Posts Tagged ‘publicity’

For the first episode of his Improperganda podcast, Mark Borkowski talks to Tom Payne, author of Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney.

The discussion covers the myths and histories of celebrity and publicity ancient and modern, taking in everything from Heracles to WAGS, Britney Spears to ritual sacrifice and Troy to John Terry.

The Improperganda podcast is a weekly forensic inspection of the truths, untruths, half-truths, myths, histories and gossip that surround modern culture, celebrity, fame, brands and PR.

Each episode will feature an interview or discussion with someone with a unique perspective on the world, be they publicists, journalists, authors, artists or just interesting human beings with an inside track on the underside of the headlines or the digital hemisphere.

 

 Marks Podcast - Episode 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The BBC have, without doubt, handed Nick Griffin and the BNP a potential PR coup by allowing him to appear on Question Time. It is very likely that Griffin will be working desperately hard to avoid belching racist bile, especially as the programme surrounds him – in the interests of the BBC’s “central principle of impartiality” – with Jack Straw (Jewish ancestry and, appropriately, Labour’s Justice secretary), Lady Warsi (Muslim Conservative peer), the critic Bonnie Greer (African American) and token Lib Dem Chris Huhne.

Griffin’s PR nous comes hard earned – the BNP’s Director of Publicity, Mark Collett, has had his share of run-ins with the television, having been caught on camera during Channel 4’s Young, Nazi, and Proud documentary in 2002 declaring his admiration for Adolf Hitler and calling homosexuals “AIDS monkeys” on Russell Brand’s Re:Brand show in the same year. Collett is highly unlikely to want Griffin to fall into the same trap, despite the strong likelihood that he will be mercilessly provoked.

So should we allow a thug in a well-cut suit on the TV to attempt to seduce the masses? Is Griffin likely to raise his status to that of statesman in the circumstances? Prohibition would, I suspect, be more likely to fan the flames of disaffection among voters – who have much to be disaffected about at the moment, hence the 6% who voted BNP in the European elections – and the last thing most people, let alone most politicians, want is to allow them more chances to snare votes.

The hope, then, is that Griffin will succumb to anger and show his dark side, which has been slathered in nice suits and careful spin for the last few years. Gordon Brown has gone on record this morning to say that: “it will be a good opportunity to expose what [the BNP] are about”. Russell Brand has said it with more style in The Sun. According to Brand it will help to let the BNP “gurgle up their chuckle-brained hate-broth” on Question Time. “The right thinking people of the Earth are on relatively safe ground when it comes to the ‘war of words’ with televised bigots,” he adds.

A few years ago Griffin told a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP (which included the then leader of the Ku Klux Klan) that: “Once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, ‘yes, every last [immigrant] must go’. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”

With this in mind, I think that Michael Corleone’s advice in The Godfather Part 2 – “Keep you friends close, but your enemies closer” – is the best bet. Let’s keep Griffin and his hateful, hate-full party close and hope that they deliver a horse’s head to their own bed, making it clear just how appalling their views, which they keep simmering under the veneer of careful PR, really are.

Twitter is the place on the net to have fun with publicity, as a brilliant new Halloween stunt, featured in The Sun, proves beyond doubt.

“Twitter users will get the chance to communicate with departed showbiz stars this Halloween — in the world’s first online séance,” proclaims the paper. “Tweeters can choose which of their deceased idols they want to talk to, pick a question — then follow the ‘Tweance’ in real time using the social networking site.”

The ‘Tweance’ has been cooked up by Angels Fancy Dress, doubtless keen to move some spooky costumes this October. Mundane considerations aside, they clearly have an almost psychic understanding of the way the web works and, more importantly, the way people engage with social networking sites; they have drawn in all the triggers needed for a publicity windfall – celebrity, the chance to communicate with dead celebrities and the opportunity for millions to nominate who will be spoken to and to see all the answers coming out in real time.

They’ve brought in “top psychic” Jayne Wallace, who has already “contacted the spirit of Jade Goody in a séance organised by The Sun” – she “will quiz four late stars nominated by Twitterers between 10am and 12pm on Friday October 30”.

