Archive for April, 2010

Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives states that ‘anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment!’.

From now on, I suspect, any political instance of this law in action will be known as the ‘Brown Variant’, after unguarded remarks about a woman he had just spoken to on a walkabout were broadcast to the world. He condemned Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigot’ into a radio mic he didn’t realise was still live.

Unsurprisingly, the press have pounced. What is surprising is that this is the first serious gaffe on any side in a flawless, highly polished election campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was 19, the publicist Theo Cowan – this country’s first pro celebrity PR wrangler, who created the Rank Charm School, an acting school run the Rank Film company that brought the world Roger Moore, Joan Collins, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors and more – granted me an audience in Poland Street. “Keep your clients’ feet on the ground,” he told me. “NEVER let someone believe a good review!”

This is advice that needs to be handed on to Nick Clegg, after last night’s second Leaders’ Debate. He appeared to have spent the week following his remarkable showing in the first debate positively wallowing in the good reviews. Certainly his people believed the good press enough to let Clegg give Brown and Cameron enough room to make up lost ground. That said, he survived pretty well mostly thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal allowing too many people to see the puppet strings in this campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

The big question dominating  the PR world this week is “have Apple changed their ways and started leaking product to the press?” after a prototype of the next iPhone found its way into the hands of tech journalists at Gizmodo.

The way in which Apple practices its PR is fascinating. They are intensely secretive, they often treat journalists with a measure of disdain normally afforded to people who man the local sewage works, they do very little PR in the commonest sense of the term and yet they still remain up there amongst the press’s lists of ‘must have’ products. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re living in what Seth Godden calls “the century of ideas diffusion”. Last night’s historic TV debate was launched with a weight of expectation as to how it might change this perception. If it did, it was mostly for the political classes.

The debate was carefully, rigorously planned as an attempt to revivify politics, seen as a necessity now that all trust has been leeched away from politics and politicians. But if the people behind its gaffe-free polish thought that this would help re-engage the electorate, who have been drifting away slowly but surely for years, they were wrong.

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One person who understood deeply and passionately about making the most of publicity – and who would have livened up the coming election no end if he had cared to participate in the process – was Malcolm McLaren, who died yesterday.

A non-conformist who enlivened punk with his arch brand of anarchy and who helped create the punk scene from the Sex shop he ran with Vivienne Westwood, McLaren was a massive inspiration to me. It seems appropriate that he died in 2010, the 200th anniversary of Barnum’s birth – they had a lot in common. Both started out as shopkeepers and both went on to radically alter the world of entertainment – Barnum with his freak shows and circus, McLaren with his situationist pricking and destruction of the ponderous music and hyper-inflated ego of the 70s music scene and beyond.

His influence has spread very far and often into unusual places, such as the art world. After all, there could have been no Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin without McLaren’s influence. As a teenager, collecting my NME from the local Village shop, I was in awe of his ability to paint news on the front pages of the papers as if they were his private canvases, ruthlessly exploiting interesting situations to create money making enterprises – usually out of the most unsafe of bets.

That, indeed, was one of the most admirable things about him and his maverick spirit – he relentlessly pursued the unsafe bet and helped it to change the establishment for the better, more often than not. My admiration only increased after meeting him in 1990. I also worked on the launch of Buffalo Gals Back to Skool.

Where are the mavericks now, though? They’re disappearing too swiftly and not being replaced. We need more people like Malcolm McLaren. Especially in politics. Read the rest of this entry »

The Independent have published a piece by me on Tiger Woods and the new, daring Nike advert he appears in. Here’s an excerpt:

“Through all of Tiger Woods’ scandals, Nike have stayed with him. Other sponsors disappeared, but when he made his big apology, they were sitting in the front row. And now they’re taking their pound of flesh. It may be mawkish, and a bit dark, but he wouldn’t be doing it if he wasn’t comfortable with it – and there’s no question that this is a piece of advertising genius.

“As this saga has developed we’ve watched Tiger casting himself upon the mercy of the cameras – a kind of therapy in the public eye. This continues that theme. It’s like it’s from In The Psychiatrist’s Chair. But it’s not what anyone would have expected.”

To read the full article, click here

You wait all week for a good publicity conversation generator that is not related to the general election – and then an astonishing one pops up, in the shape of Nike’s Tiger Woods tour de force.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another week of charting the ups and downs of celebrity, first in the Guardian, discussing the rise, fall and rapid rise again of Russell Brand, who has risen phoenix-like out of the ashes of Sachsgate to find himself on the verge of international stardom. You can read the full article here, but here’s my note of caution:

“But will he stay the course? ‘Very difficult to predict,’ says the publicist and historian of celebrity Mark Borkowski. ‘He’s had a huge amount of American fame in a very short space of time. But standup comics from the UK don’t have a good track record – not many succeed. And tucked away somewhere on his torso is a self-destruct button. America is still very small-c conservative. There is,’ Borkowski adds, ‘still time for him to mess it up.’

Talking of messing things up, I was asked to comment the effect of Tiger Woods’ meltdown on the brands that have supported him over the years. According to Paul J Davies’s article, When star power finds the rough (Financial Times, April 7th): “…the stock market value of all the companies endorsed by Mr Woods collectively lost $5bn-$12bn by the middle of December [last year].” Read the rest of this entry »

Given that an election tends to exist in a crowded little bubble all of its own and that there are now ever more ways of competing for attention, with iPhone apps, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and the like being utilised by every politico going, journalists are going to have a harder time than ever getting to the heart of the matter – policy – and the election is likely to be run on stunts.

We’ve already had one hysterical moment, with David Cameron turning in a karaoke version of Obama when he rolled up his sleeves yesterday. He may have been trying to look hip, but looked more like the sort of embarrassing school teacher who apes trends remorselessly – two years after they’ve come off the boil. Unlike embarrassing teachers, Cameron made the news. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been weeks and weeks of phony electioneering and, finally, this morning Gordon Brown has told the world what we already knew – the election will be on 6th May.

From the negative electioneering of mashed up, satirical posters, to the dusting down of the old Saatchi creative team – to deliver up what Cameron’s mob hope to be a coup de gras to Labour (as was done under Thatcher) – its been a long and spectacularly phoney war; one that has, alarmingly, only focused on the media process. Read the rest of this entry »