Here’s my comment in the Independent on the risks of spinning for dictators. This is an article in Marketing Week on the rise of social media. Here’s a piece from the Guardian on the redemption of Chris Brown. And finally a comment in the Vancouver Sun on Sarah Ferguson.

Little Chef, A65 near Clapham, Lancs.
Telephone 01524 251230
Address: A65, near Clapham, Lancaster, Lancs.
Open: All week, 7am-10pm.
Price: Around £10 per head (without drinks).

Despite spending millions on the design of aspirational corporate logos, companies often choose one that unintentionally betrays their true base nature. When BT created the Yellow Pages “let your fingers do the walking” logo, you needed only to invert it to reveal two fingers telling you what BT really thinks of its customers. I’ve long suspected that the National Lottery’s crossed fingers are simply Camelot’s way of excusing itself for giving people unrealistic expectations of acquiring wealth beyond the dreams of bingo halls (although maybe it’s arthritis). And let us spare a thought for the now-defunct Happy Eater chain of roadside diners, which was doomed from the start for two reasons: first, because its logo was a bald, fat, crapulent chef with his fingers down his own throat (seemingly in an attempt to induce vomiting); and second, because John Major frequented them.

As for the podgy cook logo of Little Chef (Happy Eater’s runt twin), he reveals the grim truth about what you can expect should you be reckless enough to venture inside. Indeed, he’s become such a corpulent liability to the corporate owners (Permira) that last year they tried to slim down his stomach, and recently decided to slim down the company instead by selling off 120 of its 235 outlets and keeping only those located next to a Travelodge (with its captive clientele). In 1958, when the first 11-seater branch opened in Reading, the tubby chef had some appeal to the British public (who’d lived through years of rationing and were getting their first taste of mass car ownership), but Little Chefs are in decline – and deservedly so, because they offer the worst of both worlds, by combining the disadvantages of fast food (it’s fried) and of waiter service (they’re slow).

A while back, I broke down outside a Little Chef near Hull (not emotional collapse, just ignition failure), so I went inside and thought I couldn’t go far wrong with an omelette. But I was wrong, because the waitress told me, “Sorry, we haven’t got any omelettes … head office haven’t sent any in the post today.” What I had requested was the simplest dish known to man, yet the “chefs” in these “restaurants” can’t prepare it, and rely on reheating prefabricated, vacuum-packed extruded kapok made into Frisbees and sent via the Royal Mail. Ah well, at least it’s the only place in the world where people can make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Being fond of an occasional coffee and bickie, I try to stop (whenever I’m on the A65 near Lancaster) at a charming cafe in the village of Clapham, but with this column in mind I recently visited the nearby Little Chef instead, and stood obediently by the ghastly “Wait Here To Be Seated” sign, listening to what sounded like a Soviet-era TB ward but was actually the “smoking section” (as I’ve said before, you may as well have a “pissing section” in a swimming pool). When I was finally seated, I perused the photographic menu and ordered “The Olympic” breakfast. In the time it takes a microwave to ding, there it was on my table, served by someone dressed in a garment that was more stain than uniform and who looked as if she was depriving a village somewhere of its idiot.

The food looked exactly as it did on the laminated menu, and therein lay the central problem. It even tasted laminated, being coated with stale vegetable oil that acted as a barrier between it and my tongue. Two insipid eggs, two rashers of unsmoked bacon, two tomatoes, two slices of toast (doubtless from a 40ft-long sliced cotton wool loaf) and two sad, sad sausages, surely the wurst I’ve ever eaten, with less flavour than roadkill stuffed into a condom. The textures were unnatural, too, from the dry potato to the mushrooms that smacked of the Chesswood’s tin (what a pity they don’t do a range of magic mushrooms – at least I could have driven home as a mile-high duck).

Looking up from the glumness on my plate, I observed the equally glum clientele. The sort of people who regard Angus Steak Houses as dangerously bohemian and are unperturbed by the stink of rancid vegetable oil and stale cigarette smoke that hangs in the air like a low cloud over a mountain. As industrial-strength disinfectant was sprayed on to the tables around me (and the mist floated on to my plate), I noticed one spotty youth in the smoking section whose protracted nose-picking session became so involved that I feared his head would cave in. Like everyone here, he wasn’t living to eat, just eating to live, and being ripped off in the process, but neither he nor they could apparently give a damn.

