Cocktails and Records

Haven’t the lovely twin worlds of PR and the media been working particularly well this week?

1. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall versus Tesco. If you watched Chickens, Hugh & Tesco Too on Channel 4 on Monday or have generally been following the saga of ‘celebrity chef’ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his campaign to improve the welfare of battery chickens over the past year you will have noticed that Tesco hasn’t exactly been taking him very seriously. They are generally obstructive, fail to return phone calls, refuse interviews and when they concede to speak to Hugh, they put forward the type of media spokesperson who gives PR an even worse name than it already has. Although you’ve got to admire Tesco for not bowing down to the whims of celebrities (unlike, say, the government and its love-in with Jamie Oliver) this has to have been a bit of a PR disaster for them. By thinking that they above having to answer to annoying TV programmes, Tesco are missing the fact that in these days of subjective, lobbying mission TV, people think that they should. They will pay for their arrogance. Hopefully.
2. The BBC versus the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). The BBC are sticking to the notion of journalistic objectivity by refusing to promote the appeal for the crisis in Gaza. Regardless of whether they are right or not, they are indirectly doing a fabulous promotional job for the DEC -the BBCs refusal to promote the appeal is itself promoted in every second news bulletin across the country. This sort of media coverage is surely something the DEC can only usually dream of…   

I was also going to wax lyrical this morning about the earth-shattering, history making event that is Barack Obama winning the American presidential elections, but something way more important than that has come up.

Cocktails and Records has been selected as a mundane blog over at the ultra-mundane website. Funnily enough, they picked the recent post about banking, rather than any of the usual boring public transport anecdotes or even the ever-popular Paul Weller hair strand (309 hits and counting).

Being a shallow marketing person, I obviously think that any publicity is good publicity, so I’d like to take this opportunity to sincerely welcome any new readers to my world of mundanity…

I start off most work mornings with a cup a coffee and a sprint around the homepages of The Guardian or The Times. This morning this article – All Aboard the Atheist Bus – caught my eye.

Now putting aside whether you think a priority for atheists should be handing over £11,000 to the cash-strapped advertising industry for the sake of annoying the religious people of London for four weeks, it is interesting that this article has pride of place on The Guardian’s homepage. In fact, it is interesting to note that The Guardian regularly has quite a few articles or Comment is Free blogs on religion vs atheism – at least one a month it seems, if not more. Most of these have comments enabled and attract an obscene amount of them (863 on the Atheist bus post as I write – who are these people?!).

Does The Guardian have some kind of duty to their readership to raise religious issues? Or is this simply a guaranteed way to get those mouseclicks and increased advertising revenue? From the tiresome predictability of most of these articles and their comments, I suspect that religion really does sell.

Next week on Cocktails and Records
Readers recommend songs about why God might / might not exist and if he does how he feels about The Wire, the credit crunch, Sarah Palin, the new Bond film and the current England team line-up. Oh, and porn.

It’s easy to laugh at the trendy vicar stereotype, but this trendy vicar of St. Mary’s in ‘chic’ upper-middle class Islington in North London certainly knows the local audience. Where else would you find a traditional church with not just a branded name (in a hip lower case sans-serif font to boot), but a catchy strapline as well?

It is grim up in North London.

There was an interesting documentary on BBC4 this evening about the bespoke tailors based on Savile Row, London. The programme was called, in a suitably restrained way, Savile Row and it depicted what is truly another world.

This was best exemplified when one of the tailors described marketing as ‘vile‘, saying something akin to:

‘We’re proud of the fact that we don’t do any marketing at all and never will. The kind of people who respond to marketing are the kind of people we don’t want coming here. We don’t want that many customers. I’d prefer to employ someone to tell people to go away’.

I am torn between whether this is just good old class snobbishness or the most radical anti-capitalist thing I’ve ever heard a business owner say. It has particular resonance too when the tailors are not paid that well themselves, and are under threat from chain stores, high rents and unsympathetic developers who want to flog their traditional workshops to tasteless overpaid City boys…

I hate Facebook. It is like celebrating Christmas, having hair free armpits and saying that other people’s babies look cute – it  is something that I can’t really be arsed with, but constantly feel the social pressure to conform on. However unlike Christmas, armpits and babies, and even using Google, I have not given in and I am not on Facebook.

So because they couldn’t find me on there, someone I knew when I was seven has contacted my brother via Facebook to find out whatever happened to me. My brother is five years younger than me so this means that he was two when they met. I mean, really! As much as I can’t begrudge anyone being nice enough to want to catch up after 26 years, why are they harassing my brother and what sort of information are they expecting to get on the superficial Facebook level anyway?

I almost wish that I was a polygamist terrorist with a keen interest in 16th century madrigals so he had something interesting to tell her. 

Anyway, I am not alone in my anti-Facebook stance as an article in today’s Guardian by Tom Hodgkinson proves. Here he describes Facebook as a libertarian capitalist experiment that seeks to commodify relationships. He also does a fabulous deconstruction of the Facebook privacy policy. i.e. you don’t have any, all your details ‘are on sale to giant global brands’.  

As someone who works in marketing, I think that this is genius. And as someone who desperately needs a new job, it’s an appalling attack on things I hold dear like privacy, individuality and being seen as a citizen rather than a consumer.

However, as a cynic the worst thing is when people on Facebook have the audacity to complain about being marketed to, like they expect something (a social networking facility) for nothing. I think it is the combination of Facebook hoovering up and selling on market intelligence and people actually being naive enough to be outraged by this which is the truly interesting thing.