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.
Showmanship- the common factor
In a striking number of folkloric traditions the number 13 is synonymous with excess and things coming undone. ITV is hoping those folks are wrong. As the 13th series of X Factor streams into our handheld living rooms the rumour mill once again begins to whirl. This time the big name in line for a potential one-series guest stint is Calvin Harris. Post-Swift you can see why his people would be jockeying for that kind of exposure. A succession of novelty faces –Kelly Rowland, Rita Ora, Mel B, Katy Perry- has been and gone, and in doing so the singing…
Lynne Franks- master of PR bluff calling
They fuck you up, your sons and daughters. This was the lesson learned by PR legend Lynne Franks when she opened her Mail on Sunday to discover her grown up son lambasting her as “too selfish to raise children”. To be fair to Josh Howie, his description of the archetypal eighties career woman, “on the phone to the office within 20 minutes of my birth, [not getting] off again until I was 16”, is clearly a parody of the baby boomer elite. His account of the cut-throat careerist shirking her maternal responsibilities makes Ab Fab’s Edina Monsoon –a character apparently…
Trump and the end of objectivity
Ask a reasonably clever ten year old what a journalist is and she will say someone who reports what is happening. While this impression may become more nuanced as we develop a greater understanding of how news is broken and spun this basic understanding still underpins our view of what the media is. How is the media to fulfil this duty when confronted by the blatant parody of political orthodoxy that is Donald Trump? To report on him is to provide a platform for a tone of politics that much of the media find objectionable. Professional reporters play catch up…
In praise of survival
This month marks the last time a brand new VCR will roll off the conveyor belt of Funai Electric in Japan. It is 12 years since most major shops in the UK and Europe stopped selling VCRs, relegating their bulky tapes to ever-decreasing shelf space at the back of charity shops. Someone, somewhere was still buying them a decade after the technology’s death had been pronounced. In our headlong rush to embrace the new we’re too quick to write off the capacity of the predecessors to cling on. Just because something should be eclipsed it doesn’t mean it will be….
The lie that won
The comedy is that David Cameron believed his own lie. The tragedy is, so did the rest of us. The Conservative victory at last year’s election sent shockwaves through the media and political establishments. When the dust had settled and the pollsters had been pilloried, it was all so obvious why the Tories had won- or, more precisely, why Labour had lost. The Conservatives had a clear economic message, supported by the business establishment. They had the backing of business leaders and the tacit support from international bodies such as the IMF. A vote for Labour was to risk the…
Experts be damned: on post-factual communication
‘Post-factual’ is a phrase we’ve been hearing a lot of lately. Once upon a time you would have been discredited for calling the Bank of England corrupt. Now –as Rafael Behr quotes in his Guardian long read autopsy of the remains of Remain– you can plaster it over a bus and the BBC will give you a free ride. Post-factual is identification politics- it means understanding what it’s like to “walk in my shoes”. As Tony Blair explained, those irritating factual outcomes – non-existence of WMDs, failure to exhaust viable alternative to combat- only tell half the story. We’ll never…
Zen and the art of Cannes Lions
“What is this festival anyway?” asked a bemused Dave Grohl to an audience of star struck advertising folk. Few of the execs in the room –who had spent the last few days pickling their vital organs in Rosé- were in a fit state to respond. There are several ways of answering Dave’s question. Excess knows few limitations For many the festival is a marathon piss-up, circa 1987. You’d think Maggie was still clinging onto power and the referendum on the 23rd June was a vote to leave the Common Market. All those who sold their agencies for mega bucks pour…
Brexit and the end of the general public
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’. Well, if this morning’s result has shown us anything it’s that this pursuit is utter rubbish. Any illusion of commons threads that bind together our diverse country has given way to intractable division. Communicators speak of audiences as if they picture their publics as attentive theatre-goers sitting down to watch a show. In truth, they live in lead-encased silos through which no views contrary to their own will enter. Reason be damned. London overwhelmingly voted…
Outside the Referendum Bubble
“Lost for words”. This was how so many of us reacted to the senseless, brutal murder to MP Jo Cox. After a frenzied week of last ditch campaigning for the upcoming referendum the tragic event in Birstall has catapulted everything into miserable perspective. Only on Wednesday the Dumbish Armada was descending down the Thames. Even by the low standards of the tat that gets floated down our noxious waterway this was an eyesore. Nigel Farage, looking like a poor man’s Alan Partridge, had his Brexit love cruise gate-crashed by Geldof’s ragtag band of Kensington pirates. Between the mudslinging of nasty…
Muhammad Ali: titan of the ring who invented a unique brand of showmanship
Muhammad Ali was a limitless divinity, touched by a tincture of madness. He was the showman beyond all showmen, conquering the decades with an all powerful chaos. When I was still in short trousers I witnessed his all consuming hype machine sweeping up all in his path. Nobody was immune to it: an intoxicating deity, an all powerful one man circus, beamed into our homes via a black and white analogue medium. What joy, what excitement. Ali was the enduring icon of my childhood: brash and ebullient, a heavyweight pugilist whose brilliance in the ring and bravado outside it made…
