How can you tell that the Tories are suffering in the polls? That the smile behind David Cameron’s airbrushed poster is turning into a grimace of fear? Simple: they’ve brought back the heavy hitters to run their campaign. M&C Saatchi have returned to try and work the magic they made for the Thatcher government. It’s…
I’m taking part in a couple of debates in the next few days. First up is Risky Business: Risk and Reputation, an early morning debate on the nature of risk, this Thursday, February 11th, at the Cass Business School. Given the year just gone and the way the financial crisis has played out, it should…
I hope you’ll forgive me a brief bask in the news that The Fame Formula has crept back up the Amazon charts and is currently at number 4 in the Film and Performing Arts Bestseller list, as well as moving slowly back into the running in the overall chart. It certainly seems like the Fame…
Joe McElderry has lost out to Rage Against the Machine – it seems that a significant proportion of the British record-buying public really have turned on Simon Cowell and given him a festive slap under the miseltoe. It’s an upset, but its significance lies in what the power of the Internet might achieve next. Motivational…
The Media Guardian published an article of mine in yesterday’s Media comment looking at the rise of Google’s SideWiki and what it will mean for the future of PR. To read the published version, click here. For the unexpurgated version, please keep reading! Given the amount of fear other Google innovations, like their library project,…
Now the dust has cleared – a little – in the wake of Jan Moir’s Mail article looking at the circumstances surrounding the death of Stephen Gately and the subsequent outpouring of Twitter anger, it’s worth asking what the difference is between Moir’s article, aimed at a certain set of like-minded readers, and the response…
You couldn’t move anywhere this morning without hearing something about Ben Southall, the British winner of ‘The Best Job in the World’ and the string of idyllic desert islands along the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia, which will act as his home and office for six months. Not surprising, when the…
I heard today that Howard Zieff had died – a name I’d not really encountered before, despite the fact that he’d directed a few breezy comedies like Private Benjamin, starring Goldie Hawn – but the obituaries made me sit up and take notice. It turns out that, when he started out in advertising, he was…
In a world rife with the ability to keep an eye on where we are, with posters that are embedded with cameras that register how many people look at the poster for more than ten seconds and GPS phones that can traced their owners to within a yard or so, why is that that complaints…
The Financial Times report on a blog that’s gone viral, complaining about the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow, apparently written by a creative at WCRS advertising agency. They asked me for my take on the matter. “…some bloggers … suggest it was a viral marketing campaign by Virgin, a charge the…