So Heather Mills has a new PR ubermouth. It was reported yesterday that she has hired a self-styled French aristocrat and beauty salon owner Michele Elyzabeth as her “official worldwide spokesperson”. She is said to originate from France and started her career with Rogers and Cowan in the Seventies. Sir Paul McCartney’s estranged wife dumped…
Over the last three days a baleen of PR bloggers have added their voices to the debate kicked off by the Wired Editor, Chris Anderson. His tirade against lazy PRs is reported in The New York Times which ran an article thick with PR’s coughing up sound bites http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/ technology/05flacks.html?_r=2&ref=business&oref=slogin&oref=slogin I fear a few egos…
Forensically picking through the PR damage that is left after Heather Mills McCartney’s Halloween PR onslaught, I can only conclude that it was an emotionally crude crusade of her own design. The harm inflicted on her tattered brand after sweeping across media Ville was nothing short of catasphrophic. The screaming banshee is now a textbook…
Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson has decided to list every lazy PR person who spams his mailbox with irrelevant messages. He claims that “Lazy flacks send press releases to the editor in chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what…
Like it or loath it, Facebook is hard to ignore. Hannah Marriott spoke to four consultants about their relationship with the social networking phenomenon
The creeping erosion of PR standards is highlighted again by some poor practice in a resultant picture caption in this morning’s Sun newspaper. Emblazeoned across the lovely Vicky Newton “bizarre” column is a promo snap of Girls Aloud all brandishing mobile phones. Clearly it was staged to promote the handset. The problem is the story…
PR companies will do anything to drum up business and sometimes it involves being creative with the truth. This afternoon I was delivering my thoughts on the power of word of mouth at a Marketing Week gig in leafy Kensington. My attention was drawn to the promotional flyer of a young hungry PR hot…
In 2002, eight cheezy PRs, including myself, were gathered together by PR Week to decide on the top 20 consumer PR campaigns in the history of publicity campaigns. One publicity stunt that shone out was Live Aid, 1984 which was an iconic event to raise awareness and money for starving Africans. It united the world…
An extract from Bob Burton’s Inside Spin: The dark underbelly of the PR industry. Brian Page, a 42-year-old railway worker, had been busy before Easter 1992 buying furniture for a house he had just moved into at Mt Pritchard, a south-western Sydney suburb. On their way home, his daughter Melissa wanted to stop at McDonald’s…
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…