When I got this job, my mate Kev (who’s very high up at Channel 4) told me, “Don’t just go to all the poncy places. Review Little Chefs, too.” OK, Kev, I’ve done it, and it was dreadful. But things don’t have to be like this, because there are hundreds of cheap, unfussy diners (Banners in Crouch End, for one) where they serve great fry-ups with efficiency, vigour and top-quality ingredients. How dare Little Chef describe itself on its website as being “synonymous with serving good food”? Never again. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. However, you can make a dog drink; quite easily, in fact. Just put him in a blender, give a quick zazz, pour and enjoy. It’s not on the Little Chef menu. Yet.
by Victor Lewis Smith

I welcome the site – it’s not something good publicists should fear. In the spirit of transparency, I’m very comfortable to declare that on occasions I’ve let my imagination run riot. Once – or maybe even twice! – I have ensured that a dismal fact has not stood in the way of making a story work. Then, in an age when there were more journalists than PR, it was tough generating ink.

The ink-generating challenge has now come full circle. Bright young PR things outnumber the journalists. I for one believe the press release is an endangered species, thanks to misuse. The media owners, under pressure to slow an inevitable decline, have cast out costly experienced journos and replaced them with more cost-effective, energetic drones who can multitask as if they were born to it. These drones are fed into the ten-minute news cycle, which spins and churns and greedily welcomes a helping hand. Now, if the story sounds good, well hey; it was true at the time.

Laziness will always be a problem but it is too easy to lay the blame at the door of the journalists entirely, especially when the pressures they face are so immense. This is why I’m a little unsure about the tactics of Chris Atkins from Starsuckers, as reported in the Guardian, who helped promote the website by setting up fake websites and pushing fake press releases about dubious products onto the media (such as the Penazzle, a penis decoration, or the chastity garter for unfaithful wives). It seems to me that the journalists involved fell victim to a persuasive hoax and then rehashed the press releases a little too exactly. Atkins’s approach seems akin to threshing corn with a sledgehammer.

Press releases should not be unthinkingly sent out or unthinkingly repeated verbatim. I keenly hope that churnalism.com will help to eradicate the mind-numbingly dull prefabricated, brand-driven drivel that’s punted out by a collection of poorly equipped agencies. The level of noise makes it hard for the true craft of the publicist to flourish. The press release, for all that it is a 130-year-old mechanism, is still a useful one if it is not mistreated and abused. I hope it lives on.

Excitement has been amping up and up since the band announced the early digital download release of the album to the point where the media is saturated with information - the Guardian have been running live updates about it and even the Daily Mail ran a long piece about these ‘Industry Rebels‘ shunning their record label. Radiohead have certainly played this well.

The Mail are right to call them rebels – Radiohead have stepped out of the major label industry by selling the album online, although they will be releasing it in traditional formats with indie label XL later in the year. But by releasing it at the height of the bloated awards season and making headlines just as effectively as ever, they have proved that they have the emotional intelligence to connect with both media and, more importantly, their fan base. It is almost certainly no coincidence that they released it at the same time as the Brit Awards – it certainly smacks of a two fingered salute to the industry.

This is a band at the height of their ability to stir up conversation, who are bending the art of the stunt out of its traditional shapes and using it to their own ends.

Now, let’s hope the album is as good as their ability to stir up conversation. If it’s as good or better than In Rainbows it will only compound their ability to sell albums in any format in future.

Gordon seems to be struggling with the difference between real life and reality show life – it is bizarre to see the hard man of cookery TV exposing his dirty laundry rather than his ability to spew expletives. In terms of resolving a problem – in this case, the fallout after Ramsay sacked his father in law from the role of CEO of Gordon Ramsay Holdings – his letter is akin to sending a child into the cellar with a candle to look for a gas leak. It is hard to work out what exactly he intended to achieve by writing it.

Ramsay is emotional beast, most comfortable on TV. Why, if he must ask his mother in law to not reject her daughter, has he used an open letter to do so? If Ramsay is determined to conflate real life and docu-soap opera, surely he should be doing so on TV or, better still for all concerned, in private. Ramsay’s emotion and verbal communication skills are his prime weapon. Why, then, has he muzzled himself with a letter?

