Posts Tagged ‘independent’

Well, dip me in honey and feed me to the bees – Tiger Woods said sorry! He actually said sorry! It is fair to say that I am eating my hat as I type this. I honestly didn’t expect an apology at all, as anyone who read yesterday’s blog will know.

Today’s media happening, although strictly controlled and rather mawkish, was only one tiny step on the road to recovery, however. It was full of the sort of therapy baloney, strictly for US consumption, that will sit well with the Oprah generation; Tiger wants “to find a place in your heart”.

That said, Tiger has brought the word sorry back into play when it was least expected, so perhaps he can do it. His step looks steadier now. If he wins his next tournament, then the dalliances will be a distant, blurry memory. But, as I wrote yesterday, if Tiger gets caught again, not even the most abject of apologies will save him.

UPDATE: The Independent asked for my opinion on Tiger’s apology – to read the article, click here.

I was asked my opinion on the John Terry affair by the Independent a few days ago, alongside Phil Hall, who has been drafted in to look after Terry. We found ourselves in agreement on the way footballers deal with problems and the people they surround themselves with. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“The publicist Mark Borkowski, a Chelsea supporter, said the Terry case would send a ’shiver’ through football. He said he would have advised Terry to hand the armband back before being stripped of it and said advisers should have been aware of the dubious PR value of the footballer accepting a ‘Dad of the Year’ award from Daddies Sauce last summer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Independent requested my opinion on the hotting up of the Russell Brand and Katy Perry romance – and more particularly the way they are being aggressively pushed into a Brangelina-shaped hole. Or should that be RussKat, as the Independent puts it. To read more, click here…

Jedward may finally be gone from the X Factor, but that’s no reason to expect that they have automatically dipped straight off the fame radar. For all of you wondering why and how they lasted so long on the X Factor, I contributed to a couple of articles in the Independent and the Telegraph looking into the phenomenon, the manipulation and the plundering of the Jedward brand.

To read the Independent article, click here. To read the Telegraph article, click here.

Here’s an unedited version of the piece I wrote for yesterday’s Independent, on My Edinburgh.

Trawling Edinburgh Festival for the sites of my old publicity stunts, celebrated in the #Twithibition I have just launched, has been a contemplative experience. The stunts celebrated 25 years of mischief, but that was then. What is now? I thought it worth considering how the Festival has evolved as I trekked around the city putting up posters.

I have been going to Edinburgh for years and there is always much that is astonishing, vibrant and beautiful on offer at the Festival – of this year’s crop, Sian Williams’ one-woman show for The Kosh at the Gilded Balloon and Shed Simove at Belushi’s are two to look out for. Sian Williams is the same age as Madonna and considerably sexier; she is compelling to watch. Shed, inventor of the Clitoris Allsorts, is like Trevor Baylis on crack.

But despite the amazing things that are, as ever, on offer, it’s clear that Edinburgh is at a crossroads. Arguably, some City grandees are not able to organise a piss up in a distillery. Princess Street has been dug up just as the Festival started. What planning genius came up with that one? Producers report resources have been pulled away from the Festival; the Assembly Rooms, mid-renovation, was a building site in week one, with one of its auditoria unfit for purpose – the council should be shot for not readying it for the Fringe. The insanity of moving the Film Festival to June is nearly as bad as serially under-funding the International Festival.

I believe that the blame for all this lies at the door of the city fathers, who appear to be unconsciously frittering the spectacle of Edinburgh away, dissipating the energy that has, for many years, seen journalists fighting tooth and nail to get up there every August to run up their expense account and discover the latest bright young things on the international arts scene. Even the bright young things are being discouraged from coming, as student accommodation gets ever more expensive in the city.

Venue controllers bemoan the lack of media attention outside of Scotland. Spreading out the festival over five weeks is a mistake; they should be condensing it to three! Considering it is the largest Festival of its type in the world, the coverage Edinburgh gets, outside a few broadsheets, is pitiful, with little or nothing in the news pages. The fledgling Manchester Festival seemed to get it right, but Edinburgh has slipped – it’s not seen as one of the greatest shows on Earth any more.

Tellingly, the BBC sent fewer staff to cover Edinburgh than went to T in the Park. Even the Scotsman is only using six reviewers. In a tenuous economic climate, it is foolhardy of the Edinburgh council to disregard the impact, and undermine the vitality, of the Festival and the revenues it brings.

