Posts Tagged ‘publicist’

Our publicist which art in Chinawhite
shallowed be our names.
Thy quick-fix come,
thy stunts be run
in Heat as they are on Popbitch.
Give us this day our daily big-ups
and forgive us our coke deals
as we forgive those who report our coke deals to the press.
Lead us not into the Priory
and deliver us from journalists
for thine is the Twitter, the spin-cycle and the story
for fifteen months and forever.

Amen.

Adam Horovitz

Written after hearing that a chain of hotels frequented by celebrities, which are to be featured in a reality show, have asked to use The Fame Formula as a replacement for the Gideon’s Bible – something for the down-at-heel Z Lister to turn to for inspiration.

Maybe I’ve reached a midlife crisis of confidence in the news, given how long I’ve worked in PR, but the more I read the papers or listen to the radio these days, the more I find myself considering the underbelly of the stories that I’m hearing and pondering on who exactly delivered a particular story and if they’ve spun it so that it would arrive on the particular day knowing what effect it might have on the world. Actually, I think it’s more than that – it may be becoming an illness. I may be developing Churnophrenia, a disease that affects publicists of a certain age and forces them into ever more desperate attempts to join the dots.

Everywhere I look I think I see small stories blowing themselves out of all proportion, being pumped up by the people behind the news agenda, floating in the headlines like ungainly zeppelins spinning slowly out of control. I’m not entirely sure what is imagined and what is truth any more, and so, to try and find out, I routinely find myself picking compulsively over the minutiae of who, what, where, when and why a story might have been spun out to create the biggest impact, all the while playing the news matrix like some vast, infernal sudoku puzzle that MUST be completed.

Take yesterday morning’s news that Harris Tweed has decided to drop all reference to Scotland in their promotional material to “avoid a backlash over the release of the Lockerbie bomber” – I immediately developed a cold, shivering sweat as I considered the possibilities.

The first thought that struck me, like a falling brick, was that it’s perfectly possible that there could be no hidden agenda; there might actually be a backlash. A brief moment of respite from the neurosis! Better than medication, I took the resurgent memory of the time the French irritated the USA in 2003 by opposing the invasion of Iraq, and the Americans renamed French Fries as Freedom Fries in revenge. The chill abated – of course it’s easier by far for an irate American to give up buying Harris Tweed than give up their favourite over-salted fried potato sticks, so there really could be reason for the tweed makers to be cautious.

Then I remembered the debate I took part in last week for the Radio Academy, which made me brutally aware of how many people accept and acknowledge the use of spin to make the news, of how many consume the information knowingly, unquestioningly. And here I am breaking out in a paranoid sweat again. I am Jack’s Churnophrenic sense of confusion.

Not even the idea that there may genuinely be crofters out there panicking about losing sales to the wrath of America can save me now – I can still feel a realisation trickling down my spine like ice: if I were looking for a good way to get Harris Tweed stitched into the national consciousness and talked about the world over, I would certainly consider planting a story about it, connected to a hot topic of the day if possible, primed to burst onto the news agenda on a Monday and help dictate the way the week’s news ran.

My god, it even ties in nicely to the launch of Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol – the hero of which wears Harris Tweed, probably even to bed.

Should I seek treatment for my condition? Is there any hope for me? And, more to the point, am I alone in this Churnophrenic inability to be entirely sure what is truth and what is spin? Worryingly, I think not…

Could the tabloid-friendly sight of Cristiano Ronaldo and Paris Hilton in a Los Angeles nightclub the night before the footballer’s Real Madrid deal was confirmed be a coincidence? Originally published on the Guardian website

Call me a cynical old publicist but I have to admit that I am hardly surprised to see Cristiano Ronaldo spread across the tabloids today with Paris Hilton tucked under his arm at a club in Los Angeles.

It’s a marriage made in franchise heaven - the world’s most expensive footballer and the headline-grabbing socialite together on the eve of Ronaldo’s ascension to the giddy heights of football godhood – and an act of sublime stuntsmanship. It cannot be a coincidence.

Bear in mind that Real Madrid is almost certainly banking on being able to get more than a bit of loose change back from Ronaldo’s £80m price tag – not to mention his mooted wages of £200,000 per week – on the back of selling shirts, and it makes perfect sense that Ronaldo is to be found in an American nightclub… the night before the deal is announced.

They want to hook the American Latino market, which is where the US’s huge soccer audience is to be found. They need Ronaldo to follow in the golden boots of David Beckham. What better way than to place him at the jugular of America’s uber-celebrity, Paris Hilton?

Rumour has it that the deal was put in place a year ago - Real Madrid have had time, then, to plan an assault on the media to hurtle their player into the celebrity stratosphere. Ronaldo’s nightclub dalliance is simply the first step on the road to turning him into the biggest brand in the world of soccer. Already today, by playing the Paris card, he’s knocked Becks off the tabloid front pages in his latest photoshoot in his grundies.

All the ingredients have been carefully crafted and placed in the Petri dish of fame. Over the coming weeks we are going to see a new mutant ogre celebrity emerge from the stew that’s been cooked up.

Football is less and less a game of two halves – it is becoming more like a 3D chess set. On the lowest level is the game itself. Above that are the great players and their wives and girlfriends. But on the topmost level are the superstar money-spinners like Beckham, who hardly even need to play football anymore to earn everyone a living – and now Cristiano Ronaldo is clawing his way up there too.

It’s game on for the press. The planning phase is over and the celebrity games have begun. You can forget the likes of SuBo and the reality freakshow turns – Cristiano Ronaldo is where the uber money’s at. This is the million dollar deal.

This article, on the betrayal of Heather Mills’ secrets by her publicist, was published, in edited form, in today’s Guardian. This, however, is the unedited version.

Michele Elyzabeth’s kiss-and-tell all story about her working relationship with Heather Mills in The News of The World is probably the most heinous crime that any publicist can ever commit.

For publicists, clients come and clients go. We live with the bitterness never letting slip the secrets we were entrusted with – those are the rules of the game. In my book, The Fame Formula, one very famous publicist sums up the frustration like this: “A client will pay you $20,000 a month for you to tell him the truth. A year later, expect the star to pay another publicist double the amount to tell the client what he wants to hear.”

Heather Mills ran out of PRs because they all told her what she didn’t want to hear, so she turned to the self-styled French aristocrat and beauty salon owner, Michele Elyzabeth and dubbed her the official worldwide Mills-McCartney spokesperson. But Elyzabeth appears not to play by the PR rulebook. She was, I would suggest, doomed to failure the moment she told the US TV Show “Extra” that her client had received a court order granting full custody of daughter Beatrice, a story that was not corroborated. In branding her client “a calculating, pathological liar and the biggest bitch on the planet”, Elyzabeth has committed the ultimate PR sin.

The current breed of über-publicists – many of whom were trained by PR firm Rogers & Cowan, where Michele Elyzabeth claims she learnt the rules – have gone to their grave without breathing a word of the potentially devastating stories about their AAA list clients, as they are paid to. Elyzabeth’s behaviour would suggest that if she did learn from Rogers & Cowan, she forgot their lessons pretty quickly.

But certain areas of the publicity industry attract such crustaceans. The Fame Formula shines a light on some of this kind of PR, the type who inveigle themselves into their clients’ inner private lives and then betray their trust, despite the professional code of conduct that says never profit from personal relationships with clients. Mills should have listened to the hard truths and taken some of the sterner advice from more responsible publicists.

That said, I doubt Michele Elyzabeth will find it easy to get such a high-profile client again. In PR, trust is worth ten times its weight in gold.

To read the Guardian version, click here.