Whatever you think of psychics and the possibilities of contacting the dead, there is no escaping the fact that there are plenty of people out there who believe – and no doubt that they will be following this Tweance religiously as well as nominating their favourite dead celebrities and sending in questions. This could go right round the world.

What excites me most about this is the way that Twitter is being used to break new ground. I ran the first ever Twithibition, an exhibition of great publicity stunts at the Edinburgh Fringe, in the summer. This Tweance is the next step towards making Twitter the communication channel of choice for the world, a place where things can happen instantly and effect real change whilst you watch. It’s thrilling.

All I need to decide now is whom to nominate…

What do ex-pop star Dane Bowers and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, have in common? They’re both publicity predators, prowling at the fringes of big news and ready to leap in and attach their teeth into the rump of a story that will get them attention.

Griffin is all over the news at the moment, attaching himself to the coat tails of the BNP’s London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook, who was invited to Buckingham Palace for a garden party and sought to bring Griffin as his significant other to the party. But Griffin, in true publicity predator style, has now consumed the story entirely.

According to the Daily Mail: “The leader of the British National Party yesterday pulled out of the Royal garden party following a public outcry over his invitation. Nick Griffin said he had ‘no wish to embarrass the Queen’ by attending Buckingham Palace on July 21.”

The far right have always been good at propaganda and at getting ink – Goebbels was an astonishing propagandist who turned the swastika into the world’s most recognisable brand logos. Griffin’s trick, learned from pop stars and the 24/7 news cycle, has been to insert himself into the soap opera of the news cycle. Soap, as we know, demands a rich mix of people and always rewards the most Machiavellian characters with big story lines.

You just have to look at Dane Bowers for proof. Bowers is back in the life of his ex, Katie Price aka Jordan, determinedly reinserting himself into the ongoing soap opera that is the Pete’n’Jordan bust up, calling her as his alibi after being arrested for drink driving outside her house. It’s a guaranteed method of reclaiming fame – this fresh injection of notoriety should last him a good fifteen months, even if he and Jordan are not an item again after all.

Griffin’s predatory ambitions are – at the moment, anyway – much more short term. He’s hoping to turn his ‘noble’ gesture to the Queen into votes at next week’s local and European elections. If that works, then the long game begins and Griffin the publicity predator will be red in tooth and claw.

In the meantime, both Griffin and Bowers are successfully writing themselves into the news-soap. For proof, all you need to look at is the reaction of Middle England. Right now, Griffin and Bowers are the names on a huge number of people’s lips.

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.

In the wake of the attacks on Sir Fred Goodwin’s Edinburgh home, apparently by a group calling themselves Bank Bosses Are Criminals, it’s clear that the attacks on Fred the Shred are a necessary distraction for the Government, who are looking for ways to recoup their status in the wake of the banking disaster and are gladly hiding behind his him and letting him take the blame.

But the biggest PR concern in the affair is the amount of money Goodwin is spending on the two slick and expensive PR people who are keeping his head below the parapet. They might not be able to prevent the angry brigade from throwing stones at one of his many houses, but they are still sucking up a hefty percentage of the money Goodwin has taken from the taxpayer in an attempt at keeping his name out of the press as much as possible.

It seems as if Goodwin is not prepared to take the knocks when things get rough, despite having been extremely keen to take all the pleasant handouts, all the fruits of good publicity, that came his way before the financial world came to a shuddering halt. He’s got a knighthood (for services to banking), a pension to die for and a list of awards – including Forbes’ Businessman of the Year and European Banker of the Year – to his name and yet he seems determined to hide and rest on these laurels.

If Goodwin is determined to keep the £700,000 a year pension he’s taken from the now part-nationalised RBS, he should carefully consider the amount he is spending on his PR budget. Despite their best efforts, his PR people cannot actually keep him out of the press. Two high-powered publicists command an annual fee that could keep a small charity ticking over nicely for a year. It would surely be better PR for him to drop his failing suppress agents than to continue paying them. Given the current state of affairs, he is powerless to stay out of the press, however much he pays his publicists.