There is, at least, good digital representation being developed to help build audiences – I am addicted to the iFringe app for iPhone – but the Festival needs to keep drawing in new talent and audiences and media. It can’t rest on past laurels as, to punters in their 20s, the Festival icons of 30 years ago are vastly distant and mostly irrelevant. Forget the past – the Festival needs to focus on what’s happening now. Stretching the Festivals out so that the Music, Film, Book and Fringe, etc, become ever more separated is preventing the sort of international coverage that Cannes enjoys from happening in Edinburgh. Something needs to change if the Festival is to remain relevant in another 30 years time.

To read the article as printed, click here.

To follow my #Twithibition, click here and search the site for #twithibition. For more information on the stunts recorded in the #Twithibition, click here.

The Independent ran an article on the rebranding of Sarah Brown and asked several people their opinion on her efforts, including myself – see the excerpt below. To read the full article, click here.

“The publicist Mark Borkowski, a prolific user of new media, believes that Sarah Brown has shown herself far more adept in this area than her husband could ever hope to be. ‘She is operating in areas where he doesn’t have any hope of generating traction,’ he says. ‘He cannot YouTube, she can. He cannot Twitter, she can. Gordon can’t generate sympathetic votes, she can, particularly from women. They’re trying to turn her into a yin to his yang.’

“Borkowski traces the origins of Sarah Brown’s strategy back to last year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester, when she stepped up to the microphone in defence of her under-attack husband. ‘Some people at the time claimed she needed to be arm-twisted into that but actually it was a bit of a toe in the water to see how it would go.’

“Despite her PR background, it will not have been easy for her. She once said of the Hobsbawm Macaulay way of working: ‘Julia goes out to lunch with people so I don’t have to.’ One industry source recalls that ‘She never really hung out with the PR crowd.’”

An article in today’s Independent on brand name changes, comebacks and stunts, mentioning the Borkowski Wispa campaign and quoting me from a blog, originally published here.

“We should really have learned from the past. Cadbury started making Wispa bars again two years ago after an online campaign by chocoholics supposedly nostalgic about their 1980s heyday. The PR guru Mark Borkowski behind the ’story’ denies it was a stunt. (In a series of blogs about the awards his campaign won, he wrote: ‘We designed a press campaign informed by the amount of online pressure groups that had been running for over two years, to twist Cadbury’s arm to bring back this favourite.’)”

To read the full article, click here.

The frenzy of moviedom and publicity that is the Cannes Film Festival is upon us again. Publicity stunts play an enormous part in the festival, however much the BBC’s Victoria Lindrea may protest that this year “really is all about the films“. Certainly there’s a great selection of serious filmmakers showing at this year’s festival, but if “organisers are casting off celebrity gimmicks in favour of a vintage line-up of classic filmmakers” this year, as Lindrea asserts, I’m certain that determined stuntsters and publicists will creep up and surprise us from nowhere – publicity stunts at Cannes, as I told the Independent’s Rob Sharp (see below), help films get noticed in a busy media world.

“Whether it’s Pamela Anderson in a tight leather top, or Jerry Seinfeld in a bee costume climbing to the top of a building, one thing’s for sure – Cannes doesn’t do understatement. With thousands of studios, independent filmmakers and hangers-on all scrabbling for publicity, you really have to push the yacht out to get noticed.

“‘A film festival would not be a proper festival without a plethora of grandiose, delightful, ludicrous and attention-grabbing stunts,’ says PR consultant Mark Borkowski, author of The Fame Formula, a history of Hollywood publicists. ‘They help the films leap from the screen into the collective consciousness of the public.’

“The media circus is fuelled, in part, by the Hot d’Or, an alternative film festival held a mile down the road. This is to pornography what Cannes is to art-house cinema. In 1995, it first brought Lola Ferrari to public attention. She turned up at the festival with just two claims to fame: her 51in breasts and a pending lawsuit from the Italian sportscar manufacturer for infringement of its brand name (the press pack did the rest). The same year, when Miramax tried to publicise a Hugh Grant movie, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, the studio built a 20ft mountain, which Grant was supposed to climb, on Canne’s Majestic Beach. As Grant was about to begin his ascent for his photocall, a Russian porn star appeared from nowhere, climbed to the top and began disrobing.

“‘Our efforts to remove her achieved far wider coverage than the movie might otherwise have expected,’ says Graham Smith, of the film’s publicists DDA.

