a sea of microphones and flanked by camera lenses. Like an effortless high wire act juggling nine clubs, he kept the media audience outside and inside the big top entertained in a style that few understand, measuring each sound bite for maximum effect.

Waspish bourgeois media dinner parties, I am sure, have a curt point of view regarding Clifford’s modus operandi. But they fail to comprehend his skill. Yes, he has enemies but he knows the power of collateral. For decades he has not compromised his style; he knows what works and the power of his personal business relationships. He’s happier to operate openly, on the phone and in the flesh. His skill can’t be replicated by a miracle app. Max has not bowed to the digital age and his instinct, shaped by decades of experience, is impossible to learn without years in the foxhole. Despite operating in the age of time compression, Max confounds the 24-7 swirl. His telltale grey hair is an insignia, a livery, which indicates his membership of a unique Guild that few have the skill or stamina to join.

I have often observed his methods of dealing with each media ruck and marvelled at his deft hand-off passes, reminiscent of the Welsh wizard Gareth Edwards in full flow. He is an adept distracter who knows how to deliver up a sound byte in an utterly disarming fashion whilst keeping the uber-media paymaster happy. He’s more than aware that one false move, one slip, could lead to a chain reaction that could negate the final payment of the big check.

When the cameras stop rolling and Jade becomes a sad footnote in Celebrity-ville, Max will pop up again and again; he is a brand and he occupies a unique place in the media landscape. If you’re in the public eye and you need to exploit your 15 months of fame quickly, he is accessible. Max has his finger on the pulse.

It seems to me that his type of PR has been genetically engineered in the last 15 years to suit the times. But, despite this engineering, I do not see any Clifford clones or heirs to his throne coming up through the ranks. Is this because of the way PR is retrenching, underscoring the inability of the new breed to come to terms with the ever-shifting churn of media from both side of the fence? Or will the next few years create a world where celebrity will not be able to command the fees that a new Max can make a meaningful profit from?

There are a number of PR people out there who need to take a clear look at Max Clifford. These are the people who decry his tactics and lampoon his deadpan manner with the press, the people who are rushing headlong into the digital media age without any grounding in the skills that have made him such a success; most notably the 360 degree vision that allows him to spot incoming missiles before they hit, be they aimed at him or his clients. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, there is much that can be learned from him.

To some, Max Clifford will be an apotheosis of the media and to others the rationale for moral intervention, but he is first and foremost a creation of the media and of his clients. His success in finding a continually crashing wave of “sordid human interest” stories for the tabloid press has been unparalleled over the last 20 years, a new age that has seen the boundaries of morality and taste shifting significantly.

He is a prime example of the squalor of the universal global media. Without modern media poverty, he could never have been successful. The future for Max is to help people amortize the moral morass because the morality compass was demagnetized decades ago and he is one of the few people still making it twitch.

Make no mistake, the floorboards of his office will creak under the weight of many more scandals for years yet.

A breakfast meeting with David Blaine last week was a very pleasing and revelatory experience; it’s good to sit and talk with someone who really, really gets true showmanship, spectacle, creativity, word of mouth and viral publicity and who has encountered many of the same things I’ve encountered, even the Russian circus act with a coat of living minks.

Blaine is a great, great grandson of Barnum and has built his persona on the Barnum and Houdini models, always connecting with his audience and constantly astonishing them. Most importantly, he is always sure that they are talking about him. He knows that without promotion something terrible happens. Nothing!

A perfect case in point is the trick he showed me. I didn’t dare ask – it felt too gauche – but Blaine offered. He got me to shuffle a pack of cards and lay out two lines of ten cards, making sure that each one was different. Then he asked me to take ten of them and hold them behind my back. Next, he suggested I look at the remaining cards and mentally pick one. “Not the Ace, it’s too obvious,” he said.

I chose the four of diamonds and told him that I’d chosen. Next, he made a gesture and told me to place the cards I held behind my back on the table. The ten cards I had hidden behind me were now eleven in number and sure enough, the eleventh card was the four of diamonds. I was gob-smacked. I have absolutely no idea how he did it – it seems an impossible trick.