The answer surely lies in the way he handles all of his public life. He has gone through PRs like sous chefs – he’s sacked or ignored them hand over fist, presumably because they’ve disagreed with him or said something he doesn’t like. But if Gordon had been prepared to listen to someone about resolving this private, family issue he would have heard an argument along these lines: an open letter is a marvellous form of protest against government or other public body decisions and is also an excellent way for someone to answer criticisms from the public. It is not, however, a good solution for someone with family issues to deal with. Just take a look at Nat Rothschild, whose open letter to the Times accusing George Osborne and Andrew Feldman, the Tories’ fundraiser, of trying to solicit an illicit donation to the Conservative party from Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, ended very badly for Rothschild, who is hardly welcome in Britain as a consequence.

He would also do well to allow himself to be reminded that there are better ways of exposing an emotional issue in the media – it has been done well many times before by many people. Gordon should look to Princess Diana’s masterful manipulation of her interview with Martin Bashir, and the way a simple line like “Well there were three people in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded” can say so much more than a clumsily executed open letter. If his intent was to fix his wife’s relationship with his mother in law, surely he would have been better served going about it in a more subtle manner?

This open letter is far from subtle however. In PR terms, it makes the post-oil spill BP meltdown seem like a walk in the park, as it treads a minefield of family politics. OK, so it wouldn’t affect the whole world, but it could devastate a family; it seems likely to me that Gordon will drive a further wedge between his wife and her family, even as he was (presumably) trying to reconcile them.

I’ve been asking as many of the PR people mostly deeply schooled in the dark craft as I can find in a hurry to give me a good reason why Ramsay’s done this – and few could offer an explanation. One person did come up with a gem of a quote, however: “Gordon Ramsay is to PR what Douglas Bader is to tap dancing.” In other words, he can do many things well but if he makes a mistake he’s likely to ruin himself trying to bluster his way out. He is without the tact and delicacy that is required of celebrities in a 24/7 world desperate for stories and he does not recognise that a good publicist is perhaps his only hope of digging his way out of his current situation.

This blog originally appeared in today’s Guardian in edited form. To see it in situ, click here.

Looking at reports on the latest Vladimir Putin photoshoot, however, I realise that perhaps I should not have been so taken aback; this sort of macho posturing has never really gone away. Possibly these sorts of fashions travel the world in a kind of Mexican wave – in Russia right now, the macho image is the sure way to win the love of the electorate, while it looks ludicrous here. For now, at least.

Certainly it is easy to satirise Putin in the UK or America at the moment – when he poses like a hero from Call of Duty 4 or, in a bid to show a softer side, nuzzles up to his horse, he is playing to local tastes that look utterly ludicrous to a more cynical western European and American audience.

It’s rather like a political version of the Eurovision song contest, to my eye. The Scandinavian obsession with odd metal bands or sublime pop with no middle ground plays oddly to a jaundiced UK audience, and the cheese that comes from Eastern Europe is almost always sneered at in the UK media, only to go on and get big votes in the countries that have not yet developed our hard veneer of cultural superiority.

So it is with politics.There is every chance that Putin’s PR men might have tried to get him to tone down the action man poses in an attempt to avoid ridicule, but they would be missing the point that Putin understands; in the rough and tumble of politics you have to act locally long before you start thinking globally.

Equally, Silvio Berlusconi’s continued survival as Italian prime minister could be down to the strong likelihood that his image, that of a womanising chancer, plays far more effectively to a mass audience in Italy than it does to the rest of the world.

I doubt that anything is going to stop Putin from posing with rifles and daggers now. If he suddenly starts worrying about the negative publicity, he is going to be seen as a soldier who is afraid of the smell of blood.

Russian leaders like grizzled hard men. In the 1950s Nikita Khrushchev – on his first tour of the US – was asked by President Eisenhower if there was one American he wished to meet – Khrushchev didn’t hesitate. “John Wayne,” he answered.

And what of the Mexican wave effect? Well, by the time the next American presidential election comes around, there should be a sequel to The Expendables in cinemas and a presidential candidate to fit that gung-ho image, assuming Sarah Palin stands.

This article was originally published in the Guardian on Wednesday. Click here to see the original.

