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.
Possibly the Best Royal Souvenir… EVER!
Just what you need for a cold February – a bit of humour and sardonic wit. This truly magnificent thing of beauty is proof that Great British creativity moves into overdrive when the stuffy Establishment offers it the opportunity. I was sent this earlier today. Arguably it’s the best Royal wedding souvenir ever…
The Lost Art of the Long Lunch
Yesterday I managed to find the time to lunch one of my old journalist pals. Now retired, the wizened old hack knew how to harvest my leads because he cut his teeth in an age when press releases were walked into the newspapers and news desks and journalists needed copious amounts of TLC. In an age of time-compressed newsrooms and the ten-minute news cycle, opportunities for the old school long lunch are pretty much all encased in the British Museum, alongside a sorry-looking stuffed Dodo. This is a shame, as there were valuable lessons to be learned at the long…
Spin and the Winds of Change
As the winds of change sweep across North Africa and the Middle East, various commentators are pontificating about the future shape of the geopolitical landscape. This is of huge interest certainly, but I am currently more interested in the language of PR spin deployed by apologists. I was struck particularly by yet another shamefaced government apologist stepping up to the mic this morning on the wireless, attempting to circumvent British foreign policy. For decades this country has hidden behind pragmatism. In the corridors of power, shabby conduct surrounds investment and support for some very dodgy regimes; take the (doubtless now…
Rebel Radiohead and the Brits
Radiohead are back with a new album, The King of Limbs, and a development of the original stunt for their last album, In Rainbows, which was for sale on a ‘pay what you can afford’ basis. Excitement has been amping up and up since the band announced the early digital download release of the album to the point where the media is saturated with information
The Egyptian Protest Gear Awards
Mubarak has gone and the streets of Egypt are peaceful once again.The tension has subsided and now, finally, a little humour can be found in the situation…
Vegan Football
Football’s back in the news, but this time it’s not about vast sums being splurged on footballers in the transfer market, it’s a stunt that raises awareness about the quality of food at your average sports match. My local team, Forest Green, have a new chairman, CEO of Ecotricity Dale Vince. Vince is vegan – and he has just abolished all red meat products from being sold to punters during the match. Out go meat pies, chips, curry sauce, sausages. In comes healthier food – though what exactly has yet to be announced. It’s likely to open up debate about…
Design an Outrageous Costume for a Star
Pop stars and celebrities all need to match the creative thrust of Lady GaGa and her outrageous, headline-grabbing costumes if they are to rise to the top of the heap, as I discussed in my previous post. So I have produced a short list of suggestions for for awards ceremony costumes for any star who has run out of outrageous ideas. If anyone has any more suggestions, please post them below – the strangest but most plausible costume idea wins a signed copy of my book, The Fame Formula. Let me know which star the costume would be for and…
Why Everyone's Going GaGa at the Grammys
Stand by – the Lady GaGa Grammy show is heading to town! The awards season is upon us and the stars have been camping on the doorsteps of designers and rounding up the usual suspects when it comes to kitting themselves out. And they all have to up the ante to match GaGa. No camping out on designers’ doorsteps for last year’s attention-grabber supreme, I’m betting – it is surely fair to say that GaGa is cooking up something spectacular this year, after 2010’s meaty extravaganza. And, given the hoo-ha, furoré and small cyclone of speculation and excitement about that…
Anarcho-Royalism in the UK
In 1981 serious riots swept the country, but the Royal Wedding still comforted and distracted the great unwashed with sumptuous street parties and lit beacons of hope. 30 years later, thanks to the digital enlightenment and the forces of social media, we might well find ourselves experiencing significant social unrest at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton – according to the Sun, at least, who lead today’s paper with the ever-so-slightly lubricious headline: ‘Anarchists Target Wills & Kate’. So has the meticulously planned publicity stunt fallen apart already? Do anarchists rule? Is this pure hype – a cheap…
Truth, Transparency & Trust: The New Celebrity Mantra
As Andy Gray and Richard Keys reach the desperate end of their careers, Jeremy Clarkson has weighed in to the row, saying that he is concerned about people being sacked and vilified for “heresy by thought”. Is it possible he’s worried about people discovering what he’s thinking? He should be if he is foolish enough to say it aloud and it’s newsworthy; you can’t avoid the inevitable, There’ll come a time when even King Clarkson’s brand is out of fashion. The prayers of the in-house Car PR teams will one day be answered. If you are in public life in…
Sullying the Beautiful Game
Andy Gray and Richard Keys were relatively well known sports commentators until a leaked tape showed them uttering sexist comments about assistant referee Sian Massey at the Liverpool v. Wolves game yesterday. Now, their faces are everywhere. There’s no excuse for the sort of behind the scenes off-the-cuff black humour they were indulging in, but it is surprising that this is turning into a PR disaster. With Andy Gray’s departure from Sky Sports just announced, it’s interesting to note the leeway given to comedians like Frankie Boyle. What is the tipping point between joke and PR disaster?
