How did 2024 change the way you think about comms? What can Keir Starmer learn from Taylor Swift, how have divisive rebrands become a thing (it wasn’t just Jaguar who took the plunge this year), and what did Nokia and Mango do to navigate the tech/ anti-tech dichotomy? Here’s what I learnt about the value of good PR and managing your brand in a year of change:
Credit: Isaac Smith
Keir Starmer struggled a little with his new identity as Prime Minister, even mistakenly referring to outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister at the dispatch box.. But as things remain difficult at home, the PM is beginning to see that his greatest opportunity is to become a statesman. And image is everything. There’s nothing as effective as appearing alongside established premiers to underline your global leader credentials. See him grow into the role in 2025 with more international jet setting.
Leading with diplomacy and dignity comes naturally to Taylor Swift who manages to find opportunities for altruism whilst conquering all before her. She balances the two identities of savvy business women with purveyor of all things fun and good in order to have the broadest appeal of any entertainer on the planet. Impressive, given that she is not afraid to stray into the political or call someone out if required. Her ability to navigate tricky waters is unrivalled. Who else will manage to copy the Taylor playbook in 2025?
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This year we learnt that a good rebrand must cause a sensation. There will always be people who hate a sweeping change (especially one that plays into the fear of Millennials and Gen X that relevancy is slipping away from them) but controversy should be welcomed as it yields dozens of column inches and weeks of discussion on LinkedIn. Rebrands are necessary in a changing world as Jaguar and the Royal Ballet and Opera (formally Royal Opera House) showed us this year, abandoning their heritage and modernising their look and feel to keep up with markets. As their new looks become established and accepted, watch out for more brands taking the plunge in 2025.
The tech/ anti-tech dichotomy continues as big companies compete in the AI arms race but struggle to placate concerned parents taking smart phones away from their children. Whilst humanity struggles with the hows and wherefores, some brands are making the most of it, including Mango who revealed their first AI ads and Puma who introduced their AI ambassador.. On the other hand, 11 year olds took dumb phones to school (which Nokia is very happy about) and CDs finally made a comeback. I even hear HMV is reappearing on our High streets. Nevertheless, there is still a thirst for someone to step in to lay down some guidelines. All eyes are on Australia who introduced a social media ban for under 16s. Look out for campaigners and governments wrestling with this in 2025.
I never fail to get a feeling of joy on Tuesdays when I listen to the weekly instalment of When It Hits the Fan. A podcast fronted by two titans of media and PR: David Yelland, former editor of the Sun, and Simon Lewis, a Chief of Comms to the late Queen and Prime Minister Gordon Brown amongst many other incredible roles. Here is a podcast that speaks directly to me. A delicious treat as my train rushes through South London on cold dark mornings.
As a care-worn PR of twenty long years, I am used to the idea that PR has no voice of its own. We are vessels of other people’s information, our job is to come up with the most resonant and evocative way to present it… But it’s far more complicated than that. Diplomacy, people management and navigating internal (and external) politics are the true skills you need to bring to the job. It’s part of the thrill, of course, which keeps us in the game, but you can’t really speak about these things. All that stuff needs to be kept firmly under the bonnet.
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Until David and Simon (yes, I’m going to use their first names) entered my life, I’d never come across people talking openly about the good, the bad and the ugly of all PRs do. And it is fascinating: why people say things when they say it, how they pull levers of power to achieve their goals, the unintended consequences when they mess up..the sheer randomness of why things happen, even in No 10, at national newspapers…when the best people in the business are making the decisions. Recent episodes have covered the political role of Elon Musk and X; the battle for the Chancellor of Oxford – and why that’s a big deal; the most disastrous PR failures and how to come back from them; why Jaguar know what they’re doing.. and the power and mastery of ‘bikeshed PR’. And of course the ins and outs of the Murdoch dynasty, a mind-boggling story unfolding right now. Their experience and insights are fascinating and endlessly entertaining. It is a delight to learn from their wisdom, and I feel a strong sense of recognition too.
Credit: Thomas Charters
When It Hits the Fan avoids the pitfall that some comms commentary falls into. It’s so easy to come across as too virtuous, or navel gazing, or with a forced earnestness that gives the impression you’re trying to justify being a PR. (By the way, I’m sure I’m guilty of this all the time.) David and Simon manage to bring their massively fascinating experience to the conversation in a brilliantly entertaining way, along with insight into the big personalities at the heart of comms and the press, and the reality that it’s not all a basket of roses.
