I like a good story as much as anyone, and I can’t claim to always be obsessive in my pursuit of the truth, but coverage of the so-called ‘White Widow’ Samantha Lewthwaite on Friday and over the weekend has put the British media to shame. Unsubstantiated claims that she was linked to the Westgate Mall…
Hats off at Borkowski towers to the pixies behind the GTA V launch, one of the most staggering, captivating launches I’ve laid eyes on for years. The game has shifted £500m worth of units in 24 hours, and analysts are putting good money on its hitting a billion within the year. The petty crime ‘em…
Following recent reports into Ketchum PR’s involvement with Russia, we thought we would take a deeper look into how the PR giant works its magic worldwide. This is not the first time that the PR behemoth has struck controversy, yet they continue to go from strength to strength. What is their secret? First and foremost,…
News of Google and Nestle’s KitKat/Android partnership has been met with a wealth of delighted puns in the tech community, but brand managers and business writers have been left with a bitter aftertaste in their mouths at the announcement of this unusual pairing. Though the press release has been widely parroted, and for the most…
Another late summer morning, another punning sport scandal headline graces the front page of the Sun. ‘L.Pee.W’ screamed the red top from Newstands across the country, as news broke that England’s victorious Cricket squad had celebrated their triumph with not so much a sticky wicket as a wet one. This would have been a big…
Last week, the first ever synthetic beef hamburger was served to a panel of experts. It was a Promethean feat of human ingenuity, involving weeks of intensive lab work, hand weaving of microscopic fibres, and the expenditure of a cool £215,000. Despite all this, however, the achievements of Dr Mark Post and his team pale…
I recently came across a post on PR Newswire’s blog (http://blog.prnewswire.com/2013/08/01/using-storytelling-to-drive-business-goals/) informing me of all the ways I could use storytelling to drive my business goals. Like the narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, who finds himself cast back in time upon consumption of a madeline, I was sent rocketing back to…
Activists scaled The Shard and the Home Office brazenly paraded their views on strategically driven ad vans. Has the PR stunt died a somewhat tepid death? In a CommsChat twitter conversation, Mark Borkowski discusses bullish lobbying, the art of EQ & the importance of play via Plato.
This week, the British media’s obsession with Twitter reached a new zenith. Unfortunately for the social network, however, this was no love in. Instead, after feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez drew attention to vicious slurs and threats made to her via the site at the end of last week, commentators have been up in arms, arguing…
This week, the business and media commentariat have talked of little but the upcoming merger of Omnicom and Publicis, the second and third largest advertising groups in the world, respectively. As befits a venture which involves hundreds of the world’s most glamourous admen and women, the accompanying spin is so utopian as to be dazzling….