All references to Christmas or end of year removed. We can do a round up at the appropriate time. A Friday thought or two. Borkowski has retained the heart of its culture throughout all the change and technological advances around us.  We are a company based on creativity and bravery, but also and perhaps most importantly, on loyalty and commitment and, this is the bit I am most proud of – that quietly what we have always delivered, we are still delivering – news campaigns that actually have an impact. That’s all I am saying. We don’t say disruption too often, we…

Well there is no doubt that it’s pantomime season, heroes, villains  and the participation of the crowd. Take Noel Edmonds for example. A scroll through Twitter a week a ago would have left you in no doubt; Marmite isn’t just found in an iconic jar . But hang on, seven days in, he’s out of the jungle and it’s all change proving that chewing on a cockroach, taking your top off and most importantly, showing your authentic personality can change the mood of the crowd. To be in the media these days (whichever side you are on) means weathering four…

We are now officially in the tinselled haze of mid-November when our TV screens are dominated by shmaltzy adverts aimed to pull at our heart strings and pickpocket our wallets. When you think of Iceland, you can’t help but conjure up images of Kerry Katona and Peter Andre clutching shopping bags full of frozen pavlovas. The biggest promotional success for Iceland was sponsoring “I’m a Celebrity” back in the day. The sponsorship went fully multi-platform, with bespoke content, behind the scenes footage, the “I’m a Celebrity” website and in-programme polls adding extra layers of Engagement. Six celebrities from the show…

The trouble is that generally there is a butterfly attention to fame and noteworthy issues these days. This causes issues for brands because ‘fame’ is a vital currency and how it is created, developed and sustained is the all important question. So what is fame? And I mean real fame, not the Andy Warhol fifteen minute kind. Fame is about influence and numbers, so a majority of people having a high quantity of high quality associations in their mind about a brand. Then fame is driven by two key ingredients: Being consistently present with mass visibility Being talked about by…

Make no mistake, this is the age of heightened individualism. More and more things are competing for our attention as the battle for clicks, likes and eyeballs gets stronger. And yet the more we compete as marketers and communicators, the more there is a sense of ‘so what?’ This stat dropped on my desk earlier. A staggering 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute whilst 5 billion videos are watched each day on YouTube alone. I heard that one newspaper alone receives 40,000 press releases and pieces of information a day. We are killing not capturing attention,…

“Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd” said P.T Barnum and I think about that a lot when wondering about the direction of certain campaigns I am working on. Barnum said a lot of quotable stuff and he knew a lot about the magic and mischief of capturing the public’s attention. Isn’t that at heart, simply what PR is about? We capture the essence of the stories or the issues that we know will move people – that result in a tangible outcome and not just noise and output, and we build relationships with like minded people who help…

There are always two ways of looking at things. The Circle https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/sep/19/the-circle-is-it-the-perfect-dating-show-for-2018-or-reality-tvs-nadiris  surely the most depressing programme to come into our homes for a decade. Or is it? Maybe it’s the cleverest, quickly uncovering the lengths we go to to be ‘liked; and how quickly we evaluate the truth. Or the lack of it. Not only that, it smartly taps into the power of the second screen as the traditional audience attention turns away from television and moves toward mobile devices and social media who chat about the content they are watching. Look, here I am writing about it. Anyway,…

Change always begins with the individual. That’s a fact or a cliché depending on your mood. Here’s another one. Purpose in business is the new digital, the new black or the next new coffee. Whatever, it’s more important than ever. This week the conversation about purpose has ratcheted up showing us that businesses who are socially aware and advocacy centric, are demanding attention good or bad. Brands and leaders with purpose who can articulate their values simply can demand action now. Just look at Nike. Nike is a brand tattooed in American history but not one without press backlash at…

The Noel Edmonds campaign against Lloyds Bank, which has led the news agenda for more than a year now, has won the day for its emotional appeal and direct connection to customers, both existing and future of the bank. Moreover, it’s had the energy and creativity to keep moving the needle and drive the message into the minds of not only the bank, but of the crowd. It’s hijacked Lloyd’s own advertising campaign and used it against them, and drawn on personal experience to disrupt a narrative on mental health. A ComRes survey was commissioned and the results shared, which…

Dani and Jack have emerged from Love Island surrounded by stars and the promise of everlasting love. Beyond that, the promise of riches and fame await them. Initially images and soundbites will feed the media agenda, holiday destinations will offer free trips in exchange for bronzed perfection by their pool and freebies will arrive daily from brands hoping for a quick fix endorsement and a post on social media. But to create real engagement and influence that lasts beyond the first flush of romance and interest, you need a structure around you that controls the impulse to go for everything…