If you’ve not discovered it yet, give it a listen.
It wasn’t the result the Democrats were expecting, but there was no denying on Wednesday morning the Republicans were sweeping to a very comfortable majority in the US election. It wasn’t long before various Democratic sources including Nancy Pelosi were attributing the Democrats’ loss to Biden being both ‘selfish’ and ‘stupid’ for not handing over the reins earlier.
It is true that three months is hardly enough time for a person to establish themselves as a contender in a race that their opponent has been fighting for four years. And that Biden should have known that he was not a credible candidate under the glare of pre-election scrutiny. All the same, it seems hard to blame him completely for not making the decision sooner. It was a leap for the Democrats to make. Despite her rapturous welcome when she was eventually endorsed, Harris had polled low during Biden’s presidential term, and the party had sometimes blamed her for those policies that had failed to gain traction. The truth of what actually happened – a complicated mess, a society that is fearful of the outside world, the lack of enthusiasm for a female candidate, Trump being a strong leader, despite his shortcomings, and, yes, culpability by some individuals for sure – is messy. It is difficult for the Democratic party to confront. So, in the cold light of day, blaming Biden is easier, and perhaps cathartic for them.
The Democrats are hardly alone in playing the blame game. Blame has been slung around in all quarters these last few weeks. Like the mud slung at the King of Spain when he went to visit the victims of the Valencia floods, one of those tragedies where blame and anger, as Henry Mance writing in the FT points out, is a normal and important process of grief, but can also prevent us from learning from awful events and how to handle them.
Rachel Reeves played the blame game with panache and political style during her first Budget speech at the House of Commons dispatch box the other week. It is typical of an incoming government to blame their predecessors for the state of the nation as they found it, and there are a lot of things the Tories are to blame for, for sure. Here, Reeves used the blame game to temper what was, according to many commentators, the most painful Budget in years. She did it in the anticipation that many of the measures would be hard for the public to swallow.
So, blame is all around and, in many senses, it is a natural part of life. Not only is it part of our fight or flight reflexes according to Dr Bernard Golden, writing in Psychology Today, to preserve our sense of self-esteem, but it is also how the media dissect and analyse world events (and sell papers, if you’re being cynical). Dr Golden says that blame has become a type of global thinking. And surely this is partly down to the globalisation of information, ways of thinking and perspectives spreading quickly from person to person and country to country in a matter of days and hours after something has happened. But he also argues that blaming others can be personally disempowering, denying yourself agency and the ability to grow. I would argue that, equally, the public inclination to apportion blame prevents society from truly examining itself, having open and difficult conversations in order to iron out collective mistakes.
But just as we shouldn’t always blame others, we need to have the strength, when necessary, to accept blame ourselves. If an organisation is going through a crisis, the executive team at the centre of the storm is often tempted to explain why they are not to blame or to deflect blame onto someone else. Sometimes this has ruinous consequences. Boeing were criticised by the National Transportation Safety Board for failing to disclose who carried out work on a door that blew off mid-flight. The omission led to an escalating scandal and ultimately the resignation of the company’s CEO and Chair. Actually, crises are dealt with most successfully when an organisation can acknowledge culpability, face up promptly and proactively to internal faults, and have the courage and strength of will to address them. The incoming Starbucks CEO played into this tactic when he acknowledged that the business had moved too far away from coffee and pledged to steer it back to its roots, a move that has been described as bringing clarity and decisiveness and which boosted shares by 24%.
The end of the daily print of the Evening Standard felt like a particularly savage cultural blow in the life of London. Many of my early memories of working in politics involve scanning the early edition of the Standard when I popped out for lunch to get a feel for the news agenda, and a sense of direction of events in the Commons. The sound of ‘Standard!’ yelled by news sellers as we plunged down into tube stations at the end of the day gave me the thrill of feeling that I was at once grown-up and a real Londoner. And yet…there was a sense of inevitability about this summers’ announcement, and the feeling that other major papers cant be far behind.
But, whilst print is probably dying, reports of the death of news itself is premature. We’ve heard that ‘everyone being a journalist’ means that sources go unproven, political agenda sways the news narrative, and the sheer unaffordability of maintaining a news outlet has seen hundreds of journalists forced from their jobs. Whilst, this is definitely true in some respects, in others, news consumption seems to be as all consuming as ever. How many people open the BBC news app as soon as they wake up? Flick open the Apple News app, the Daily Mail sidebar of shame? Soak up world events as they scroll through Facebook, X and TikTok or (old school!) make their breakfast with the morning news on in the background on tv or radio. The Evening Standard itself lives on strongly through its online presence, and a weekly print as the London Standard, and still provides a unique insight and perspective on what’s going on in the Capital.
