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.
Little Red Lines
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This is how shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s whipping out of Mao’s Little Red Book went down in the Commons yesterday. Critics, on both sides of the house, have lambasted the former backbench romper stomper for quoting from a genocidal dictator. McDonnell argues this “flamboyant gesture” was required to cut through the Osbornomic noise and get a point out about the sale of public assets to foreign buyers, including the Chinese (“Maoist”) government. The assumption is that publicity –whatever the controversial means applied- is self-justifying. Is he right? Amazon provides a case for the…
You can’t get better than a PR quickie
The formula for the Christmas Ad is out and even PRs are having a go. John Lewis’s Man on the Moon and Sainsbury’s Mog the Cat may have been beamed out into the national conversation courtesy of big budgets, social media overkill and appearing on platforms that still demand attention; but a bundle of Christmas-themed videos released online by every brand under the grey clouds shows that you don’t need the budget of an Oscar-bait film to tap into the seasonal magic. Kwik Fit’s winter safety check campaign is proof in point that PR “content” is moving further into terrains…
TV Adverts
From the infuriatingly catchy to the plain bizarre Mark joins Adrian Chiles on Five Live to discuss the value of TV adverts- past and present. Alongside branding guru Robert Bean and Go Compare’s opera singer Wynne Evans Mark explores how, from Andrex to John Lewis, classic TV ads inject a brand into our cultural bloodstream. He also ponders whether, in an age of digital engagement, there is much life left in traditional formats. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p037p7h6
A World without PR
In this month’s PR Week I ask what a World without PR would look like and basically imagine myself out of existence….. http://www.prweek.com/article/1371355/mark-borkowski-brave-new-world-without-pr
Dreaming of Christmas 2016
You could power much of the national grid on the hype that’s been fissioning on social media. We’ve been drip fed on teasers and speculation has been rife. It isn’t a new Star Wars or Bond. It’s November 2016 and we’re watching the latest John Lewis Christmas ad. Could it possibly top the previous year’s much lauded television event? Since its broadcast Man on the Moon went on to become an award winning classic. Lewis saw an 18% rise in telescope sales and even Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who bears some resemblance to the grizzled and lonely lunar figure, saw…
Corbyn and the PewDiePie effect
“Once the press officer becomes the story, it is the end of the press officer.” This was the verdict of one of David Cameron’s inner circle on Andy Coulson. For Seamus Milne the knives were out from day one. Jeremy Corbyn’s new PR chief- branded “fascist” and “odious” on Twitter and treated as “a man with questionable views” on Newsnight- started his job by spinning his own appointment. Milne’s problem, however, isn’t what he is. In the real world he’s hardly a household name and, being an Oxford PPE man with spells at the Economist and Guardian, his CV is…
What our stunts say about us
Last week an eloquent appeal was made by Mark Perkins to all London PRs: stop floating things down the Thames. He reminds us (given how forgettable they all are) that this year our murky waterway has been invaded by an armada of houses, apocalyptic horsemen, lottery balls, melted ice caps- to name a few. In a talk I presented this week to an audience of senior communications and marketing directors I described these stunts as a prime example of ideaporn: interventions for the sake of being interventions, existing simply because everyone else is doing it. One explanation for the rise…
Radically Dull
The commentariat are baffled by Jeremy Corbyn. He does the unthinkable of giving straight answers to hypothetical questions. He can be pictured with a large marrow and not look ridiculous. So infuriated was Eamonn Holmes by Corbyn’s lack of sartorial concern that the Sky presenter gave up on sentences and reverting to a state of spluttering apoplexy. For all the talk of spin in Team Corbyn their man’s great achievement is perfecting the charm of dullness. This week we were reminded by the publication of the Dull Men of Great Britain that dullness is quite a different shade of grey…
Dawn of the Red
In the early hours of Monday the undead corpse of old Labour was seen walking across Westminster Bridge. The zombie being harangued by a small cohort of junior journalists was the newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Over the summer a virus known as Corbynmania spread through disaffected members of the public. Alarmist rumours of undead socialism sharpening its clause (all four of them) on the imaginations of thousands developed into an all-out bloodbath for the Blairites. Burnhamites and token moderates were saved- presumably to be sacrificed at a later date. Cries of “They’re coming to get you Tony” sent…
“Potentially concerning”
Potentially Jeremy Corbyn could be Prime Minister and Donald Trump president. Potentially particles colliding in the science world’s answer to the circle line could inadvertently open up a world-consuming black hole. Potentially Katie Hopkins could someday make a good point. Everything is potential. When we are told, on the basis of a speculative connection between CJD and Alzheimer’s on half of the neurological subjects of a sample total of 8, that the transmission of Alzheimer’s is ‘potentially concerning’ a degree of scepticism should be a no-brainer. Instead Thursday’s headlines –across the press spectrum- thundered about an Alzheimer’s bombshell. Tentative observations…
The Queen is dead, long live the Queen – Who needs PR?
