January 2008

DEREK CONWAY: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

What a mistake that Christmas card was, says Jasper Gerard. Didn't Derek Conway know that a Tory MP posing with his family meant he had something to hide?

Telegraph 31st January 2008

Reaching for the marmalade, you glance at the photo on the Telegraph's front page - and you are suddenly consumed by an unfamiliar, yet urgent, need to hurl the jar at someone. Or to be more precise, to hurl it at anyone called Conway: oh boy, what a family portrait. Short of Conway giving the V-sign to his voters, his Christmas card could hardly have been more Alan B'Stard
You would start with dodgy Derek, Del Boy, the Hon member for Sidcup; move on rapidly to the MP's daughter, whom he almost certainly calls "Princess"; pause briefly over his fur-coated wife, before really setting to work with the Glasgow kisses on his apparently supercilious sons in their Sloaney Hackett finery. There is not a jury in the land that would convict you. Indeed, you would probably crop up in the New Year Honours List for services to the community, be made a UN goodwill ambassador and have a dinner thrown in your honour by Lady Antonia Fraser.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2008/01/31/ftconway131.xml&DCMP=ILC-traffdrv07053100

Short of Conway giving the V-sign to his voters, his Christmas card could hardly have been more Alan B'Stard. There was his family, personification of the old smug Tory party, standing before the Palace of Westminster that Clan Conway was busy bleeding dry. This arriviste not only employed his wife as his secretary, he also rewarded his sons handsomely for their "research" - even though they were at university at the time. It is commendable for a Tory MP to uphold family values, but couldn't he have demonstrated how highly he values his family with his own money?

Conway could not have seen the Little Britain sketch in which the Tory MP drags his family before the cameras to explain his latest transgression. Doesn't he realise that any Tory MP posing with his family instantly lobs up the question: hmm, so what's he hiding? Other MPs, kind enough to send me Christmas cards, limit themselves to snowy Westminster scenes from Victorian watercolours. Why did Conway, knowing of his dextrous employment arrangements, feel the need to flaunt how well he had done courtesy of the constituents who sent him there?

And you have to feel sorry for David Cameron. He has spent two years hugging hoodies, huskies, Polly Toynbee and everyone else a good Tory would despise - all to convince us the Conservatives have changed. And in the flash of a camera, all those engaging images were swept from our minds, replaced by a more familiar picture of the party: snouts in troughs.

advertisementThe Conway exposé is, I would argue, worse than those chalk-striped, on-the-make Tories of the Major years: their scandals tended to involve sex or private money. This is public bunce. There is nothing hypocritical about Tory lads done good, of course: making money is the party's creed and Derek is a believer. But no party that has banged on about benefit scroungers can afford an MP who is an allowance scrounger.

True, Conway is not unique. Years ago, working as a Commons researcher, I was staggered to open the internal telephone directory and find page after page of assistants sharing a family name with the member. And those were the vaguely legitimate ones: many more wives were on the payroll without ever hearing the bongs of Big Ben.

But would any such MP have been quite so gauche as virtually to boast about this felicitous arrangement in a photo? Del has a furtive hand in pocket, as if fingering a folded wodge of crisp fifties he has just trousered for flogging a hot motor on a Bexley forecourt. Daughter Claudia, who is innocent of any involvement in this saga, looks hilariously Tory retro: perhaps she is a Norland nanny, or attending a Swiss finishing school, though it was remiss to forget the pearls. If she had been born 20 years earlier, Jonathan Aitken might have broken her heart.

And then there is Mrs C. The wives of Brisbane bookies like deporting themselves in fur coats; not, you understand, because they are cold - far from it - but because they can. As for the vulgar Versace-esque scarf, well, it reminds me of Elsie Tanner. It says many things, that fur-coat-silk-scarf-gold-earring ensemble, but little of it shouts "public service". How does it go down in the typing pool?

And then there are the sons, whose image mesmerised us yesterday, like a picture of some fascinating deformity. No self-effacing modern Toryism here: Henry Conway has thrown "F*** Off, I'm Rich" parties and dresses as a New Romantic, which leaves him looking like an indeterminate love child of Simon Le Bon and Gillian Taylforth. He also admits to being, or perhaps aspiring to be, a Sloane; if one must revel in snobbery, Conway Jr will forgive us for pointing out that Papa was brought up working-class in Tyneside.

Frederick looks equally to the manor born. He has a far-off look in his watery eyes, perhaps imagining some amusingly well-paid job for Cazenove if things don't work out at Sandhurst - though as he lists his hobby as "sleeping", I suspect he might have to settle for Knight Frank.