But this is the reaction Blaine is constantly seeking, since he instinctively knows I would go away and talk to several people about the trick and how astonishing it was and, in this way, his reputation would be perpetuated. Now, of course, I am also blogging about it. The chances are that his reputation will spread in ever increasing circles if everyone who is astonished by him does as I have done.

Just as interesting was the revelation that Blaine actively thrived on the people who came and taunted him with food and insults whilst he was attempting to live on only 4.5 litres of water a day in a Plexiglas box above the Thames. “I needed people to react in the way that the did to get through the stunt,” he told me.

Their antipathy during his 44 days of starvation gave him something to prove to the haters and became a media focus for the endurance stunt, guaranteeing it more coverage and even comments from then-President Bush. No wonder he was heard to murmur “I love you all” when he finally completed the stunt.

He is the greatest modern showman / illusionist and will remain popular as long he can maintain the incredibly high creativity, the quality of his unique stunts and continue to amaze and astonish. Celebrities, brands and publicists have a lot to learn from David Blaine.

Where have all the rebellious heroes of British music gone? If the Brit Awards are anything to go by, there is pretty much no such animal anymore, just a parade of no-marks who are too wary of upsetting Mastercard, the sponsors, and the TV executives to do anything interesting.

The fact that the inoffensive Welsh songstress Duffy, a fine singer if you like your music to hark back to a supposedly innocent era where everyone was happy and no one rocked the boat, has been crowned the overall winner of this year’s Brits merely reinforces the corporate sheen of the modern awards, and where no alcohol is served whilst the TV show is filmed in case of trouble. No trouble is allowed, of course, in case it interferes with the mundane business of rewarding money with more money.

As recently as a decade ago, there was an inevitability about some sort of mischievous prank being pulled at the Brits; the award ceremony could be relied upon to provide at least one instance of much-needed end-of-winter anarchy in the TV schedules, be it Chumbawamba dousing John Prescott in water and changing the lyrics of Tubthumping to support the Liverpool dockers, Jarvis Cocker waving his arse at Michael Jackson or the KLF firing blanks at the crowd from the stage before depositing a dead sheep outside the venue.

Even Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox’s notoriously bad presentation style at the 1989 Brits seems like a paragon of rock ‘n’ roll anarchy now, in an era when all we get by way of mischief and outrage is the crawling skeleton that is Amy Winehouse abasing herself in the Caribbean.

Of course, it was Fleetwood and Fox’s reign of autocue terror on the show that stopped it from being broadcast live; the first step in a steady progression of limitations that saw the Brits become less a celebration of modern music and more of a corporate jolly at a seaside resort, shackling British rock music to the tedious format that spawned it simply by reacting violently against it: the 1950s variety show.

Watching the Brits now, it’s as if the Beatles never went to Hamburg or discovered acid, as if the Rolling Stones never scared the parents of the Baby Boomer generation. Everyone plays nicely and the nation’s passion for music dribbles away.

The Brits, and pop music in general, need adventure, excitement, mischief, stunts and anarchy. Someone needs to be rewarded for all of the above, not just for toeing the line and practising the art of appeasement with big business and the company bosses. Rock ‘n’ roll demands bad behaviour. It’s great that Iron Maiden were awarded Best Live Act – here was one band in the line up who have always pushed the boundaries of publicity, moved forward and never just caved in to industry pressure, thanks in great part to their excellent manager Rod Smallwood.

The same can’t be said for the other winners. Girls Aloud are, without doubt, a nice bunch of women who perform cheery, upbeat songs, but they have no serious agenda; they are part of a celebrity money machine that is dying on its feet as the world of high finance implodes and people discover that they want more serious, cerebral and inventive things in their lives.

Sales of broadsheets are up, The Economist is experiencing a surge in sales. In the face of coming hardship, people are bound to want their entertainment to mean something again, to have a story behind it that is more than a metaphor for the excesses of the banking world. Amy Winehouse drinking herself into oblivion is not rebellion; what the rock and pop scene needs is a good selection of agent provocateurs amongst their ranks, unsettling the stale corporate shindig that is the Brits with something a little more radical and exciting.

