Last Wednesday, the cuddly, credit card provider Mastercard ran into an alleged PR fail storm when their PR agency mishandled and misjudged a bevy of journalists they were inviting to the Brit awards. Scribblers claim that, in exchange for entry to the event, they were asked by email to guarantee coverage, and were requested to keep to social media guidelines including using brand hashtags. Why the inane babble was thought important, is another discussion. The first thing to say is that this is but a irritating itch, not a full blown brand ebola. Journalists may have ‘taken to Twitter’ to gloat…

It’s now been a week since Flappy Birds, the infuriating iOS game, was taken down from the app store, and I’m still waiting to find out what it was a stunt for. For those unfamiliar, the game requires users to navigate a yellow, beaked blob with an insipid expression past a series of Super Mario World-esque green pipes. Keep going until you snuff it, then either stop or have a shot at beating your score. So far, so derivative. Flappy Birds is different because of its maddening difficulty level. A generation of gamers used to being spoonfed their points, coins…

Hats off to Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho – a true media operator. Where rivals babble incoherently about “games of two halves” or, at best, indulge in bland 1970s-style trash talk, Mourinho understands that the battles played out in the media can be just as important as those won or lost on the pitch. After he dominated the sports pages last weekend with his assertion that Chelsea are a “little horse” in the Premiere League title race – a comment he later admitted was a “mind game” – we thought we’d put together a list of what brands can learn from…

The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince is on our fair shores at the moment, reminding me of what a roller coaster it was to work with him 15 years ago. His set on Tuesday night at the Electric Ballroom in Camden may have seen only 1,000 fans in the comparatively tiny room, but the excitement it has generated has been huge. The singer has refused to reveal details of other venues on his tour, presumably preferring to keep fans guessing via Twitter clues, as he did before the first show. A pure showman with relentless…

So Scarlett Johansson has parted ways with Oxfam. The actress, who has served as an ambassador for the humanitarian group for eight years, quit yesterday over a “fundamental difference of opinion” (read: PR disaster waiting to happen). Johansson has recently signed as brand ambassador for the drinks-fizzinator (possibly not a real word) manufacturer Sodastream. It seems Oxfam’s support for marginalised Palestinians sits badly with Sodastream maintaining a factory in the occupied West Bank. This is the PR meltdown that never happened; thanks to careful stewardship (and, one imagines, a lot of hair-pulling and arse-kissing behind the scenes), everyone has emerged…

Whether it’s the Adidas Olympics, the lazy brand leveraging notions, the mobile space, even the Costa Book Prize, over the last decade we’ve become used to the venues and events living in symbiosis with the corporate giants. Many of these relationships have been mutually beneficial, allowing for the growth and survival of one party, whilst providing advertising, sales, and moral kudos for the other. Few, however managed to leverage love. The problem comes when brands try to recreate this somewhat organic mechanism out of the other, with sponsored award ceremonies, festival hospitality media and D-list kettling areas letting off puffed-up…