A week of spin can’t save Top Gear from ratings slip
The spin and backtracking that have characterised Chris Evans’s steering of Top Gear have been more Downing Street press office than racing track. Last year it was “100% not true” that he was in line to fill Clarkson’s shoes; months later the BBC announced that they had signed him up for a three year stint. If the presenter’s people ever advised him against loose talk in the wake of this U-turn their caution wasn’t heeded. When pushed on ratings Evans stated that anything less than 5 million would be “disappointing”. Sunday night’s opening episode drew 4.4 million viewers. This still…
Jose Mourinho produced a PR masterclass to land his dream job at Manchester United
Jose Mourinho’s journey to Manchester United is the culmination of an impressive behind-the-scenes campaign of media manipulation. Assistant professors at Harvard Business School – where Sir Alex Ferguson has taught – would call it strategic positioning. It has been a masterclass in PR and playing between the lines. To read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/05/24/jose-mourinho-the-special-one-produced-a-pr-masterclass-to-land/
Manchester Utd's PR is stuck in the dark ages
Louis Van Gaal reportedly first heard of his sacking from his wife after she’d seen the BBC breaking news alert. Harsh stuff. Despite the FA cup win there clearly was no love lost between the Dutchman and the Glazer family. As the bungled leaking of Van Gaal’s sacking showed –first he was out, then he wasn’t, then he definitely was- the club’s PR is stuck in the dark ages. Its communication with the media has been as cryptic and obfuscatory as a Panamanian tax return. Rather than putting forward eloquent spokespersons Manchester United delegate spin to maverick commentators like Paddy…
Noises off: The EU referendum and the virtue of shutting up
Every political campaign eventually enters a silly season. Apocalyptic scenarios are invoked; pledges are carved into stone; statistics are rendered meaningless. Even the dead aren’t safe as our great icons are dragged up and ventriloquized by either side. For the EU referendum the shift from apathy to absurdity has been sudden and overwhelming. One day we were discussing the benefits of a common market and the next we are hearing about the fulfilment of Nazi dreams for European domination and our collective fight for survival against terrorism and environmental oblivion. Today we discover –to no one’s great surprise- that the…
Woody Allen: The ties that bind old media to protecting old men
It was not a cover-up or an establishment conspiracy that let the likes of Savile, Harris and Cosby off the hook for so long. So much had been invested into building their public personae. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em they are part of our cultural fabric. For a journalist to ask awkward questions would be to piss on that fabric and potentially lock them and their colleagues out of the star’s orbit. Besides, surely it’s the job of investigators-not poorly paid hacks- to dig up the dirt? This is the blinkered thinking that accompanies our relationship to the ‘national treasure’. It…
Peston on Sunday needs a much stronger marketing push – and less of the daytime TV vibe
It was always going to be an uphill slog. Robert Peston’s new politics show seems to have been dwarfed by the Andrew Marr juggernaut. BBC One’s Sunday morning programme found an audience 10 times that of Peston’s debut 10am slot yesterday. The producers of the ITV show will, not unfairly, cite the hot weather as disproportionately eating into the later programme’s audience. It may be too early to start speculating on a New Day-style collapse for Peston on Sunday. But heatwave or not, should ITV be worried? Read more here
Feeling Good: in defence of the New Day
The obituaries to the New Day appeared before the first edition. The announcement, 49 issues later, that the paper is closing has come with little surprise. The media bubble postmortem has latched onto not what went wrong but the lunacy of launching a new for-sale paper in the first place. Was failure really written from the beginning? The facts speak for themselves- we all know papers are in decline. Since 2005 the circulations have dropped by up to 50% for the Guardian, 40% for the Sun and 30% for the Mail. What made the ND bold enough to defy the bleak…
Labour needs to learn the art of Ranieri
To paraphrase one Vladimir Ilyich, the more something is said the more it becomes so. This is the essence of spin. A few weeks ago it was all about David Cameron’s family finances. He tried to dodge hard answers until it dawned on Carlton’s ex-PR chief that denials and prevarications were only fuelling the story. Our proposition this week is that the Labour party has a problem with anti-Semitism. If the first scalp in the fracas, an obscure MP from Bradford, kept the story rumbling the fall of big beast Ken Livingston has provided Labour’s poachers a prize trophy. The…
Hannah Woods – whose “arch” eyebrow, print knitwear and encyclopaedic IQ captivated University Challenge viewers as she led her team to victory – has the potential to earn millions if she capitalises on her new-found fame, a leading PR expert said today. Read more of Mark’s thoughts on becoming an internet sensation overnight here
Mark with Newsweek on whether or not Amazon's investment will pay off.
British PR guru Mark Borkowski tells Newsweek that Amazon’s investment could prove wise and boost the streaming service, which is said to have 46 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. In comparison, Netflix has 75 million. Read more here