Credit: Toa Heftiba
Papers littering the train by 7pm every evening was the norm twenty years ago. Now, with the rise of smart phones, the world is always in our pocket and it is served up in click-bailable sound bites to compete with everything else demanding our attention in the world of social media. But it isn’t just that. During a job where I had to read and summarise every editorial for my boss, I realised that the least annoying, most balanced and most enlighting was the Financial Times. My love for this insightful, eclectic, international paper has remained strong, and convinces me that long form, in-depth, investigative news is still resonant and powerful at the top of the news food chain. Indeed, the Financial Times recently exceeded £500m in revenue for the first time – it is going strong. And long may that continue.
Five or ten years ago, Twitter was a really useful medium for picking up news, journalists would go on the platform to break a story, and you’d also have early sight of tip offs – particularly about what was happening in Westminster. As a public affairs consultant, it allowed me to call up my clients and say ‘I understand there’s going to be a reshuffle this afternoon’ or ‘the Prime Minister may make a statement’ as soon as the rumours started up in the press gallery. There was a synergy between what was seen on Twitter and the solid reliable, well-informed news that would be read in newspapers the next day. But the death knell for that era sounded in the echo chamber of the EU referendum and, since Twitter has changed to X, the algorithm spits out useless and frustrating garbage – to me anyway. From a news perspective, there isn’t a platform that has really managed to reproduce Twitter in its golden era, and perhaps that is perhaps more of a threat to news integrity than the demise of print.
What happens when you break the fourth wall, in the theatre, culture, and life …?
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There’s a fantastic moment in the first episode of House of Cards when Kevin Spacey, as the Machiavellian politician Francis Underwood, on finding an injured dog in the road, turns to face the camera and says “Moments like this require someone who will act, do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing.” The trope used throughout the series invites the audience to glimpse the psychopathic workings of Underwood’s mind, and perhaps become complicit in it. But it is particularly impactful the first time around because it creates an element of shock – we don’t expect to be addressed directly and we see, for the first time, the two sides to Underwood’s character, the difference between his public-facing and private personas. The defining theme of the series.
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In the theatre, the traditional haven of the fourth wall – the proscenium arch between actors and audience – the fourth wall is there to help us suspend disbelief. A different world which, unlike in film and tv, cannot completely be reconstructed in a realistic way. If we, as the audience, can allow ourselves to accept the fourth wall, what is going on on the stage becomes real to us. But there are times in theatre when the fourth wall is broken. There are plenty of examples when an actor has broken the fourth wall to ask a member of the audience to turn off their mobile phone. Recently, the actor Andrew Scott noticed a member of the audience working on their laptop while he was performing in the title role of Hamlet. On these occasions, the interruption alarms the audience and jolts them back to reality. But the actor does it when they feel it is necessary to break the fourth wall. They do it to make sure the fourth wall continues to exist. The theatre needs the fourth wall so much more than tv and cinema, so it’s even more important to protect it.
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The fourth wall also exists in life, it exists in order for us to do the tasks that we need to do and for people to give us the space and respect to do that. I remember once as a young communications consultant presenting on behalf of a media literacy education charity to representatives from the beauty industry. We wanted the industry to support us so that we could produce a suite of education materials about ‘airbrushing’ (it was back in the early 2000s) and the impact that might have on young girls’ expectations of themselves. The representatives came to the meeting, but they were not up for it. I was talking about the government’s criticism of airbrushing when one lady from a very well-known global brand muttered audibly in decidedly spicey language that the government (and we) were talking out of our backsides. For a moment I was lost for words, this lady’s behaviour was so out of form for a respectable workplace meeting, and my client was sitting next to me, and this woman’s comment could very easily derail the entire strategy. Swallowing my panic, I cleared my throat and asked whether there was a problem she wanted to discuss. A painful few moments… But, if she hadn’t said anything, the elephant in the room wouldn’t have been addressed, everyone would have listened politely and then they would have gone away and we would have never heard from them again. We ended up teaming up with the beauty industry, and the airbrushing lessons were eventually rolled out in secondary schools across the UK.