He was slick and sharp – an American who had made his home in Chile and so perfectly placed to move in and interview the men, even via speaking tube whilst they were in the mine – and made an interesting point about the rescue of the miners being a global uniting point, an anti-9/11 that made everyone happy.

But at no point did I get a sense that there would be any money for the Chilean miners coming from his book. His implicit position on this was a piece of classic journalese reason – they’ll be pleased that he captured the right story, he suggested. The suggestion being that this is all that’s necessary.

This has always been the sticking point for a good PR; balancing the perception of what is good for the client and good for the media. I suspect that this book will suck more money away from the miners, will remove them further from the ownership of the narrative they have collectively created, and put it into the pocket of the opportunistic writer and publisher instead. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so.

For more on the ways in which I think that the miners will be exploited, look at today’s Media Guardian, in which I have an article on the matter, by clicking here

Talking of not owning the story, what is going on with Wayne Rooney? Anyone who crosses Alex Ferguson tends to end badly – surely that lesson has been learned quite conclusively over the years – so it is worrying that the numerous people with a finger in Rooney’s PR pie have let the story of his dissatisfaction with Manchester United bash its way across the back pages of the nation’s papers like a cudgel. Sponsors, agents, merchandisers, friends, foes and family all have access, all have a view and are all briefing the tabloids, who are plundering the soap opera.

It has never been a good idea, PR-wise, to let stories run riot in such a manner. If Rooney wants out, he and his people need to be subtle and careful. If they aren’t, he’ll surely rue it.

“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].”

The article discusses the need to protect against reputation meltdown. My take on this was to point out that companies needed to be prepared to combat reputation meltdown effectively and well. Here’s an extract: “When Kate Moss, the supermodel, was caught taking cocaine in 2005, many of the brands she then represented, such as H&M, the retailer, ran a mile – but other, differently positioned names, such as Sir Philip Green’s Top Shop, soon took her on.

“’Kate Moss is an interesting example,’ says Mark Borkowski, who runs an eponymous public relations agency. ‘The teenage brands fell apart, but Virgin and some other edgier brands moved straight in.’

“Companies are increasingly recognising that reputation is an important and valuable asset that is vulnerable and volatile…

“’In the digital world, everyone can comment on your product or brand immediately and you have to be aware of what people are saying about your brand,’ says Mr Borkowski. ‘There will be a time when Twitter gets a billion followers [and] that’s a huge conversation. As a company you have to have the resources to monitor and respond to that – and quickly.’”

To read the full article, click here and register with the FT.

As PR mechanisms for reaching journalists get smarter, so many PRs themselves risk becoming that much more dim. In the new techological landscape, journalists are no less prone to the pressures of the speed of technological change. As they succumb to these pressures, as time is stripped away, they put up the barricades and deny that they have any need of or use for PR.

There seems to be, all too often, little understanding on either side. The uneasy pact slips into ruin. No one is going forward with the craft of PR and anyone guilty of sending out easy spam information at the expense of building a relationship with journalists is simply assisting them in their unhealthy bid for isolation.

As Madeleine Bunting said in the Guardian a couple of days ago: “We should be watching carefully for how a new generation of media technology might erode… the nursery of our skills to speak, listen and build relationships.”. She was talking about families, but the same could easily apply to the previously intimate relationship between hack and flak.

The more information is disseminated at the expense of building a useful relationship face to face, the more sterile the relationship becomes. PR spam isn’t the new chlamydia – intimacy unprotected by a layer of technology can only lead to new growth. Some of the loudest complaints are from scribblers with a weather eye on their own notoriety; a remarkable number of them are in the technology sector, so are perhaps more prone to PRs using kits to spew and spray.

As ever, it’s about how one uses the tech – with a bit of intelligence and a willigness to listen on both sides, technology can make the world of media and communication a much more fertile place.

“Let’s get one thing straight: Tiger’s situation is no ordinary brand collapse. This is the high watermark for individual brand disintegration. It’s not of massive media interest just because of the girls; the attendant hoo-ha surrounding Tiger’s spectacular brand disintegration has been heightened to such an extraordinary degree because of the high level of brand protection surrounding A-list celebrities and sporting giants.”

To read the full article, click here.