And let’s not forget that Fred the Shred is merely the tip of the iceberg. If he, as the most obvious villain of the day, can have one of his homes attacked by Bank Bosses Are Criminals, then there are plenty of others who will suffer the same if nothing is done to create a PR strategy that actually addresses the grievances of the British public.

The lesser-known bankers – and the Government – are not Hollywood movie stars from the 1930s – all their dirty secrets are out and in the public eye. They do not need suppress agents to keep grim reality at bay; it’s far too late for that. What they need is a strong, constructive PR strategy that squarely addresses the grievances people are directing at them.

There needs to be a PR turnaround, from venture capitalists, from Sir Fred, from the Government too. No one can afford to replicate Goodwin’s strategy of hiding and hoping that the fuss will die down. If they don’t – and they keep throwing money at protecting themselves – the small acts of grievance such as the stoning of Goodwin’s Edinburgh home by Bank Bosses Are Criminals could turn, before too long, into full-scale ire and serious social unrest.

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.

A breakfast meeting with David Blaine last week was a very pleasing and revelatory experience; it’s good to sit and talk with someone who really, really gets true showmanship, spectacle, creativity, word of mouth and viral publicity and who has encountered many of the same things I’ve encountered, even the Russian circus act with a coat of living minks.

Blaine is a great, great grandson of Barnum and has built his persona on the Barnum and Houdini models, always connecting with his audience and constantly astonishing them. Most importantly, he is always sure that they are talking about him. He knows that without promotion something terrible happens. Nothing!

A perfect case in point is the trick he showed me. I didn’t dare ask – it felt too gauche – but Blaine offered. He got me to shuffle a pack of cards and lay out two lines of ten cards, making sure that each one was different. Then he asked me to take ten of them and hold them behind my back. Next, he suggested I look at the remaining cards and mentally pick one. “Not the Ace, it’s too obvious,” he said.

I chose the four of diamonds and told him that I’d chosen. Next, he made a gesture and told me to place the cards I held behind my back on the table. The ten cards I had hidden behind me were now eleven in number and sure enough, the eleventh card was the four of diamonds. I was gob-smacked. I have absolutely no idea how he did it – it seems an impossible trick.

But this is the reaction Blaine is constantly seeking, since he instinctively knows I would go away and talk to several people about the trick and how astonishing it was and, in this way, his reputation would be perpetuated. Now, of course, I am also blogging about it. The chances are that his reputation will spread in ever increasing circles if everyone who is astonished by him does as I have done.

Just as interesting was the revelation that Blaine actively thrived on the people who came and taunted him with food and insults whilst he was attempting to live on only 4.5 litres of water a day in a Plexiglas box above the Thames. “I needed people to react in the way that the did to get through the stunt,” he told me.

Their antipathy during his 44 days of starvation gave him something to prove to the haters and became a media focus for the endurance stunt, guaranteeing it more coverage and even comments from then-President Bush. No wonder he was heard to murmur “I love you all” when he finally completed the stunt.

He is the greatest modern showman / illusionist and will remain popular as long he can maintain the incredibly high creativity, the quality of his unique stunts and continue to amaze and astonish. Celebrities, brands and publicists have a lot to learn from David Blaine.

Where have all the rebellious heroes of British music gone? If the Brit Awards are anything to go by, there is pretty much no such animal anymore, just a parade of no-marks who are too wary of upsetting Mastercard, the sponsors, and the TV executives to do anything interesting.

The fact that the inoffensive Welsh songstress Duffy, a fine singer if you like your music to hark back to a supposedly innocent era where everyone was happy and no one rocked the boat, has been crowned the overall winner of this year’s Brits merely reinforces the corporate sheen of the modern awards, and where no alcohol is served whilst the TV show is filmed in case of trouble. No trouble is allowed, of course, in case it interferes with the mundane business of rewarding money with more money.

As recently as a decade ago, there was an inevitability about some sort of mischievous prank being pulled at the Brits; the award ceremony could be relied upon to provide at least one instance of much-needed end-of-winter anarchy in the TV schedules, be it Chumbawamba dousing John Prescott in water and changing the lyrics of Tubthumping to support the Liverpool dockers, Jarvis Cocker waving his arse at Michael Jackson or the KLF firing blanks at the crowd from the stage before depositing a dead sheep outside the venue.