Mark Borkowski, public relations fixer, is amused by the photograph, too: "It contains every cliché of English life: if Sam Taylor-Wood had taken it, we would laugh at the irony: togged up to open the village fête, or to go to church, or an 80th birthday party. It screams 'smug'. The Tories are trying to present a picture of modernity, yet this is the opposite."

And the Tories have form, he adds. "Because Conservatives believe in traditional family structures, they have a very unfortunate way of using their children: think David Mellor posing on the gate with his, or John Gummer stuffing beefburgers down his kid's throat."

Still, there are compensations for this PR calamity: although Conway has lost the party whip and his local association is under pressure to deselect him, at least he will have a happy family memento to remember the days he could dip into the public purse in such a civilised fashion.

MARTIN AMIS AND HIS PR SLIP

Whoops what a celebrity slip up this morning. The unguarded comments made by Martin Amis appear in the Independent . The flak who policed the interview needs to be shot. The following extract might just cause the author a few problems.

“And he has always loved this multiracialism, he says.” At that time, I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, and I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim. It’s interesting. The Iranian one – this is 1969 – was into mini skirts and discos because she was not an inhabitant of an Islamic republic but of a decadent monarchy 10 years before the revolution. The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernise. You would – I don’t know – just look at her and just feel eons between you.” Because of her faith? (Martin is allergic to superstition). “No, no. There were plenty of religious girls. It was that she couldn’t go out with me in public. I could go to her house, and I could be left alone in her room, a big house in High Street Kensington, but we absolutely couldn’t be seen in public.”

He was 22, and his Muslim amour was 21. “I was the first man she had ever kissed, and there were no tongues or anything. I was having a very hard time with girls at that point, and I thought, ah, a kiss.” He didn’t feel at that time that she was oppressed; it didn’t enter his mind. “I was very respectful of it really, and I was fond of her, but she was very vulnerable, and I wouldn’t have dreamt of…” He trails off. “No. It was after we kissed that I stopped going round.” Was the South African girl the same? “No. She was Muslim, but she had no problems in that area,” he says, and chuckles. He doesn’t know what has become of any of them now. “

I have a put a modest wager on the Sunday Times or Mail On Sunday tracking down his old girlfriends - could be a corking buy up. Expect an embarrassing double page spread soon.

PR WATCH

Oh dear, another tale of stupid PR folk.

There is a bit of a kerfuffle in the U.S. between Judith Siers-Poisson from the Centre for Media and Democracy and a hapless PR outfit fronted by Jennifer Windrum of the Swanson Russell Associates PR firm. PR watch has never been shy about being critical about the public relations industry. It would seem that Swanson Russell Associates PR should give a second thought before sending out PR material to scribbler's blogging for the organization. I shudder at the crassness of firms that can't seem to help themselves. Why bother to tip Spin Watch off to their own questionable efforts at slipping product placements into TV shows like American Idol. If you want to see what happens to a PR Company that has a spat with an industry watchdog, click on this link

http://www.prwatch.org/node/6938#comment

MOB OR GOB

The hearing on the suggested banning of Marion Knight from Compton is being held today. It’s interesting to see how Marion “Suge” Knight, the co-founder of Death Row Records, has called his recent involvement in being banned from Compton, “a publicity stunt”. Knight has been included in a request to ban members of the Mob Piru Street gang from congregating in Compton. According to officials, Suge was one of the 200 people that were members of Mob Piru. The order would prevent him from congregating, drinking alcohol in public, carrying guns and staying out past 10pm. Knight was quoted as saying “This is crazy, I’m a 42 year old businessman, not a gang member. I don’t even live in Compton anymore”. Is this a betrayal to his homeys or the truth? Isn’t half the charm of these hip hop impresarios due to the fact that they are supposed to be some of the hardest men around? Think Biggy Smalls, think Tupac Shakur, think 50 Cent. They’ve spawned a generation of wannabe hip hop followers, where carrying guns, being involved in drugs and general crime is not only considered cool, but somehow actually is cool. Danger has always been very alluring and the fact that hip hop music has netted untold billions in profits over the years seems too much of a coincidence.

