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.
Cannes Lions – the sober reality
Sex and death. “Two things that come once in my lifetime,” quipped Woody Allen. At this year’s Cannes Lions both happened- and that was just on the Croisette. The fatal car accident involving a Google executive and Twitter’s gleeful smuttering over a couple caught eloping on the red carpet after one too many melon balls overshadowed much of the creative powwow that is this Mad Men sur-la-mer. Rather than appealing to Woody’s aforementioned corporeals, many of the wares on display aspired to a higher kind of social purpose. To follow the festival on twitter is to be removed from the…
It was true at the time: does it matter that yesterday Chris Evans was lying and today he is telling the truth?
Last Autumn it was ‘100% not true’. This Spring it was ‘absolute nonsense’. On Tuesday the BBC announced that Chris Evans had signed up for a three year stint as Top Gear presenter. Like conkers and daffodils in Summertime, the veracity of past statements becomes irrelevant in the time-space continuum of our mediascape. Evans, the Beeb’s resident man for all seasons, has always been the obvious choice to replace Clarkson. 3.7 million watched his one-off TFI Friday special — a reboot that in retrospect was a test drive for Top Gear. But surely he did himself no favours by not mincing his…
Merlin, PR wizard
“You’ll forgive me if I’m not really focussing on the share price at the moment” said Nick Varney, shooting down Kay Burley’s ambulance chasing questioning. It is the Sky News interviewer, not the Merlin Entertainment CEO, who is now feeling the heat. More interrogation than interview, Burley’s aggressive approach has generated more than 1,000 complaints to Ofcom and calls –from tweeters to online campaign sites- for the presenter to be sacked. None of this is overlooking the fact that Merlin has questions to answer following the tragic collision of carriages on the Smiler roller-coaster. 16 were injured, 4 badly. A…
Battered
Twin US and Swiss investigations. A fall out with UEFA‘s chief. Excoriating editorials. Calls to resign from Prince William to Rod Stewart. Major brands threatening to withdraw their sponsorship. But what really convinced Blatter to call time on his FIFA presidency? Last week it seemed like he’d managed to pull one over on America’s long-armed law and Britain’s foul-mouthed press, and cling onto power like a true Mugabe of the sporting world. Tuesday’s resignation –dubbed blatter late than never- represented the thickening of a plot already as dense as a platinum-plated Chuck Blazer. Whether or not the FBI has something…
Breaking the Internet
My thoughts in today’s Independent on how the brand of Vanity Fair and the Khardashians have the power to break the Internet
How does it look?
For Thomas Cook accepting responsibility was a last resort– but it will survive If tackling the greatest ecological catastrophe of recent times with golf balls failed to reassure the US public the pronouncement by BP’s aloof chief exec Tony Hayward that he wanted his life back is the definition of insult to injury. This moment encapsulates the less than slick handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a PR blowout that has become one of the canonical texts of crisis mismanagement. Accidents happen. But as Deepwater showed the fact that they are unforeseeable does not excuse the need for…
The Tory in Shoreditch Clothing
Pondering the 1980s Stewart Lee observed that culture itself seemed to hate Thatcher. Musicians hated Thatcher. Comedians hated Thatcher. Writers hated Thatcher. There were even aliens from the future in 2000AD comic strips who hated Thatcher. And yet she still managed to get elected. Three times. On May 8th the left were again confronted by the gap between the professed beliefs of the cultural mood and ballot box choices. For the future-junkies of the PR world there are a number of lessons to be gleaned from the political class’s failure to read the crowd. While Cameron’s critics may not be…
What just happened?
If tweets were votes, Miliband would be installing his 8 ft monolith into the Rose Garden this afternoon. Even as they were haemorrhaging seats in Scotland, Labour were adding followers on twitter and making friends on facebook. In the last two weeks Miliband was averaging almost 2,000 new fans per day. His (over-)hyped interview with Russell Brand was watched more than a million times and #milifandom had definitively vanquished the #cameronette upstarts. When the commentators hailed #GE2015 as an election to be fought and won on social media they were at best only half right. Where in 2010 34% of…
Don’t throw the burger out with the gherkin
As seen on The Guardian Who said juggernaut brands can’t self-reflex their muscles? On Wednesday McDonald’s supersized on nostalgia with the re-launch of the Hamburglar. It went viral. Twitter exploded with shares comparing the new fast food bandit to celebrities ranging from wrestlers to politicians. A far cry from the cheeky childish earlier incarnation –last seen in 2002- the new Hamburglar is somewhere between Hipster and Christian Gray. For a company that has been struggling to cope with fundamental shifts in the restaurant market this is an unexpected coup. Yet the response of the media press has been sniffy, accusing…
The writings on the wall
The more metaphors that are pinned to Labour’s 8ft pledge slab the more the original meaning of the limestone monolith has sunk into the bog of Baldrick ideas. The only positive that can be spun out of Ed’s stone is that it marks a rare moment of consensus across the political divide: on the right it’s the tombstone of Labour’s hope to be taken seriously and on the left it brings back memories of Kinnock’s election stunting triumphalism. If anything Ed’s stone is a monument to PR hubris. Like Ozymandias the campaign guru stands high and mighty; in an election…