(Not my friend) Credit: Priscilla du Preez
The fourth wall can be broken in a moment of crisis, to right something that is going wrong. A friend, a successful news journalist, had moved to the UK to start up in financial PR. One day, he galvanized all his creativity to pitch a client’s non-story to a news desk (it was back in the days when we used to call them up). The journalist snapped ‘why would I even write a story about this rubbish?’. ‘I’m just doing my job, I used to be a journalist too,’ my friend replied. ‘I broke the fourth wall,’ he said to me later. Many frustrated PRs have yearned to say the same thing, but haven’t been able to, because of the fourth wall – the rules of engagement – in the process of PR pitching. It was extremely cathartic for my friend to break that fourth wall in that moment. He was able to get rid of months of frustration, the frustration of being regarded as the lesser party by journalists, even though he had years of experience as a front line crime reporter up his sleeve. He was able to say what all PRs want to say – that we work brilliant things with our material. Sometimes that material is excellent, other times less so, but we can only work with what we have. My friend who is a very successful PR, has always had a great sense of timing. I admired his bravery in calling out the journalist for being rude.
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But imagine if all PRs broke the fourth wall, all the time? No story would ever get sold. The relationship between journalist and PR would break down. And the public relations industry would be on its knees. Remember the famous ‘Ratner moment’ when CEO Gerald Ratner referred to one of the jewelry company’s products as being ‘total crap’. That comment spelt the end of his career, and the end of the business. It’s been acknowledged that this was one of the worst PR mistakes ever made.
If we were to describe what the fourth wall is, moving beyond the literal of the entertainment industry, we could say it is a not-acknowledged contract between two parties (professional, personal, institutional), that accepts that there are some rules of engagement that allow us to suspend reality to a greater or lesser extent to make that interaction work. Viewed in that way, the fourth wall is an important part of society. It is there when a politician campaigns during an election (imagine the legwork the recent Tory government had to do during the last election campaign, trying to sell new ideas and the concept of hope after fourteen years in power); it is there during online dating (when couples chat about their favourite TV shows but are in fact auditioning each other as a future life partner); it is there during the pitching process. We can’t really afford for the fourth wall to break down, but it can be fantastic to challenge it, judiciously, for impact, to shock and to change things, or even to make sure we maintain the status quo, when the moment is right.
Shortly after they won the recent general election on a massive majority, Labour announced they were changing the name of one of the government’s departments. This often happens when a new party gets into power – a signal of the structure and strategy behind their plan for running the country. What made this name change particularly politically significant was that Labour scrapped the Department for Leveling Up, Housing and Communities (‘Leveling Up’ being the right wing Tories’ great battle cry) and replaced it with the less flashy, more homey, name of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. With the emphasis shifted to ‘Communities’, a concept everyone can get behind, and a commitment by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to ‘no more gimmicks’. In fairly short order, signs were ripped down, emails replaced and the department moved on to its next life. For Labour it is a simple but decisive signal that they are doing away with the rhetoric of the last government and all the baggage that carries, and bringing their own ethos to the table. The return to common sense and straight-forward politics echoes the wider messaging and personal brand of Prime Minister Keir Starmer (who himself has carried the legacy of his given name, reminiscent of the founder of the Labour Party Keir Hardie, into a life of public service).
Changing a name can come across as superficial, as if there is something slightly ‘not done’, even suspicious, about it. Boris Johnson was mocked for not using his first name Alexander as was former Tory Chancellor George (Gideon) Osborne. Changing your name can seem to be an affectation, a signal that the name changer is not genuine. Although the reasons people do change their names are myriad, and often tell the story of lives and histories which the names’ owner is seeking to shape for the better, or to move away from threat or trauma.
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But names – the advert for the substance, are very powerful. They are the linchpin of brands, and they inevitably shape what a thing is and how it is perceived. On starting her mega beauty label Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow consulted a brand expert famous for advising some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies, who told her that single syllable words with a long double letter sound get traction most easily. Goop may seem babyish at first hearing, but the sound evokes the simplicity of a dollop of cream on one’s hand, and the devil-may-care cheekiness/ low level shock factor associated with many of the brand’s products – like vagina candles.
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Brands changing names, or having names in different markets, is a source of fascination, urban myth almost, that underlines the importance of language in cultural life. When the chocolate bar Marathon rebranded as Snickers (already its American name) in 1990, it symbolised to many the Americanisation of UK culture and the increased fluidity of cultural understanding between two countries. Elon Musk understood the power of changing a name to shock when he changed Twitter to X. The new nihilistic title seemed to represent everything that was doomed about the Musk take over of what had become a cultural institution. Yet Musk had the power to do this and so he did and, slowly, we have been forced to accept this change. Eventually the Twitter that it once was will likely fade from public memory. Perhaps we thought we owned Twitter as a social platform that formed part of public life, and this is his way of reminding us that we do not. And that he holds the power.
