Each day Whatsapp and Messenger process around 60 billion messages. We’ve never been more communicative- and the burden for instant response has never been greater. It’s quaint then that the main news story of the week has been the delivery of a single letter. Since the declaration of Article 50 was signed by the PM…
Next week Theresa May will be writing to the European Council to declare her intentions to initiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. The resounding message of last year’s referendum –for right or wrong- was the country’s desire to ‘take back control’. The message was an alluring one. We have long been told we live in…
Search current articles on Facebook and you’ll find pages and pages on its exciting new messaging app. What is clearly a Snap Chat rip-off, the app allows users to share photos and videos that vanish in 24 hours. That this news itself comes little more than a day after a BBC report into the social…
In a night of surprises the greatest revelation of the 89th Academy Awards was that Pricewaterhousecoopers plays a leading role in counting voting. If anyone ever queried the involvement of accountants in Hollywood the Best Picture mix-up has provided sufficient ammo. The knee-jerk statement of regret from PwC, coupled with the obligatory promise to investigate…
Donald Trump may have only been in office for three weeks, but he’s already started to work his entrepreneurial magic. Taking to Twitter to lambaste Nordstrom for withdrawing his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, he unleashed an outpouring of consumer love. The store’s stock finished the day up 4%. Meryl Streep’s performance in “Florence Foster Jenkins”…
No one likes a show-off. Even if you’ve won 19 major trophies in a 20 year football career and have reinvented yourself into a $1bn empire spanning fashion, music and film, it isn’t a good look to cry out for recognition. Yet any obituary of Brand Beckham in light of the email leak is…
Above all else an iconic image is an expression of power. Think of Korda’s photo portrait of Che Guevara –starting life as propaganda for a dynamic young radical it wassucked into the incredible merchandise mill of capitalism. When Korda first photographed the Argentine radical we were exposed to at most 500 images a day. In…
La La Land –the new musical by Damien Chazelle that has got audiences feather stepping out of cinemas- opens with a traffic jam on a freeway ramp. For a glorious moment the honking drone of commuters is suspended for a sequence to rival great dance numbers from Top Hat to Thriller. What makes Chazelle’s film…
Newspapers have been shedding their arts reporting for decades, relegating reviews to dispensable supplements and buried middle-pages. Depressing reports such as last week’s piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the disappearance of full-time arts staffers are a familiar sight. If the professional reviewer is an endangered species then the rise of the blogging geek…
In PR we talk about reaching out and cutting through. We craft messaging that will engage that poised and docile mob we call ‘the public’. In 2016 –a year of Trump and Brexit, outrage and division- this pursuit has never seemed harder. The year will be remembered as one where the mighty fell, the great…