Good music PR cannot just rely on churning out the latest set of sound-a-likes and hoping they’ll do something stupid or crazy (within a certain set of limits) for the press. In a digital download age, where music is becoming as ubiquitous as breakfast cereal, acts that want to break through with credibility intact are going to have to think very hard about what they have to say, what their music has to say and how they want to go about promoting it.

“Dying is an art,” wrote Sylvia Plath, in her poem Lady Lazarus, and the very public final weeks of Jade Goody are reinforcing Plath’s point remarkably well. Jade Goody has moved on from the unthinking, mouthy persona that brought her to national attention with a sudden aplomb, becoming, in her need to make a better life for the two children she will be leaving behind in the wake of her terminal cervical cancer, an iconic figure whose death will mark the end of an era of celebrity in Britain.

Jade Goody

There are notes of disgust registering around the country that she’s intending to let a film crew follow her through her final weeks as well as to her wedding, assuming it happens before she is too ill to cope. There shouldn’t be; this is a woman dying as she lived. She is, in many ways, like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, in that all she knows is a life in front of the camera and all she can do to ensure the future for her children is to make as much money as quickly as possible for them in the only way she knows how; on television and in the press.

It’s telling that she has made it clear that she wants to ensure that her children are educated; this is the woman who came from difficult, uneducated beginnings to make a career in the celebrity industry, a woman who created a new life for herself on Big Brother and took on the personality the tabloids created for her, only to watch them turn on her with more vigour when she rose above the cheap insults that were initially levelled at her. She’s not the brightest of women but, tellingly, she knows it. And it’s her attempts to make amends for her mistakes that have endeared her to the British public. She is finally taking control of her life in the spotlight in a way that she wasn’t able to do when she first found herself in the arms of fame.

She is a most human celebrity and it is to be hoped, for the sake of her children, that she will be remembered for her late transmogrification into a role model; according to The Guardian, the swift and vicious spread of her cervical cancer – and her brutal, well-publicised honesty about it – is responsible for a massive upsurge of requests for smear tests. This alone drives home what people think about her. She is ‘one of us’, albeit ‘one of us’ who has become an industry in her own right. She is fallible but not above trying to make amends for her failings, even if that means doing so in excruciating detail in the public eye.

“There is a charge//For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/For the hearing of my heart…” wrote Sylvia Plath, again in Lady Lazarus. And: “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see//Them unwrap me hand and foot/The big strip tease.” Jade Goody has run with this idea and made a positive of it; where Plath was contemplating her attempts at suicide, the ‘big strip tease’ of Goody’s final weeks is solely about taking care of the future for her children and may well see her reborn in the public’s collective memory as someone who rose above the pain and despair and did some good.

Goody is not succumbing to Gwili Andre’s lonely and miserable mode of death, alone in her flat consumed by the fires taking root in her piles of cuttings. She has not allowed fame to make her bitter. She is taking what remains of her life and transforming it, seemingly aware that she, like so many celebrities before her, from Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana, will be frozen in the moment by her early death. Of course she’d prefer to live to see her children grow old rather than die in front of the cameras, but what she’s doing is right for her and what she thinks is right for her children.

If it disturbs you, do not watch or read the reports, but do not try to prevent Jade Goody from choosing the manner of her death; she has finally proved that she deserves more than that.

Reading about the Wellcome Collection’s stunt to promote research into the science of the freak show, featuring contortionist Delia du Sol, in the Evening Standard yesterday, I was reminded how, in the dark days of the recession before the big one, I met an extraordinary contortionist called Hugo Zamoratte.

Delia du Sol

Zamoratte was an Argentina exile who was able to stuff himself into bottles; he had discovered a natural talent for dislocating his joints after he accidentally dislocated his arm in the Argentinian National Guard. After 20 years of practicing his art in South America, training in yoga and gymnastics all the while, he illegally crawled into the US from Mexico through a tiny sewer outlet.

On his arrival in America, Zamoratte’s extraordinary skill was quickly exploited and showcased by the Ringling Brothers. He became a national sensation in the USA. My client at the time, Gerry Cottle’s Circus, were impressed by his ability to stuff himself inside bottles that held as little as ten litres and booked him for their annual season at Wembley Arena. I was handed the task of generating media interest.