So why is Suge now suggesting that this whole ban is totally ridiculous and merely a “publicity stunt”. Is Suge just a middle aged businessman or is he not? Many people believe that Death Row Records was responsible for the murder of acclaimed Tupac Shakur because he was leaving the label to form his own label Makaveli Records. Both Tupac’s murder and the resulting drive by shooting of Biggy Smalls would certainly have made the record books if they were publicity stunts, but in other cases hip hop artists like Dr Dre, Daz, Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dog have been decried as closet queens, fake pimps and washed up crack addicts. Are these just regular guys, souped up to create an image that will sell records, or are they authentic? Whatever the truth, it’s hardly cool or hardcore to use the media for your own ends one minute, and then turn around and claim you’re the victim of a publicity stunt the next.

DEVIL'S OWN

To those outside the profession, PR has always seemed a cut throat business, and the associated businesses around it are certainly adding to that reputation of ruthlessness. Take for example the recruitment agencies; about 20% of them are decent, the other 80% would shaft their own grandmother, thus adding to the already poor reputation that PR has. A recent example of their sharp practise astounded my company only a few weeks ago when my MD uncovered some very shady goings on. We use a recruitment agency who we discovered had tried to lure one of our account managers to a new job in a different PR firm. If their ruse had not been discovered, we would then have paid them a fee to find us a new account manager and they would have received a fee from the PR company who employed our account manager. The moral of this story is, if you get in bed with the devil, expect him to urinate on your doorstep.

KNICKERS

Students of PR, take note.  To understand what gets the media's knickers in a twist, look no further than Jeremy Paxman and the M&S gusset debate. Any good alchemist of spin will sniff the aroma. The well known inquisitor and self effacing presenter of serious political debate, focuses his precious attention on something as banal as M&S underpants and it fuels a public outcry. It's been talked about in the news, blogs, web and traditional media in a 48 hour frenzy of flailing opinion.  Clearly the constituents needed to get a story away are in full view.
A noteworthy person, male underwear, alpha male indignation, age, the semi silly season, a leftfield subject – the list of essentials goes on and on. Remember, the most surprising issue can always grab the media’s attention, and what this has in spades is an unconventional subject, being talked about by one of the most surprising people.  What it has achieved is acres of free publicity for M&S underwear. If it hadn’t been Jeremy Paxman, I would have thought it was a publicity stunt, but this man’s credibility and standing is beyond something so facile. Isn't it?  

CHOCOLATE FACTS

It's nice that the Telegraph has reminded the great unwashed about our Easter stunt for Thornton's last year and the effect that it has had on the recent sales figures.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2008/01/17/bcnthornton117.xml

Thornton's pockets sweet sales
While high street consumers have been reluctant to delve into their pockets of late, Thornton's has proved they still indulge a sweet tooth. The chocolate specialist has reported a 1.2pc rise in like-for-like sales for the 14 weeks to mid-January, compared to the same period last year - and an overall sales growth of 7.6pc. The latest figures cap a welcome turnaround for the former family-owned confectioner, which has in recent years issued a string of profit warnings.
A resurgent comeback was helped last Easter by a publicity stunt which involved unveiling a pure chocolate edible billboard in London's bustling Covent Garden.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;jsessionid=HUXVMCEL2D2KNQFIQMGSFGGAVCBQWIV0?xml=/money/2007/04/18/bcnthornt18.xml

PRO NUCLEAR PUSH

I find Andy Rowell's blog compelling ;his recent article on the The Covert Pro-Nuclear Push in Schools is very disturbing. Time to dust down my DVD of Edge of Darkness

http://www.spinwatch.org/content/blogcategory/248/30/

GIANT AMONG DWARVES

I saw a Neval motorbike on the street earlier today, and I had only one thought. My great friend and first freelance client was the crazy Marcel Steiner who ran his Theatre off the side of one twenty years ago. Marcel is a forgotten genius. I found the obituary I penned for the Guardian. He should never be forgotten.

Giant among dwarves.
Guardian, Monday August 2 1999
You’d think I’d be glad to see the back of someone whom the Financial Times once described as “huge, hairy and shamblingly repulsive”. In the case of Marcel Steiner – the one-man theatrical phenomenon and king of kerbside culture who so sadly died last month – nothing could be further from the truth.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,282160,00.html

The story goes that Marcel once landed up in a London flat where Yoko Ono was staging a fast for whatever was fashionable on the fasting agenda at the time. Late at night, he caught her raiding the fridge. Marcel was never very money orientated, so when Yoko paid for his silence at great personal cost … but here the details descend into the hazily apocryphal.

You could call Marcel the first and last great actor manager of the street theatre genre. Or you could say he was an outrageous exhibitionist with an instinctive sense of showmanship and a dedication to all things over the top.