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Names and naming will always be associated with power. Nothing is more powerful than a parent choosing the name for the child that they will bear for the rest of their life; and place names have always been tied to ownership and culture. The renaming of cities and countries across the world was a fundamental part of reclamation post colonialism. Some cities – like Derry/Londonderry – have arrived more or less at a compromise of two names, a recognition of two perennially different cultures living side by side after a long period of difficulties, and perhaps an acknowledgment that this history can never be undone. Other places have two names acknowledged by different groups but not by one another, and all the hurt and vanished histories that represents hang waiting for recognition, and the complex dynamic between who holds the power and who does not.
And so now in the UK, Labour hold power and they (and we) are in the process of finding out the pros and cons of this new set of circumstances. A mostly moderate left wing government, they are unlikely to proceed to change place names with abandon, but the new Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government is their reminder that the old guys are gone.
A ray of sunshine and a political lifeline – my take on the breakout TikTok stars of the Covid-19 crisis
When the Covid crisis escalated in the UK and it became clear that we needed to lock down and fast, we all turned to the government and, in particular, Boris Johnson for direction. We were prepared to put aside months and years of Brexit-fuelled political turmoil, if he could provide leadership, instruction and reassurance at a frankly scary time.
John Bull taking a Luncheon – James Gillray, 1798
A few months down the line, things look different. We’ve arrived, via some of the highest death rates in the world, confusing and contradictory messaging, and a host of U-turns (not to mention that little bank-holiday busting Cummings-special) at a point where public trust in the government has steadily eroded and Labour under Kier Starmar have come within touching distance of leading the polls, just months after a government landslide.
We’ve gone through three months of hard times, and goodness knows what is yet to come. But people are inherently resourceful and there are small rays of sunshine that have helped us through the relentless bad news. Two TikTok stars have come to the fore during the darkest days of lockdown. The States have Sarah Cooper, lip-syncing perfectly to Donald Trump, somehow managing to capture his absurdities in the dart of her eyes and making us chuckle at his most alarming pronouncements. On this side of the Atlantic, there’s Meggie Foster with her on-the-nose, sideways re-enactments of the latest political contretemps (see here for her portrayal of Rosina Allen-Khan and Matt Hancock at couples counselling). This hilarious satirist, who made appearances this week in Vogue and on Lorraine, has risen from obscurity in a matter of months. Her ability to appeal to everyone from the casual news consumer to the obsessive political geek has made her the breakout star of this political lockdown.
There is something about political satire that helps us endure times when we feel helpless and frustrated by the apparent irrationality of the people whom we have to trust to lead us. We’ve just had an election and it’s unlikely that the current administration is going anywhere soon. But being able to laugh at them gives us a feeling of control, it helps us navigate our feelings of anger and doubt, and it allows us to bond (virtually of course) with others who feel the same.
Political satire grew big in the 18th Century, as the nascent middle class became increasingly politically engaged. People became more aware of inequalities between the rich and the poor, were frustrated by the outrageous extravagances of the Prince Regent, and the weakness of the nation in losing the American war of independence. (The military were too interested in getting their uniforms looking good to go out and fight – and Instagram didn’t even exist at that point).
It was in this context that political cartoons lampooning politicians and royalty were pioneered by William Hogarth and taken to unrivalled levels of both the sublime and the ridiculous by James Gillray. These cheaply produced prints surged in popularity and were knocked out in their thousands from a little shop in St James’ to reflect the latest goings on in Parliament, world events and the internal power struggles of the Georgian royal household. These cartoons were entertainment, but they also played a vital role in political education and helped that new political class come together. This ultimately led to the evolution of British politics into the locally-resourced party system we know today.
We have seen a similar political evolution taking place in the last ten years, with the rise of online campaigning. Lockdown has only served to make this virtual world more pronounced. It is fitting that Cooper and Foster, as today’s Gillray and Hogarth, come to us in TikTok form. They may use a 21st Century platform but they are similarly hilarious, instantly digestible and incisive in the commentary they make. Like the original political satirists, they have a universal appeal that unites people in relief and a renewed vigour to change politics for a better place.
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