Posts Tagged ‘digital’

And so the day has come! Prince William is to marry Kate Middleton. Be of good cheer, Britain, there’s new blood being drafted into the old firm!

It really is fabulous news, in such tough economic times, that the cuts will not affect everything. In 2011 there will be something for the whole nation to celebrate, especially the merchandise sellers, caterers and makers of bunting. It’s really an early Christmas present for them all.

And better still, it’ll take place 30 years after Charles and Diana’s wedding. We will have a new Princess of Hearts – and the same sort of economic straits then as now. Perhaps we’ll get anniversary riots in Brixton and Toxteth too, only to have the wedding calm them down.

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It was fascinating, on Wednesday, to watch the streets of London step back 20 years in time to the sort of violent protests that marked the anti Poll Tax movement. I admire the energy and the zeal of the students but, in an age where everything is being re-drafted, reinvented, challenged and overturned, I wonder why they would choose to default to the divisive clichés of protests past.

The power of social media is at their fingertips, so isn’t it time to reinvent the act of protest and direct action for the digital age, where the image is ever more important? Images of violence, window smashing and scarf-faced ‘anarchists’ are something the establishment can deal with in the aftermath all too easily – it allows them the breathing room to default to a huffy ‘look at them, they don’t care about anything’ stance. Read the rest of this entry »

Margaret Thatcher’s great spin man Bernard Ingham knew a thing or two about pragmatism. He kept himself out of the Westland Helicopter Crisis as he knew that even a whiff of his involvement would damage Thatcher. And he was surely very glad of the off the record Downing Street briefings that kept his name out of most of the other stories he promulgated.

How things change. The continued attempts to shake down Andy Coulson, who occupies Ingham’s position for David Cameron, are relentless – and are now getting to seem more than a little supercilious. Coulson is caught in the political version of some over-hyped heavyweight brawl – he is being pummelled on the ropes but his opponent is congenitally unable to administer the knockout blow. Read the rest of this entry »

The King and Queen of Morning TV have been ripped apart in a plot worthy of Shakespeare. Money, greed, deceit, jealousy, subterfuge and high drama are driving this scenario, as if an excitable new scriptwriter with grand designs has been drafted in to rescue a failing soap. The vigour is intoxicating. Fern Britton has quit This Morning because she is fed up with being in Philip Schofield’s shadow. The screaming headlines are a sub-editor’s wet dream; Fern’s sensational walkout has fractured her relationship with ITV chiefs.

Rows in TV are fantastic copy for the dailies, but never a good thing for the talent; they’re often a wounding career move. I have been on This Morning once or twice and I like both Fern and Philip. I think they are both terrific broadcasters and stand shoulder to shoulder in the talent stakes.

Perhaps, if there is one factor that separates them, it’s that one embraces the modern techniques of digital PR and the other doesn’t. Far too simplistic you cry, but is it really? If we know one thing, it’s that the digital PR space is a subtle knife, which has unfathomable, hidden depths, which can sharpen a celebrity’s ability to persuade and inform.

We are not privy to the fine detail of the true row between Fern and ITV – it will be left to the unnamed friends and spokespeople to whisper into eager ears to keep this particular soap opera on the pages of the red tops. The hullabaloo will undoubtedly pick up pace over the weekend – until boredom sets in – but I believe it has lessons to teach us all in the game of brand husbandry.

Philip Schofield is a keen advocate of the digital space. He has a lively blog and a refined online presence. He uses Twitter well and is building a profile that is both honest and engaging. There is also a hint of vulnerability in his Tweets. We see his brand through a prism of tweets and the Twitter folk cherish his banter as he moves through cyberspace like a weekend charity half marathon runner.

Twenty years ago, his brand of celebrity would have been engaged in constant fete openings, ready with a smile and oodles of time to sign autographs for ladies of a certain vintage. But Scofe is a hands-on collaborator in the digital PR process and has generated a subliminal channel of support as a result. Perhaps this consideration suggests that he has a real hunger to remain relevant and that he recognises what it takes to stay ahead. No wonder people are paying top dollar for his services.

I would suggest that there is no complacency in Scofe’s world, just a craving not to be mutton dressed as mutton. Fern, on the other hand, has perhaps suffered from being a little too relaxed; she was certainly bruised by her unfair treatment at the hands of the News of the World. Her only crime was a lack of transparency regarding her weight loss, but negative press can create disconnection and a mistrust of the process. Scofe, however, has built the tools to reinforce his brand value whereas Fern feels like a superpower with a rusting arsenal of weapons, hampering her ability to fight back. I pray she doesn’t become a footnote – she has a crowd of support but she needs to source it!

Another TV talent who has proved that he can rise above the fug of negativity with the same tools is Jonathan Ross. I was not surprised when he received a BAFTA nomination. He too has created a virality and herd that has interacted with his brand since he started using Twitter. It’s a new dawn for celebrity engagement – the writing is on the virtual wall.

The analogue media should be looking over their shoulders; it might well be fortuitous that the This Morning bust up is played out today. But in the future the stars will have their own digital media to drive their brands forward without the perilous media high-wire walk.

So, an über-Cardinal in Rome feels that it’s time for a generation to detox from technology. Forget fasting for lent, the Pope’s publicist has floated a story that we all need to curb our technology obsession and digital addiction. “Thou shalt not text or play games for lent” is the missive from the Vatican. Transformational storytelling it’s not.

I think the Supreme Being will be pulling cosmic hairs out of his signature big white beard with frustration. This sort of reactionary fundamentalism is plain silly. The Catholic Church is missing a trick. They need to embrace the myriad of platforms available and use them. If the church was to think creatively about what could be achieved by hooking up to the gaming universe, mobiles and social networking sites, it might just become relevant.

I am not suggesting a repeat of some of the stunts that have emanated from the odd funky priest – sermons in txt or text voting for hymn choices. No, I propose something much more immersive; to use church buildings and communities as the springboard for a major digital rethink.

Get the game play right for a religiously themed Xbox game and think about the potential of communicating with groups of gamers. What about apps on Facebook and iPhone? There’s a whole generation out there that any religion that wants to try can only reach by becoming digital missionaries.

The Vatican needs to grasp vitality and stop proffering a hair shirt!

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.