Even Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox’s notoriously bad presentation style at the 1989 Brits seems like a paragon of rock ‘n’ roll anarchy now, in an era when all we get by way of mischief and outrage is the crawling skeleton that is Amy Winehouse abasing herself in the Caribbean.

Of course, it was Fleetwood and Fox’s reign of autocue terror on the show that stopped it from being broadcast live; the first step in a steady progression of limitations that saw the Brits become less a celebration of modern music and more of a corporate jolly at a seaside resort, shackling British rock music to the tedious format that spawned it simply by reacting violently against it: the 1950s variety show.

Watching the Brits now, it’s as if the Beatles never went to Hamburg or discovered acid, as if the Rolling Stones never scared the parents of the Baby Boomer generation. Everyone plays nicely and the nation’s passion for music dribbles away.

The Brits, and pop music in general, need adventure, excitement, mischief, stunts and anarchy. Someone needs to be rewarded for all of the above, not just for toeing the line and practising the art of appeasement with big business and the company bosses. Rock ‘n’ roll demands bad behaviour. It’s great that Iron Maiden were awarded Best Live Act – here was one band in the line up who have always pushed the boundaries of publicity, moved forward and never just caved in to industry pressure, thanks in great part to their excellent manager Rod Smallwood.

The same can’t be said for the other winners. Girls Aloud are, without doubt, a nice bunch of women who perform cheery, upbeat songs, but they have no serious agenda; they are part of a celebrity money machine that is dying on its feet as the world of high finance implodes and people discover that they want more serious, cerebral and inventive things in their lives.

Sales of broadsheets are up, The Economist is experiencing a surge in sales. In the face of coming hardship, people are bound to want their entertainment to mean something again, to have a story behind it that is more than a metaphor for the excesses of the banking world. Amy Winehouse drinking herself into oblivion is not rebellion; what the rock and pop scene needs is a good selection of agent provocateurs amongst their ranks, unsettling the stale corporate shindig that is the Brits with something a little more radical and exciting.

Good music PR cannot just rely on churning out the latest set of sound-a-likes and hoping they’ll do something stupid or crazy (within a certain set of limits) for the press. In a digital download age, where music is becoming as ubiquitous as breakfast cereal, acts that want to break through with credibility intact are going to have to think very hard about what they have to say, what their music has to say and how they want to go about promoting it.

Dear old Brad Pitt. In an interview with Newsweek in the US this week, prior to the three-ring Oscar hoopla, the star says he’s sick and tired of the media focus on his relationship with Angelina Jolie. The actor hammers his point home throughout the interview, clearly believing the odd notion that his private life is totally separate from his career. “The publicity machine is out of control,” he tells the magazine. “It’s everything we didn’t sign up for.”

Brad Pitt and family

Are you listening to your PR minders, Brad, or are they telling you want you want to hear? Here’s a question for you to answer. If you wanted to send out a signal that you were a very different celeb, why did you sell the first photographs of your twins? If you facilitate a $14 million contract (which is what the photos of the twins, then less than a month old, reportedly fetched) with devils like People magazine and Hello! magazine, what do you expect?

Come on, Brad; you were paid a king’s ransom for the photo rights – this indicates that you are playing the game. OK, some of the fee was purportedly donated to African charities but the process of monetizing baby pictures is going to causes problems. If newborn infants are thrust into the spotlight to make money, you can’t expect the media to leave you alone to play happy families.

Old Hollywood legends were much better with sound bites and showbiz wisdom. Undoubtedly crafted by a publicist, David Niven’s words should echo through to Brad: “Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don’t take anything too seriously, it’ll all work out in the end.” More pertinently, Clark Gable once remarked to Niven that, when it came to the contract between a star and his public, the public had read the small print and the star hadn’t.

Brad should remember that being famous has its costs. Disconnection with the audience is a real threat and remarks such as the ones made in the Newsweek interview are sure to wind the media up. Newsweek are a conduit for all the love that has been directed towards Brad Pitt over the years, but all takes is one insignificant violation of the contract that Clark Gable mentioned and the adoring crowds can turn, all too quickly, into a baying mob.