In the 60s, he was one of the original members of the legendary Ken Campbell Roadshow. One day, he introduced the company to a Panther bike and sidecar which he’d spotted in a showroom, had taken a fancy to, and rashly purchased. Ken was moved to comment “Christ! That’s so big you could fit a theatre in it”.

Which Marcel did. Single-handedly, he designed and built the facility, and then personally handled the box office, prop shop and set design workshop, stage-management, costume, lighting, sound, musical direction, overall management and day-to-day cleaning and maintenance of the Smallest Theatre in the World – the only venue in the country which can claim to have had 100% sell out houses for every single performance it ever staged during 30 years.

Replete with premium quality Tandoori flock wallpaper (£5.00 per roll), velvet plush drapes, a chandelier from Woolworths and a Sistine Chapel frescoed ceiling, the venue – with its single-seat auditorium - shamed many of its vastly subsidised cousins.

Not content with his administrative and technical roles, Marcel wrote every classic literary adaptation which formed the venue’s staple repertoire … and directed and starred in every production. On – and around - the Smallest Theatre’s fabulous stage, Marcel created and performed dramatisations of everything from A Tale of Two Cities to The Guns of Navarone, The Raising of the Titanic, and War and Peace (complete with cannon). Krapp’s Last Tape never made it into his repertoire.

With just two additional cast members, he dedicated himself to the presentation of huge panoramic dramas which drew to the utmost on his manic energies and ferocious appetite for playing to the gallery.

Inhibition was not Marcel’s strong point. He was an early devotee of nudity, and could be relied upon to take his clothes off for dramatic effect with frightening regularity. Joan Littlewood banned him from the Theatre Royal Stratford East for streaking through the venue’s famous Variety Nights. Often he’d walked over an audience in a kilt whilst performing the legendary brick-catching routine (attaching a brick to a 30’ length of taut elastic held in his mouth, and firing the brick into his face).

Whilst touring nationally and internationally, he stood naked by some of the world’s most famous statues, striking up the same poses, and recording the images for posterity; introducing Terry Wogan to the delights of his Hunchback of Notre Dame, he flashed his bum on live TV; but perhaps his biggest nude coup was the ban he incurred from the Playboy Club in Chicago. The great Victor Lownes detected in his use of nudity something disgusting, loathsome and offensive … and told Marcel so to his face.

Famous for setting fire to himself, for hammering six inch nails up his nose, for performing in Hammer Horror movies and for his cult status as a berserk interloper into the chaos which was Tiswas, Marcel never did much by halves, and if there was the vaguest chance of a party, he’d be there … even if it involved scaling four floors up the front of a town-house in Edinburgh to get in.

From the outset, he never conformed. In his teens, whilst his friends were dib dibbing in the Scouts, he’d got hold of a 16mm camera and was shooting his first feature. The only vaguely conventional theatrical thing that he did was to get himself an Equity Card. But given the arena he made his own, he needn’t have bothered.

Marcel was perhaps the ultimate exponent of an art and an attitude which is withering fast. He celebrated the simple disorder and freedom of being able to set up shop on whatever street corner, park, square or public space he pleased, and going hell for leather to earn a living out of a hat. It’s not misty eyed nostalgia to say that those days are gone.

Increasingly, city centre malls and council-run spaces pre-book and package up outdoor entertainment, printing programmes, company profiles, and performance times. Marcel never wanted that … if he had, he’d have worked in straight theatre. If you know when it’s happening, where it’s happening, who’s doing it and what it’s all about, then half the purpose of street theatre is undermined. Spontaneity has been suffocated under a deluge of permits, licences and regulation. Marcel would have no truck with any of it. His work said it all – kerbside culture was the sole preserve of the performer and the possession of the audience, and nobody else’s business.

He described himself as an “old beatnik Belgian bohemian” and “the only actor who can perform Quasimodo without make up”. Struggling to encapsulate this strange and manic physical entity, he was once summed up in these pages as “a large dwarf”.

Personally and professionally, he was held in the highest esteem, and everyone who ever knew him will remember him, his integrity and his rare generosity of spirit with incredible affection. Perhaps the strongest indication of the regard which people felt for Marcel and for The Smallest Theatre in the World came when an inferno razed the theatre to the ground one year.

The donations poured in, and within the space of just 24 hours, the funds were in place to undertake a total re-build of the venue. Not a bad achievement for a large hairy dwarf.