Businesses still like to lead by function. Creative in this corner, publicity in that corner for example. But at the same time these days, it’s fashionable to be integrated. Too often I see that all of this just leads to greater dysfunction. Within the integration, each sector concentrates on their expertise and the metrics they use to state their value. This serves only to create more distinction between every other role. Sounded like a good idea at the time? In reality, it seems to make very little sense at all! Perhaps integration would be better described as “time saving”, though…

As Koke missed the second penalty and the whole of Russia erupted in a frenzy worthy of a Tolstoy epic Stanislav Cherchesov, with a face chiselled out of Russian granite, barely broke his Stakhanovite visage. It’s reported that the head coach had received a call from Putin before the match for some “encouraging words”. Steely Stan has bought some time now his team remain in the championship and his transfer to a club in a far-flung peninsula neighbouring Mongolia has been delayed. One thing we can be sure about: Vladimir Putin is on top of this world cup. No one…

In 2008-9 Prime Minister Gordon Brown bent over backwards to recruit Alan Sugar as his government’s ‘Business Czar’, with an eye to lining up the boisterous entrepreneur as Labour’s mayoral candidate. Back then reality TV stars going into politics didn’t have quite the same stigma as it does now and in the dying years of New Labour proximity to mass media appeal was all the more essential in the absence of Boxoffice Blair. Yes the Apprentice star was prone to the occasional off-colour remark – but it didn’t stop him being elevated to the upper chamber or having his BBC…

Mark spoke at the Westminster Media Forum on the 26th April 2018 ¬ the subject Next steps for tackling fake news – impact, industry response and options for policy Responding to the challenges: media literacy, responsibilities and options for policy Mark Borkowski, Founder and Creative Head, Borkowski PR My friends in media land in media sales claim our attention span in that 8 seconds, so given the fact that the goldfish’s attention span is 6 seconds I’ll try and make this as short as possible to so my views actually do embed yourself. I believe everything is different and everything…

If Paul Dacre was listening to the “mouthpiece of the metropolitan elite” BBC on Thursday morning he might have heard Polly Tonybee lay into this “bully in chief” who has “poisoned British politics”. Would there be a more fitting leaving present for the outgoing Daily Mail editor than to have these words framed, preferably in the olde English typeface of its masthead? This is precisely the legacy that Dacre sought to create in his nearly three decades at the helm of the Mail. As he once commented on Desert Island Discs, his choice of castaway luxury would be a copy of the…

No format has been more maligned than reality TV. Its obituary has been written many times. Commentators pour over declining ratings of the likes of Big Brother and X Factor. In the age of Netflix we gaze into a future where live viewing is obsolete. Yet just when it seems time to switch off the life support machine the format bounces back and trammels all over its scripted competition. The fanfare that has greeted the return of ITV’s Love Island is a case in point. Not only have the tabloids lapped up this abattoir of bronzed horniness. Even the Guardian,…

The news that MI6 will be launching its first advertising campaign aimed at recruiting more women is significant not just because M’s the word. It marks a new openness for an organisation that for the best part of the last century did their utmost to persuade us they didn’t exist. Diversifying away from the old boys networks that have often characterised the world of spooks is fitting for a moment when macho power-structures everywhere are being exposed. Yet it also seems to be part of a more general drift towards openness, the benefits of which are not always clear cut….

Influence is a tricky one to measure. The word itself derives from the Latin influentia, meaning an influx. Influence flows out, imperceptibly, and its effects are more qualitative than quantitative. Take the Sunday Times’s big splash this week revealing findings from its investigation into Labour’s dominance on twitter during the 2017 election. According to research from Swansea University over 6500 accounts grouped pro-Corbyn can be linked to Russian domains. Many of these were operated by bots programmed to retweet anti-Tory messages. Often appearing under a female avatar, could it be that the face of spycraft 2.0 is not so much Karla from…

Forget the hastags #Bots #CambridgeAnalytica #Russian #trolls #darkforces #Socialmedia #disruption  What we see from Rudd’s downfall is that the agenda is still being set by the reporting of traditional media turbo charged by established opinion-formers.

The price of a J D Wetherspoon pint will be the cheapest within a ten minute walk of where you’re stood. Whether or not this adage is entirely true, the pub chain has created a brand of cheap-and-cheerfulness that has have left its competition in the gutter. Could this partly account for why its chairman Tim Martin announced this week that all 900 plus of the chain’s social media accounts -mainly facebook pages but also its corporate twitter and Instagram accounts-  have been deactivated? The move is clearly a stunt designed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom that leveraging…