Mark My Words Blog
Welcome to ‘Mark My Words,’ the digital sanctuary where insight meets intrigue, and commentary sparks contemplation.
Delve into the dynamic world of PR maverick Mark Borkowski as he unravels the threads of media, culture, and communication. Mark’s blog is a treasure trove of industry wisdom, offering a backstage pass to the inner workings of publicity and the ever-evolving landscape of modern media.
Unfriended: What Facebook tells us about PRs and the media
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 network’s shambolic response to a investigation into its tepid policing of paedophilic images is surely less than coincidental. The example speaks volumes for the current state of PR. It began last year when the BBC found that paedophiles were using secret groups on Facebook to share…
Best Picture mix-up is the best PR stunt Oscar’s ever pulled
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 how the wrong envelop came into the hands of Warren Beatty, comes as no surprise. But shouldn’t it be the Academy that is thanking PwC? What happened last night is in a long tradition of Oscar shambles. From Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather to reject his…
Brands all over the world are praying that Trump attacks them
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” is not her best work, but a high-profile spat with the US President has likely helped secure her a record 20th Oscar nomination. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary of Trump’s bile has been his most-hated foe: the mainstream media. Despite being labeled as “fake news,”…
Brand Beckham will take more than a minor email leak about knighthoods to bring it down.
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 staggeringly premature. If the brand were a publically listed company its share price would be having more a wobble than a tumble. David Beckham has constructed a vehicle infinitely bigger than himself. The revelation that not all of his charitable endeavours were a 100% motivated…
The Truth Behind the Beyonce Pregnancy Photoshoot
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 the twenty first century that figure is well over 5000. It has never been harder to produce those iconic images that become entrenched in the cultural memory. Yet as the release of Beyonce’s pregnancy pics on Instagram over the last few days show, the power…
2017 exists in an augmented reality
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 different is that its flights of fancy exist side-by-side with the mundane reality of the daily commute, of folk scraping by and making ends meet. Its appeal isn’t that is it pure escapism but rather than it presents an augmented reality (AR). This goes well…
Who killed the newspaper critic?
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 and the entitled opinionators of social media are its Walter Palmers. The recent deaths of giants of the form, John Berger and A A Gill, seem spookily prescient. We are witnessing the passing of an era and it’s time to take stock of where we’re…
PR in 2017: buy a bunker
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 passed on and the rest of us were left scratching our heads in disbelief. In a time when pollsters are discredited and experts derided, anyone flaunting their future-gazing creds should be treated like a purveyor of quack medicine. Last year, when sensing that 2016 would…
What's the value of values?
Whether it’s a burka ban in Germany or Trump’s plan for an overhaul of America’s trading relationships much in politics is justified on the ground of ‘our values’. They can be liberal or American, Enlightenment or corporate- what matters is that they are ours and we have to defend them. As analysts of political discourse will tell you the word is a classic semantic ruse- it assigns the audience a share in the matter at stake without specifying the content of the matter. The greatest part of the rhetorical trick is that it assumes a history- and in a period…
What now for the liberal elite?
Between the shock of Trump and the likely pummeling of the Italian establishment in the country’s constitutional referendum on Sunday the metropolitan liberal elite have received a small boon in Richmond Park. While the defeat of a Tory former wunderkind is an odd platform for restoring order, the bi-election had become a proxy war between the well-to-do 48% and the self-righteous Brexiteers. We’re still a long way from seeing a liberal elite fightback. There will surely be more upsets to the world order. A Lib Dem win in Richmond Park –the country’s wealthiest constituency and which overwhelmingly voted to remain…
Theresa May would be missing a trick not to make Nigel Farage our next man in Washington
Is the thought of Ambassador Farage really beneath contempt for Theresa May? Undoubtedly, the interim Ukip leader would be a live wire. Foreign Office mandarins, already on tenterhooks about Foreign Secretary Johnson, would be livid. But the potential benefits outweigh the risks. If Trump has transformed politics once and for all into reality TV, then diplomacy by selfie and proclamations in less than 140 characters is the foreign relations equivalent. Read further at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/22/theresa-may-would-missing-trick-not-make-donald-trump-next-man/
Fantastic Lies and Where To Find Them