Hugo Zamoratte

I spent weeks researching the great contortionists and, in the course of my research, I discovered the Art of Enterology. Escapology we all knew about – Houdini escaped from things whilst the great Enterologist squeezed into tiny spaces. The art had died out thanks to the more immediate thrill that escapology presented – both took weeks of preparation, but the escape happened in minutes, whereas the enterologists had to take their time getting into the right shape to enter a bottle. Audiences naturally inclined to the flashier, more immediate art.

I stole the idea of this long-lost practice and applied it to Zamoratte, dragging him through all the media hoops available at the time, from Jonathan Ross’ The Last Resort to the Wogan show, presenting him as the missing link in the art of Enterology. Ross still mentions Zamoratte when I see him – his impact was enormous. He garnered a great deal of attention for the Gerry Cottle Circus and went on to become a true international phenomenon.

And then he vanished, like Mickey Rourke’s wrestler. For all I know he is trapped in a bottle somewhere like a genie, wishing he’d spent more time practising escapology. In the meantime, I was fired up with the art of Enterology and, when Britvic asked me to help them launch their new design of bottle a few years later, I returned to the idea, setting up a series of auditions to find a new enterologist who could fit themselves inside an outsized version of the new Britvic bottle.

There was only one person who could do it; Delia du Sol, who is now working with the Wellcome Trust. She was a brilliant eneterologist – the only one who could enter Britvic’s bottle. She had only one flaw – she could never close the little door in the side of the bottle and would have been left exposed, like the overgrown Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, if one of my team hadn’t been on hand to shut the door behind her.

Delia in the Britvic bottle

Wellcome’s stunt has no connection with me, I should point out. They have clearly imitated the stunt, recreated it now that some time has passed – very flattering it is too. I’m of the opinion that my book, Improperganda, inspired them to do so. Secondhand copies of the book have been flying off the shelves in the wake of the release of The Fame Formula. Perhaps it’s time for a reprint of Improperganda?

More to the point, I wonder what other stunts of mine that appear in the book will be imitated in the coming months as companies find that they need more interesting ways of communicating their brands and celebrities over the fog of the credit crunch.

Is there any need to reinvent the dating agency? It seems that there is in America, where a company have audaciously taken the process to its extreme, as a press release announcing the launch of Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com, “The World’s First Dating Service for the Terminally Ill” proves.

Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com claims to be “designed to cut through the superficiality and embrace issues we think are most meaningful – the desire and need for understanding, compassion, empathy and comfort between human beings” but it also offers to help terminally ill people to find others like them, who don’t mind they’re dying, to have sex with.

Are they trying to court controversy? Certainly, if the puns throughout the press release are anything to go by. The press release urges terminally ill people to “join us… if you are truly dying to connect” and promises to help them “to go out with a ‘bang’”.

The press release is spectacularly brazen, offering “the possibility for individuals to connect with other open, accepting minds who might better understand their unusual circumstances” and to help potential clients to find “a singing partner for your swan song”, as well as selling their ability to hook people up with sexual partners as desperate as themselves.

I’m astonished by the audacity of this release and the project itself. It is bound to cause a storm of controversy – all of which will no doubt make it a huge hit when it is launched on St. Valentine’s Day.

They’re quite extraordinary, these Americans.

It’s good to see that my client Noel Edmonds’ groundbreaking new show on Sky One, Noel’s HQ, is having some effect. This week, the programme, which aims to inspire people to acts of kindness and help transform lives, tackled the case of Joe Townsend, a 20-year-old veteran of the campaign in Afghanistan.

Townsend lost both his legs to a landmine and, to help him rehabilitate and get his life back on track, his grandfather offered to build a specially adapted bungalow on his own land in Sussex. They chose a spot that could not be seen from the road and canvassed locals, who had no objection to the plan. Wealden District Council refused permission, despite the absence of any objections.

It was after this that Noel’s HQ got involved; it’s a measure of the show’s effect that it managed to get quotes from David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown, all of which called for the council to reconsider.

