It was only meant to be a retail report at the backend of the Tuesday Standard. But when Pret A Manger CEO Clive Schlee let slip that he has given his baristas the power to hand out free drinks or food to customers the interview became one of the paper’s most read stories. Over the…
There is sure to be an intern at CCHQ whose Camfandom idea didn’t get much of a hearing at the Monday morning hangout. When the #Cameronettes did begin to trend on the coattails of the milifans it had as much organic credibility as a cheese string. It doesn’t matter whether the origin of this blue…
Ed Miliband doesn’t do “photo-op politics”; he stands for ideas and substance against the soundbites and style of the Tory brand. That combatting style in politics is its own kind of political style is nothing new. Remember Saatchi & Saatchi’s attempt to turn the former PM’s dour persona into an ironic vote winner, “Not flash,…
5 years ago he was, according to The Sunday Times, “more popular than Churchill” and the other was cleaning fish guts off the floor of Billingsgate Market. The Nick Clegg-Joey Essex selfie shows us how far these posers have come and how far our politics hasn’t. 2010’s Cleggomania came on the back of those ‘historic’…
The boss of Aintree has called for “negative” photographs of Ladies Day at the Grand National to be banned. But isn’t getting dressed up, drinking too much and having fun part of the appeal? I spoke to Harry Wallop at the Daily Telegraph about this topic.
I would expect Lufthansa one of the largest airlines in Europe, both in terms of overall passengers carried and fleet size, to have invested in a substantial crisis provision. Sadly, for all corporations, things will go wrong in any given situation, we know this as Murphy’s Law. A multimillion pound crisis business has been built…
So there are two questions in light of Clarkson being ‘sacked’. 1. Can the BBC win back the fans whilst reinventing a format for Top Gear without the key constituencies at the heart of the show. Is there a creative genius still throbbing inside the BBC to triumph with a new show and gather a…
Remember this new word: ‘voyeurgasm’ – translated as the joy of watching a media storm meltdown on all channels. Crisis and Clarkson fit hand in glove. He is a man resolutely himself, much loved and widely loathed. So, let’s mutter the unsayable – it will be a sad day when Clarkson packs away his webbed…
Yesterday we got the news that Starbucks is to back a social storytelling start up. Of course. Today storytelling is colonising every aspect of business, taking precedence in the order of things. It’s not hard to see why stories are so powerful. Borkowski was built on the premise of stories and we have been telling…
Remember last year at the Oscars? “No, it wasn’t a marketing stunt”, said Samsung, who may have paid a reported £12m for its advertising “integration” but the company, it insisted, was every bit as astonished as everyone else when host Ellen De Generes’s star-studded selfie, taken during the broadcast on a Samsung smartphone, became the…