The response of the established media to reports that the majority of stories shared on facebook during the US election were stonking great lies has been the predictable bellow of I told you so. According to the holier-than-thou op-eds this is clearly the fault of the news gathering public for shunning proper paywalled journalism. Yet this stern lecture from a dying breed misses a greater truth. The distinction between fact and fiction hasn’t so much blurred as morphed into one big post-truth blob that has long since gobbled up all news outlets- from the altar of the establishment to the…
The excellence of festive campaigns should teach us that brand engagement is not just for Christmas
PR is deployed to whet consumer appetites by leaking morsels, as if we couldn’t picture what is in store for us. An adorably toothless child in a well-furnished house befriends a fantasy figure with a particular cause for sadness. The figure is a metaphor for the magic of childhood refracted through a wistful gauze of adult memory; we know this because the soundtrack is a popular song from 10 years ago, covered bitter-sweetly by a breathless chanteuse. Beneath the confident festive formula, there is nervousness among top brands. Read more at http://www.prweek.com/article/1414363/excellence-festive-campaigns-teach-us-brand-engagement-not-just-christmas
The Algorithm of Influence
Influence isn’t what you have, it’s what you can convince others they need. Every time a product is launched we are persuaded not only of its desirability but that it has rendered everything that came before redundant. To cling onto the old is to live in the past. This was played out last week when Twitter announced that it was closing down its short-form video service Vine. Despite having 200m active users the social media giant had decided that it was to be consigned to the past. Cue news of Twitter and Apple further investing in augmented reality. Videos are…
HyperNormal: PR in a post-truth world
As we gaze on the latest stunt or cracking campaign for a new talking fridge we miss out on the darker side of the industry. Too often PR does not question the larger informational frameworks in which we communicate. That’s where Vladislav Surkov comes in. Surkov remains semi-invisible and anonymous, lurking in the shadows. He gets on with it away from the public glare. According to Adam Curtis’s visceral new filmic essay HyperNormalisation Surkov is the author of a new kind of post-factual politics. Under Putin he has held portfolios as various as media, religion, modernisation, foreign relationship and the…
From Paddy to the Donald- the Economic Bubble of Outrage
Spare a thought for Panama. They want to be known for their high levels of literacy, their traditional straw hats and their eclectic cuisine. Yet thanks to the famed leaked papers this country of less than four million continues to be synonymous with Dickie Roepers swigging their Crème de menthes on their untaxed island getaways. It comes as no surprise that this week it has been revealed that the Panamanian government has brought in Bellwether Strategies, the firm that gave us the acceptable face of China for Beijing ‘08. If Bellwether’s job is to make the Central American country boring…
How does Sam Allardyce ever come back from this?
As Sam Allardyce jets off to his Spanish villa, he will have ample time to reflect on how he became the shortest serving England manager of all time. It is no surprise that Big Sam says he has not ruled out returning to football. Nor should he. No one wants a crisis but once it has happened there are ways of making the best of it. To read the rest, follow the below link to The Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/09/28/how-does-sam-allardyce-ever-come-back-from-this-first-he-should/
Corbyn- PR Revenant?
Jeremy Corbyn goes from clinging on to gripping the Labour party by the neck. Forget the Revenant this year’s great survival story belongs to the softly spoken radical for Islington North. A year in to the experiment, and two successful leadership contests later, we know any attempt to school the ragged trousered socialist in the ways of media handling and spin would be to defy a force of nature. But, vice versa, could there be any PR lessons for us to glean from Corbyn’s endurance? Nestled in the latest PR Week dispatch from the Labour party conference there is a tantalising…
Hiddle-split: PR lessons from a shomance
It was a romance worthy of a bard, a ballad to rival John and Yoko. Only the most cynical of PRs would dismiss the star-crossed lover affair of Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift as a stunt. Well I am a cynical PR man and from day one the pictures of the well-groomed couple canoodling on a coastal nook had as much gritty authenticity as a Nicholas Sparks novel. The news of the Hiddleswift split has confirmed that love is, after all, little more than a tennis score in the cut-throat world of celebrity. Reports have spun the story that Swift…
PR fails to catch em all
Pokemon Go has entered the decline stage. This is the fad phase after the belles-lettre stage that sees a flurry of pretentious musing on how said fad is changing everything and the one before the stage where your parents get into it. Meteoric popularity followed by equally dramatic trailing off is nothing new. The Washington Post quotes a psychologist Robert Bartholomew who posits that digital living has accelerated the spread and decline of fads- Pokemon is only the most current example of this phenomenon of extreme effervesce. Where Pokemon does seem distinct is the proliferation of click bait flies feeding…