2008 GOOD FOR PRS. DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH

Times are tough in the communications business and it’s going to be a grim 2008 if we believe the statistics. The IPA noted that in the last three months of 2007 there was a large cut back on marketing spend by the major brands. In fact, it was the biggest fall in spending for the last two years. Supposedly, this is great news for the PR business – well that’s what my friends in advertising tell me. The patronizing chat suggests that it’s time for the more effective - economical members of the order to shine their lights. This condescending babble is making my ears bleed. It can’t be ignored – it’s mid January and the big media fromages are returning from their boutique holidays to address this grisly news. The brilliance of ad land unlike the hapless past managers of the England football team is that they always have a Plan B. Trust me, the myriad of PRs, big and small, don’t possess the guile to truly profit from this malaise in advertising. Ad men are far too assiduous to let a client out of their sights. Trust me they will and have always done what ever it takes to hang on. I have watched in awe as they miraculously conjure up another six arms to clench a wayward brand. As time passes this vocation in search of a reputation fails to convince brand marketers that PR can deliver, and ear on year it fails to take them on. - will 08 offer a real opportunity to end this insecurity - hate to say this but I don’t think so.

SHOW ME THE RECORD SALES

The media’s feeding frenzy on poor old Britney’s latest crisis has suggested that further slips into the pit of despair, have actually been a boon to her record sales. Clearly the media who feed from her problems balance it out by suggesting that they can gaup and plunder column inches and that somehow it does her a favour. Intimating that this type of publicity is good for record sales, I find odd – show me the proof. Some entertainment retail chain has thrown that rumour to the press and that fiction has become fact. If people stare at the car crash that is Britney, they should do it with impunity and not suggest they’re doing her a favour. The girl is clearly disturbed and should be left alone to go and hide.

HILLARY CLINTON AND HER LOVE AFFAIR WITH JOHN MAJOR'S MEGA PHONE

So Hillary Clinton's campaign has reached for a soapbox and megaphone in a desperate attempt to regain momentum to counter the compelling charisma of Barack Obama who is leading the polls. The British broadsheets are all drawing parallels with John Major who pulled his '92 campaign up with a pair of cosmic sock garters using the same tactic. I think she might need something more substantial to bump Obama off his fast track. All the millions spent on advertising and strategy consultants have not had the desired effect, so it's back to basics to unite support. Car park rallies addressing the caucus seems Victorian. Hillary should be more impressed by the efforts of the Al Qaida media wing Al Sahab, which announced yesterday via the web a move to make their propaganda available on mobile phones.

Clips of Musab al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader in Iraq who was killed by U.S forces, can now be downloaded thus spreading the word by the new trend of consuming content whilst on the go.

THE YEAR IN IDEAS

The Year in Ideas
The Times 29th December 07

From Islam-friendly finance to the fall of Z-list celebrity, and from the rise of supercrunching to the return of the bonkbuster, leading commentators and Times writers chart the major cultural, economic and social changes of 2007 and offer their predictions on the shape of the year ahead.

The new billboard by Mark Borkowski

Outdoor advertising is about to change for ever as technology and creative ambition fuse a new reality and turn the traditional medium into something unexpected. If you hoped to escape the influence of the marketing folk on a stroll to the shops, think again. Consider the contemporary Tube escalators adorned with HD digital screens that engage us with glossy commercials and films. The revolution now integrates performers, props, product displays and other branded 3D elements into the new LED (light emitting diode) billboard medium.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/specials/article3069051.ece

In 2007, adidas sponsored soccer matches between two athletes suspended on wires high above the streets of Tokyo and Osaka. The players acted out a game of football with an adidas billboard serving as the football field backdrop (above). Meanwhile, as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for KFC, a giant Colonel Sanders image was laid out in the Nevada desert and can now be seen on Google Earth.

There are Bluetooth billboards that interact with mobile phones, BlueCasting (transmitting) songs or movie clips to the PDAs and phones of passers-by. LED also allows instant message uploading via the internet, so community messages and public-service announcements can also run on the signs. There are even roadside listening billboards that profile commuters as they speed by, then personalise ads based on those profiles. So, if the road is clogged with Classic FM listeners it might make a pitch for a high-quality car. If Radio 4 is on, the billboard could change to ads for an airline or gourmet grocery.

We are in a brave new world in which the dark art of ad craft is operated by disciples with a desire to bewitch the consumer with anamorphic engagement. It is improperganda – an alchemy of brand experience geared to generate consumer buzz. Our streets will never be free from legal graffiti, subversive mobile posters, in-your-face brand experiences and guerilla projections. Mark Borkowski