Rebekah Brooks is back. To use Robert Thompson’s words: “Rebekah will lead a great team at News UK into the digital future, while maximising the influence and reach of our newspapers, which remain the most informative and successful in Britain and beyond”…blah blah blah. Michael Wolff, the American author of a biography of Mr Murdoch called The Man Who Owns the News, said that the UK had gone to war with the media mogul and “the UK lost.” Media land clamour suggests that the appointment represents a terrible PR move, but perhaps the hyper babble circulating on all channels misses…
McFlop
The sea turns to blood. The sun scorches the earth. The seven seals open. The Whopper and the Big Mac unite. Such is the vision of cataclysmic world destruction prompted by this cynical invitation to McDonald’s to join forces with Burger King in aid of, erm, world peace day. The McWhopper advertisement ran in the New York Times and was followed by the launch of a website featuring the dubious contents of each signature sandwich floating down screen like a slow-mo sequence in the Matrix. Perhaps this is because there is something of the dystopian simulation to Burger King’s whole…
Moral Hazard
They haven’t won their four warm up games. They lost the community shield to their arch-rivals. And the start of the season was a less than spectacular draw with Swansea. Yet the only thing we’ve been talking about is José Mourinho’s spat with a doctor. In one word: result. In the week leading up to Sunday’s Man City clash –the only club incidentally, that Chelsea lost to in Mourinho’s first League victory – we haven’t been focusing on Chelsea’s lacklustre performance or the red card blow to £8m summer signing Thibaut Courtois. Shielded by the back pages intrigue on the…
Clubbed to death?
Why Millennials are no longer going to nightclubs. Mark gives his thoughts in today’s Independent
The Cumber-down
“I’m going to try my hardest not to scream the minute he walks on stage” revealed one of the many Benedict Cumberbatch superfans to a WSJ reporter at last night’s first performance of Hamlet. I’m sure the Gielgubitches said the same back in ’48. Despite the worries that a legion of hysterical Cumberfans would have to be transferred to the nearest nunnery before the end of act one, the audience were by all reports eminently well behaved. It was the press, however, that broke all the rules of reviewing etiquette. Rather than waiting to press night a number of nationals…
The meaning of Cecil
Cecil was not a lucky lion. First being named after the unreformed imperialist who invented the concentration camp; then to be slowly killed, skinned and decapitated; and finally, to become a meme of the moment and plundered worldwide –from stuffed toy makers to press offices groping for a current analogy. (See Patrick Kidd’s skewering of a recent press release that exploits various Cecil metaphors to sell a story about renewable energy. PRs, Kidd concludes, “have no pride anymore. Like Cecil”.) What are we to make of all the furore (not to mention the furoar of bad puns that quickly followed)?…
Mudslinging on twitter
She is considered the most influential female rapper of all time. He is has less sheen than a dog-eared copy of The Ragged Trouser Philanthropists. But it turns out that Nicki Minaj and the Labour leader hopeful Jeremy Corbyn have one thing in common. Both have shown this week that twitter thrives on good old mudslinging. For Minaj it was personal. What started with a tweet about the exclusion of her video from the VMAs turned into a frosty exchange that dangled racial and gender issues above a fan-charged pressure cooker. The intervention of Taylor Swift demonstrated the ego of…
Flacked Off
What do you get when you pack a room full of PR folk and journalists – with the former outnumbering the latter 4 to 1? The result is less a confident face-off and more a joint session in existential angst interspersed by the occasional bout of mutual backslapping. Such was ‘Hacks V Flacks’, an event organised by PR Moment earlier this week. The gathering was eye-opening to us insiders – and, I suspect, eye-closing to anybody else. Rather than reflecting on the big issues pulling at the contours of our mediascape – the sucking up of old media by the…
PR stunt hubris and the Paddy Factor
It’s night-time. Toxic plumes are being pumped out of industrial chimneys. An image of a crying child cuts through the smoke-smeared sky. Surreal, disturbing, it’s like a batman signal for help from a beleaguered mother earth. After this haunting spectre of aerial gas chambers a logo and web address appear. It is an advert for an air purifier by the company Xao Zhu. After a few hours the factory that was inadvertently providing the novelty backdrop for Xao Zhu’s projection put a halt to this eerie open air screening. Outdoor advertising -the oldest medium in the book- brings an aura…
So Farah, not so good Freuds
The agency faces a formidable challenge fighting the wildfire of speculation surrounding the Olympic athlete since a Panorama investigation was aired. Read the opening paragraphs of athlete Mo Farah’s Wikipedia page and you’ll be confronted bya roll call of records sufficient to fill the sports category of several Trivial Pursuit decks. But amid the distances smashed and gongs awarded the only section of the page that matters now is a four-line paragraph headed ‘BBC Panorama investigation’. Having become ensnared in the doping speculation surrounding his coach Alberto Salazar, Farah has learned the only fact worth knowing for the hounded luminaries…