It took half a century for us to work out that smoking had certain negative qualities, and it took another twenty years for the legislators to do something about it. Big Tobacco was a formidable opponent to change for several reasons. Yes, it was massively lucrative, provided thousands of jobs and sold an aspirational product – but it’s strength ultimately lay in its highly addictive nature. These are the corporations to be really scared of, the ones that hold their customers captive through addiction – and although Big Tobacco has started to reconfigure, there will always be products that we…

One of the minor, but depressing, changes to our society is that since Brexit, and the cultural and media zeitgeist got sucked into a political chaos-loop there is no part of national celebration that the zealots and partisans can’t ram their agenda through. Last week Dawn Foster, outrider for Jeremy Corbyn, criticised ‘centrists’ for basing their entire ideology on the ‘false premise … that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity.’ I don’t know if I’m a centrist, but I do know…

Barbie, in a way, is like dog food. Neither a small child or a dog can take either product to the till and pay for it themsevles. In fact, neither can reliably articulate what they want and why they want it at all. It’s an unusual marketing challenge – aimed at convincing adult humans, that their canine or child would be really happy with them for buying it on their behalf. Barbie has always had to ride this wave cleverly, appealing to Mothers as symbols of the womanhood that they want to their daughters to play with, learn from and…

As the last litter pickers weave their weary way homeward from Worthy Farm, it’s time to take a long view on the talked about highlights. Nowadays, particularly in the media, cultural phenomena are often judged far more on its perceived moral worth than on its superficial entertainment value. Once upon a time, art was simply judged on its merit, but that’s changed – and whilst Stormzy’s brilliant set at Glastonbury shows that he knows that, Glastonbury are still playing catchup. Folk were thrilled Adele said on Instagram: “I’m so proud of him, Stormzy just monumentally headlined Glastonbury in his own…

As communication comebacks go, Vladimir Putin’s transformation from the man with a horse but without a shirt but to the all-powerful, all seeing bogeyman who stands at the centre of the forces sweeping across liberal democracies is a pretty good one. How did this man go from looking like a scuffed action man model, to a geopolitical behemoth? Put simply, his Putin’s ability to capture the global zeitgeist and cope under extreme media pressure has improved with practise and with twenty years near or at the pinnacle of politics, nobody has more practise than him. For an ex-spook, he is…

When an army sweeps the field of its enemy, it puts down its weapons and goes to the pub. When a political campaign annihilates its opponent at the polls, it pretends to puts down its weapons but almost immediately turns on itself. It’s in the politician’s bones to fight and to scheme up the ladder, so on the rare occasion that a campaign renders its opposition harmless it turns on itself. Would Blair and Brown have been locked in a deathgrip for so long if they had been fighting for their lives against the Conservatives? So if total victory inspires…

Although Churchill will always be known for his peerless rhetoric on all manner of subjects it is his political motto that his distorted descendants mimic. K.B.O. Keep Buggering On. Once upon a time that meant perseverance in the face of menace, or rout, or despair, but today Boris Johnson refuses to be curtailed or slowed by scandal. Less, he refuses to even be embarrassed, and has nullified the most effective weapon that the press and the public once held over errant political careers – shame. But apart from our aspiring leaders learning from the rise of Trump that shamelessness is…

Trump’s visit reminded me of that old adage ‘money can’t buy class’. But it can get you close to it if you are President Trump, and in doing so see your approval ratings soar back home by quite a margin. With no gaffs or protocol errors in the UK this week, his standing in the polls has risen which proves that despite the media bubble the Trump three ring circus trundles on pretty much unaffected. As he memorably said himself back in the day; “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” Or maybe it…

As a person with a blood pressure that I value, I try to avoid any unnecessary debate about Brexit. But as a person who lives and breathes communication strategy I am fed up with watching this one sided massacre.   The politics of the right have always understood the power of the symbol. The eagle has appeared on thousands of battle colours, on millions of statues and billions of coins. This embodiment of proud freedom is a good one, and its power is proved by its withstanding millennia. Is there a left wing or centrist equivalent?   Perhaps, but it’s…

So the royal baby was finally introduced to us within the walls of Windsor Castle at about the same time as Sara Latham informed us that the PR disaster surrounding the announcement was due to the failure of an email to send. That one is as old as “the cheque’s in the post” and nobody will believe it. It is inconceivable that someone didn’t check, after all, this was an announcement awaited globally with bated breath. But still, perhaps both things are a small recognition that the media handling by the Sussex’s of the birth has been a disaster. The inclusion of…