Scapegoats & Subterfuge: Andy Coulson and the Phone Tapping Saga
In the wake of Andy Coulson’s resignation, a number of questions immediately come to mind that have been only passingly addressed by the press over the weekend. How to deal with news organisations owned outright by people such as the Barclay Brothers and Rupert Murdoch comes top of the list for me. We need to remember that dirty tricks have been part of the palette employed to fill in the background to the news in vivid colour for decades. Back in the days of the G.P.O. running the telephone service, every paper had a mole in the office passing on…
Katie Price, Vengeful Goddess of the Tabloids
Ever since Tom Paine’s book Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney came out, I have been looking more and more at the way celebrity and myth intersect – and now the news, and Katie Price specifically, has presented another killer analogy. In Celtic mythology, the Year King would be feted and loved and cherished for one full cycle, drawn into the circle of the Earth goddess and made great. Then, to ensure the crops kept growing, he’d be destroyed. So Katie Price, in her vengeful aspect of the goddess, has struck again
The Cliché Awards: Nominations Open
I think it’s time to act. Consider this, my happy followers. We are being submerged by cliché! Need proof? Just see my post from yesterday: Governor Sarah Palin attacked, as a “blood libel”, suggestions that her political rhetoric contributed to last Saturday’s fatal shootings in Arizona. Blood libel? Glory be! These PR sound bites and political clichés are usually concocted in the cauldron of warped Machiavellian PR spin-meisters. As the global media devours the aftermath of the event, the expression is already spiralling out of control. And I am offering you a chance to name and shame the worst offenders.
Sarah Palin and the Language of Violence
Reading and hearing about the shootings in Tucson, Arizona I am more and more struck by the awful ironies of this tragic event. That Gabrielle Giffords should be a pro-gun Democrat is strange enough, but the fact that her life has been saved by a trauma surgeon just back from Iraq, whose skills have been learned in the heat of the war, makes it ironic. Add to that the fact that the 9 year old girl who died was born on September 11 2001 and you have a indictment of the past decade of American politics wrapped up in one…
Underground, Overground
There’s been quite the hoo-ha regarding the undercover policeman who penetrated the Green movement and ended up a member of the Ratcliffe Six, and the more recent revelations about an undercover WPC who had done pretty much the same, both at great cost to the tax payer. But honestly, what did people expect? There are shadowy powers all around us, as there have been for decades, if not centuries, insinuating their way into, and manipulating the progress of, groups who run counter to the establishment. Why are we surprised?
Promote It Like Beckham
Tottenham Hotspur have pulled off a nifty coup for the New Year, bringing David Beckham in to train after a few weeks of speculation and “will he/won’t he?” in the tabloids. Regarding Beckham actually playing for the team, nothing is certain still, but that is hardly the point. The point is that this is a perfect way for Beckham to maintain his British profile prior to LA Galaxy’s season start in March, it’s not a bad way for Beckham to get fit for that purpose too and, if he does sign, Spurs will be able to turn quite some coin…
Fallen Archers
Even if you aren’t a fan of The Archers, you surely can’t have escaped the hype surrounding the 60th anniversary of the show. It was a delicate soufflé, whipped up over weeks, promising a storyline that would ‘change Ambridge FOREVER’. Unfortunately, said soufflé emerged from the oven as flat as a pancake. It came down to a fairly predictable two candidates for death featuring two characters who have presumably irritated listeners the most over the years.
The Borkowski Blog 2010 Review
It’s nearly Christmas, the snow lies heavy on much of Britain in astonishingly traditional fashion, causing less astonishing but no less traditional mayhem, chaos and panic. But, given the last year, one can almost understand why there is panic. The weather may hark back to the past but the world moves on into the future at an astonishing rate. This has, without doubt, been an extraordinary, tumultuous year, a year in which the cliché of the water cooler moment has been reinvented time and time again by a clamouring horde of news stories, each more consuming and captivating than the…
The Borkowski Blog Christmas Appeal
Cycling through London the other day on a Boris Bike (surely one of the great modern branding failures – Barclays pumped millions into the scheme only to lose the name to the charismatic mayor) and sweating like a constipated sumo wrestler, full of the joys of winter and rushing to get back for a meeting, I jumped a red light in a bid to outrace a black cab. I was on my way to see a film, for work. It was urgent. You know how it is; sometimes your life just seems more important than anyone else’s. Not that the…