A few thousand tabloid-loathing Stop Funding Hate campaigners, exercising their wrist action on Twitter and Facebook, have persuaded Paperchase to abandon an advertising promotion, which offered readers of The Daily Mail two free sheets of Christmas wrapping paper. What should the advertising and PR community make of this debacle? Read on ›

According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo entitled Our words matter, if one man employed by the company writes or says something women find offensive regarding their gender, Google’s women start ‘hurting’ and ‘worrying’ every time they enter a room or open their mouth to speak in a meeting. Read on ›

What words might best describe Charlie Gard’s last months on earth, when he couldn’t move, breathe or swallow without the support of machines and other intrusions, which were eased by morphine? Read on ›

By Martyn Perks

The word governance speaks of the past, of a time and a way of thinking that is replete with boardroom politics, stuffy decision making, and codifying rules, guidelines, regulations and compliance. Read on ›

21^st Century PR Issues maintains that within PR circles there is a near-universal conformity governing the industry’s self-destructive, poorly thought-through response to the Culture Wars. In short: the PR business is currently leading clients in the wrong direction. So here is a PR manifesto that sets out how things could be turned around so that we can help our clients keep their end up in the 21^st_century Culture Wars. Read on ›

Societies in the 21^st century are increasingly defined by rapidly fragmenting socio-cultural outlooks and competing ways of life. Personhood has been politicised and commodified: we have identity politics and firms track our tastes. Whether it is the words we utter, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, or our taste in holidays, music and sport, or how we demarcate our sexual, racial or national identity, cultural chasms and schisms divide us, even as we are supposed to empathise more intensely and widely. Read on ›

What unites all the major political parties in South Africa: the African National Congress (ANC), the Democratic Alliance (DA), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)? The answer is their determination to divide the country along pre-existing racial fault lines. Yet the DA, South Africa’s main opposition party, has had the audacity to lodge a misconduct claim against Bell Pottinger (BP) with the UK’s Public Relations and Communications Association, accusing it of “sow[ing] racial mistrust, hate and race-baiting, and [encouraging a] divided society”.  Read on ›

Professor Anne Gregory and Jean Valin have asked readers of PR Conversations (PRC) to get involved in their project to produce a Global Body of Knowledge that defines the capabilities that proficient public relations practitioners should possess.  I am taking up that challenge here by critiquing their attempt to elevate public relations into a respected profession by defining the professional qualifications that PR pros must acquire. Read on ›

Back in January, I gave a lecture on the moral bankruptcy of the shame culture in ancient Greece to Associate Professor Josh Greenberg‘s fourth-year undergraduate class. Afterward, a debate arose about Isocrates’ legacy. It revolved around whether his ideas and lived-example laid the foundations for what some practitioners refer to as the morality of modern ethical two-way symmetrical public relations. Read on ›

It is not former Co-operative Bank Chairman Paul Flower’s peccadilloes that bother me. That’s merely an amusing sideshow. It is the bankrupt Bank‘s audacious reinforcement of anti-business sentiment and its bashing of its competitors’ practices that drive me mad.  Read on ›