Back in the day, it was always the women who owned the fashion moment at the glittering award/fundraising events. From Diana Dors to Liz Hurley publicists knew how to grab the zeitgeist. Who can forget Gaga’s meat frock, or Cher and Bjork in headline-grabbing Oscar red carpet confections? Fashion has always had an opinion and leaned its voice to political issues and in 2019 it is reaching fever pitch about gender. If you look back a bit, Marlene Dietrich was the first to showcase blatant androgyny with a bold, sexual questioning behind her couture gender-switching. Great PR means being ahead of the…

Purpose is one of those buzzwords like disruption, innovation and ephemeral content that I try to avoid. I like to keep things simple though I will admit the thing that has kept https://www.borkowski.co.uk for the past thirty years is a singularity of purpose, and whilst of course we keep an eye on the future, our work is grounded in the present because whilst the future is coming, it may well change direction several times before it gets here. Meanwhile, there are clients who need media coverage and counsel that sticks and engages now. Our roots have always been in strong media relations and within that, seeding stories…

Everyone can see the media agenda speeding up to a blinding speed as it tries to keep pace with Brexit, screeching along towards its Byzantium, boring and terrifying ever-elusive finale. Everyone is talking about it, but I want to talk about what it actually means, and because Brexit is such an unusually elongated story, it gives us a unique insight. Like a stunted stream of slow moving traffic peering at road side wreckage, we each stop in our own way to take a snapshot image of the chaotic mess, so that we can store it away and rely on it…

I have found myself struggling to write something about Leaving Neverland. Channel 4 provided an advance preview which proved to be four hours of unsettling weekend viewing. This is a dark and uncomfortable documentary about the peculiar world of fame. It’s not only painful but heartrending TV which will go a long way towards realigning our future relationship with iconoclastic popular culture totems, even if it doesn’t quite destroy the Michael Jackson brand. When I wrote my book The Fame Formula, I posited a hypothesis regarding the exploitation of fame. PT Barnum captured the American public’s attention and curiosity by exploiting human oddities…

To read Liam Neeson’s interview in the Independent – bewildering and alarming in equal parts – is to be reminded of the actor’s cameo in Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short. This moment was a highlight of a largely forgettable Warwick Davis vehicle, playing off the idea of Neeson turning his hand to comedy. Pitching his concept to Gervais and Stephen Merchant Neeson, hunched by the weight of ineffable angst, says he’ll “do some improvisation comedy. Now.” He proceeds to imagine himself as a HIV positive African prostitute. The joke is of course that Neeson, in an age where action cinema…

If you ever wanted to see an example of why it is so hard to manage reputations in today’s world of clickbait, professional outrage machines and judgements made at the speed of  scrolling, then you don’t have to look any further than the recent media furore over the altercation between the students from Covington Catholic High School, Mr. Nathan Phillips and members of the Black Hebrew Israelites. Consider it, the entire trans-Atlantic media repeatedly paused to pass comment on a strange, harmless altercation. This wasn’t just tabloid tattle, eighteen individual articles appeared in the New York Times over a five-day…

You would have to have a hardened heart not to have felt for Andy Murray on waking up this morning. This is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve and bravely isn’t afraid to show it. His authenticity and courage has warmed a nation’s heart. Yet Andy Murray has had a checkered history with the media. He’s been described in the past as boring, petulant, sulky and worse. But Wimbledon in 2012 changed all that. That’s when he lost to Federer in his first final and shed tears of crushing disappointment into his towel. If we had once…

The British Army’s has caused quite the stir. Although this time it’s across Facebook, not the Faroes. As part of the “This is belonging” campaign, the army has released posters illustrated in the style of World War One recruitment ads featuring Lord Kitchener. The posters use derogatory phrases such as “Snowflakes”, “Me me me millennials” and “Phone zombies” to highlight the qualities needed by the Army. As one particularly ‘un-astute’ twitter user observed: “I think this ad campaign might not understand that no young people actually call themselves snowflakes – it’s a word entirely reserved for right wing commentators and…

The term Succès de scandale (French for “success from scandal”) originates from the Belle Époque (‘beautiful era’) in Paris, where artistic success began to be attributed to the public controversy surrounding their work. The adage is now echoed as ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’, and instead of Édouard Manet and Oscar Wilde it’s now Primark and Pret. Whilst, it has long been a well-established concept that if your starting point is obscurity, bad publicity can be outright helpful. Alan Sorensen, an economics professor at Stanford University examined the effects of book reviews in the New York Times….