1900’s – John D. Rockefeller regularly gave away silver dimes in front of reporters. It instantly caught the imagination of anyone who saw the image in the mass media, turning an alien faceless money-monger into a friendly old man giving a child a dime. Image is everything… 2007 – “The billionaire entrepreneur and serial self-publicist…
The media vultures are circling high above the rotting carcass that is Britney Spears’ much-vaunted “career”. Her public image has been mashed and trashed by a concurrent series of disasters that has resulted in the family courts ripping her children from her bosom and placing them in the care of her trailer trash ex mate…
Unbelievably the “wrinklies” public image has had a face lift this morning across the media. Usually it’s a hopeless task for poor PR folk who are heroically attempting to peddle the joys of the over 60’s. Valiant attempts to sell old age often stumble chiefly because of the media’s obsession to remain attractive to the…
This morning we heard that the mother of Madeleine McCann, the missing girl who was snatched from her parents’ holiday home in Portugal last Thursday, has made a desperate appeal to whoever is responsible not to hurt her daughter. The British public take it for granted that the Police use the media, but what they…
As someone who has been involved part and parcel in the modernisation of PR under the influence of the Murdoch papers, the internet and 24/7 news and who has watched from the inside as celebrities took to selling their stories to the press in the same manner as a butcher sells sausages, I am inclined…
Listening to the Today Programme yesterday morning, I was depressed to hear the story in Business News about the merger of George Wimpey and Taylor Woodrow. The reason was not so much the merger itself, but the bland and faceless media-trained voice of Peter Redfern, chief executive of Wimpey. It was deeply upsetting to hear…
In an eventful year for the media, we have seen boardroom battles and shock resignations; public acclaim and private fear. We ask a dozen industry insiders to select the real successes and failures of the last 12 months Mark Borkowski Founder, Borkowski PR The success of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat is a cracker. It takes…
I thought I had taken on the dream PR job. But I didn’t realise that meeting Michael Jackson was forbidden. From the Independent 13 March 2001 A few weeks ago, I was employed by Michael Jackson. It soon became clear that what he wanted was a PR flunkey to hand out edicts and information to…
Last week’s judgment in the legal battle between OK! and Hello! threw the future of the buy-up into doubt and raised a whole new set of questions about the rights of celebrities who do deals with the media. So where does the press go from here? We canvassed expert opinion http://news.independent.co.uk/media/story.jsp?story=640284 Mark Borkowski Head of…
The history of direct action is a proud one, taking in the likes of Peter Tatchell, Greenpeace and Swampy. Many feature very brave individuals � think of those campaigners on their tiny inflatable boat heading out to tackle a huge tanker or whaler. And it does work. The bottom line is that here we are,…