Production staff at Noel’s HQ then called Wealden District Council’s press officer, Jim Van Den Bos, who sneered down the line, saying: “we don’t deal with entertainment shows”. It’s astonishing that Van Den Bos did this, clearly off the cuff and without research into the organization he was speaking to. The first rule of the press officer is that he or she is servant to the message.

If a TV show calls with a thorny issue to discuss, a press officer needs to ask if they can call back, look into what it is they do and find out what the threat level is. Then they need to deal with the situation appropriately and, if the pressure is on, remain respectful. They must try and understand the issues and make their side of the story known with as much care and neutrally as possible.

Arrogantly dismissing the caller only leads to trouble; in this instance, it left Noel free to tell his viewers that if Wealden “would sneer at what we are doing here” then they’re “sneering at millions of others”. Wealden District Council performed a swift volte face in the wake of the show.

There are plenty of press officers in local government producing award winning work; these are the people who know that when a press officer is in the firing line, they need to keep their best foot forward, their eye on Google, their temper in check and their professionalism cranked up to 11. They know full well that if they don’t they’ll end up, like Jim Van Den Bos, holding a smoking ACME bomb.

In a world rife with the ability to keep an eye on where we are, with posters that are embedded with cameras that register how many people look at the poster for more than ten seconds and GPS phones that can traced their owners to within a yard or so, why is that that complaints are so few and far between?

Alright, there are the net conspiracies about social networking brands and how they are allegedly linked to information-gathering for the NSA (that’s the USA’s National Security Agency of course, not the UK’s National Sheep Association) but this is not a serious, concerted force; there are people leaping up and down about blind emails and viral marketing, but no complaints have really registered about how technology is monitoring people.

Monitoring is back in focus at the moment, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude, which is based on the Google Maps service. It allows people, through their computers and mobile phones, to keep tabs on their friends and family by pinging out their location to anyone who’s part of the service. Given that this is Google, and that they dominate the tech market, there is some fear as to what latitudes Google will allow themselves with the gathering of information and how they may use the data that such an application gathers.

In light of these concerns, Google have announced that they will not be keeping information on Latitude users who wish to hide their location, but is this the most effective way of managing the potential crisis in confidence for a company whose ideals were once trumpeted as being pure as the driven snow? The PR machine behind Latitude, both on and offline, is to be congratulated on the way it has so effectively quelled any seeds of unrest.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been greater outrage about Latitude, however; Latitude seems to me to be little more than a covert widget to make Google’s advertising model more effective; one that impinges on the privacy of anyone using it. Added to that, a Latitude-enabled phone could be easily stolen and used against the person the phone belongs to. It’ll be interesting to see if any human rights group make like French lorry drivers and park a protest right in the middle of Google’s information superhighway in the near future.

The BBC are coming under fire again, this time for the sacking of Carol Thatcher, who, according to The Scotsman, “emerged last night as an unlikely rallying point for freedom of speech, after … referring to a tennis player as a ‘golliwog’.”

Carol Thatcher

“… a growing list of politicians, lawyers and media experts attacked the BBC,” continues The Scotsman, “accusing it of overstepping the mark and making [Thatcher] a scapegoat in an era of burgeoning political correctness.”

Lord Tebbit is quoted as saying: “It is probably a bit of a way for the BBC to get back at Carol’s mother.”

Cameron Fyfe, a Glasgow lawyer, is also quoted: “I don’t think it is racist to say someone’s hair resembles a children’s doll. I think there has to be a crucial difference between private conversations and those that are formal as part of your employment. It’s absolutely crucial that we keep that distinction, otherwise we could all be sacked tomorrow.”

There is still some confusion, it seems, as to whether Carol Thatcher was referring to a white or a black tennis player when she uttered her remarks.

The Scotsman asked for my take on the matter, too; I stood up for the BBC, given that I think Carol Thatcher’s language is unacceptable, whether the conversation was private or not.

“Anyone that has the word golliwog in their vocabulary doesn’t need to be on the BBC,” I told them. “I think it’s a totally and utterly unacceptable word. The BBC’s reaction was utterly appropriate, but it is being hit from all sides now, whatever it does.”

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