Spinning hearts and minds: The triumph of PR
Last night Question Time dissolved its usual audience of flustered halfwits and elected another to give Cameron, Miliband and Clegg a proper grilling. As the Guardian’s Owen Jones tweeted this was set up to make the politicians “fear the people”. For what felt like the first time in the election, the slick, tinted-windowed campaign machines were ground to a halt. Cameron, so used to trotting out his campaign lines, was clearly flustered to have an unimpressed questioner shoot down his forced defence of the NHS- “well you’re wrong”. Miliband gifted the crowd a visual metaphor with his slippery exit –a…
The Marmite Pret-a-meter
It was only meant to be a retail report at the backend of the Tuesday Standard. But when Pret A Manger CEO Clive Schlee let slip that he has given his baristas the power to hand out free drinks or food to customers the interview became one of the paper’s most read stories. Over the next few days all the national papers were sending their reporters to flex their flirting muscles and imbibe some of the Pret Buzz. The story was picked up by a handful of regional papers and a few international titles (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal). On…
Being Human
There is sure to be an intern at CCHQ whose Camfandom idea didn’t get much of a hearing at the Monday morning hangout. When the #Cameronettes did begin to trend on the coattails of the milifans it had as much organic credibility as a cheese string. It doesn’t matter whether the origin of this blue swooning is a genuine teenage Camfan- the whole thing reeked of a cheap knock-off to an already shallow original, a Here’say to milifandom’s S-Club. The brilliance behind milifandom is that it hooked humorous content into a narrative of defiance: a politically excluded group –young women- using…
Red Ed, Dull Dave and substance of personality
Ed Miliband doesn’t do “photo-op politics”; he stands for ideas and substance against the soundbites and style of the Tory brand. That combatting style in politics is its own kind of political style is nothing new. Remember Saatchi & Saatchi’s attempt to turn the former PM’s dour persona into an ironic vote winner, “Not flash, just Gordon”? Many commentators lament the focus on the party leader’s personality (or lack thereof) in British politics. We are not the US, they argue and proceed to imagine a golden age of voters sitting down in their studies with manifestos and a dog-eared Hansard….
Selfie Politics
5 years ago he was, according to The Sunday Times, “more popular than Churchill” and the other was cleaning fish guts off the floor of Billingsgate Market. The Nick Clegg-Joey Essex selfie shows us how far these posers have come and how far our politics hasn’t. 2010’s Cleggomania came on the back of those ‘historic’ leaders debates, a political Weakest Link where the right answer seemed to be “I agree with Nick”. Yet the power of the liberal demigod fell short of actually winning votes and his party saw its share of seats decrease. Ahead of tonight’s 7-way clash many,…
The Grand National 2015: Don't airbrush Ladies Day
The boss of Aintree has called for “negative” photographs of Ladies Day at the Grand National to be banned. But isn’t getting dressed up, drinking too much and having fun part of the appeal? I spoke to Harry Wallop at the Daily Telegraph about this topic.
Lufthansa's crisis communications approach to Germanwings disaster
I would expect Lufthansa one of the largest airlines in Europe, both in terms of overall passengers carried and fleet size, to have invested in a substantial crisis provision. Sadly, for all corporations, things will go wrong in any given situation, we know this as Murphy’s Law. A multimillion pound crisis business has been built on this premise. So when Germanwings crashed into the Alps on Tuesday, Carsten Spohr – the head of Lufthansa, the German carrier that owns Germanwings flipped into crisis mode. He was well aware, because of training, all eyes were on his leadership. The systematic by…
Is anyone the winner?
So there are two questions in light of Clarkson being ‘sacked’. 1. Can the BBC win back the fans whilst reinventing a format for Top Gear without the key constituencies at the heart of the show. Is there a creative genius still throbbing inside the BBC to triumph with a new show and gather a new Global audience? 2. Can Clarkson take his own particular genius to a different channel and start again with the same success? Only time will tell now. Still, the handling of this affair, given the strength of the social media support for Clarkson, proves the…
Jeremy Clarkson and the BBC: the corporation's latest comms crisis
Remember this new word: ‘voyeurgasm’ – translated as the joy of watching a media storm meltdown on all channels. Crisis and Clarkson fit hand in glove. He is a man resolutely himself, much loved and widely loathed. So, let’s mutter the unsayable – it will be a sad day when Clarkson packs away his webbed driving gloves. This time the Marmite brand has crossed the BBC’s proverbial line once and for all, breaching another BBC guideline after a ‘fracas’ with a producer. Crisis comms demands a low profile, but Clarkson is unable to pull on his Second World War helmet…
The world now spins a story
Yesterday we got the news that Starbucks is to back a social storytelling start up. Of course. Today storytelling is colonising every aspect of business, taking precedence in the order of things. It’s not hard to see why stories are so powerful. Borkowski was built on the premise of stories and we have been telling them for thirty years. Advocacy messages, whether for a cause or a brand, automatically invite scrutiny (think politics) They prompt us to put our defenses up. Stories are different. Not only do stories encourage people to identify with the brand or individual they represent, but…