“The studios are guilty of the odd dirty trick themselves. In 1992, muscle-bound combat heroes Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme were walking down the red carpet to promote their film Universal Soldier when they became embroiled in a slanging match. It almost descended into violence before they were pulled apart.

“In recent times, the publicity-seeking has become much more overt. In 2007, Jerry Seinfeld climbed to the top of the Carlton Hotel, dressed in a bee costume, to promote Bee Movie. Thirty minutes after checking his gear, Seinfeld slid down eight storeys, across the Croisette, to the beach below, before repeating the stunt again. Last year, Jack Black arrived by speedboat with 40 people dressed as giant pandas for the release of Kung Fu Panda, while Pamela Anderson arrived by the same method, dressed as Barb Wire, for her forgettable 1996 action film of the same name. And who can forget Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat in his mankini in 2006?

“So what of this year? Potential comes in the form of Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric, which will have its party in a local football stadium. Hopefully it’ll yield a kung-fu kick or two.”

Click here to read the full article.

I was intrigued to read in yesterday’s Independent about the splash Paul Duddridge is making in Hollywood. He’s moved from being an agent for comedians based in Soho to becoming a fame guru in Los Angeles in two years and seems to be making a good fist of getting numbers of the countless acting hopefuls who litter the staff rosters of LA bars and restaurants to come to his seminars in the hope that they, too, will be able to make Hollywood work for them.

The promise he offers is to make them famous in 40 days, if they follow the instructions in his two-day seminar to the letter.

“’I started out giving tips to people, and straight away, it just seemed to work,’” Duddridge told the Independent. “’What’s more, it turned out I was giving the same tips, over and over again. Now think I’ve boiled down my theory of fame into forty instructions, forty specific rules that will get you noticed.”

“He is, if you like, the sergeant major of a show-business boot camp,” says the Independent.

It seems to me, however, to be another Hollywood trawler net, powered by publicity, that might capture a star but is more likely to drag up shoals of fodder for Jade Goody-land, the sort of reality TV/brief tabloid stardom culture that is dependent on a constant turnover of faces.

Longevity is about talent, about originality. Yes, people can become famous very quickly, but their ability to stay famous is dependent on what new versions of themselves and their talent they can offer over years. As I have discussed in The Fame Formula, even the most talented need to refresh their fame every fifteen months if they want to stay in the limelight.

Duddridge’s theory of fame is based around Keanu Reeves. “’He’s a major, major movie star, yet no-one thinks he’s a great actor,’” says Duddridge. “’Even he may not think he’s a great actor. But I’m guessing people would give right arm to be as successful as him. My system that is more geared towards getting you to where he’s at.’”

Which is fine, but it should be remembered that Keanu Reeves started out as a child actor, has worked in movies continually, is rather handsome and has a screen presence, far beyond his ability to act, that any amount of training will not replicate.

I wish Duddridge luck with the venture, as well as the hopefuls he is teaching to become starrier in their outlook (to the point that one of the first things he instructs them to do is turn down auditions to test whether the people holding the audition really want to see them). But I believe that the global psyche has moved on from the bling bling nature of fame and fortune that has seen us through the last 20 years and that he won’t be able to utilize the old PR mechanisms to make this work in the way he might have been able to five years ago.

The Independent reported yesterday on the decline in ratings of Richard and Judy since their move to cable and asked me to comment. Here’s an extract of the article, entitled Turning off Richard and Judy.

“They have spent the best part of two decades as Britain’s most unlikely TV power couple. Now it seems the fortunes – and ratings – of the husband-and-wife team are dropping fast, despite once having A-list guests queue to appear with them and a lucrative book club that could make or break an author.

“Since the couple’s move last month from Channel 4 to the cable channel Watch, viewing figures for Richard and Judy’s New Position have slumped disastrously, even by cable channel standards. The prime-time show attracted just 20,000 viewers for one recent broadcast, plummeting from 149,000 for the much-heralded first show at the beginning of October. The average is just 47,000 compared with 2.5 million in their Channel 4 heyday.

“Mark Borkowski, a publicist and PR expert, said: ‘Personality brands occasionally have to be rested and try to create some nostalgia for that person to come back. Some of the best television formats have been those brave enough to cut personalities off in their prime, rather than suffer the ’slings and arrows’ when they’ve stretched for too long.’”

To read the full article, click here.