A Boat, McDonald’s and the Question of PR

November 15, 2010
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Should McDonald’s, the restaurant chain of international renown, pay compensation to the owners of the Badger, a 34ft junk-rigged sailing dory whose home is the scenic sandflats of the West Cumbria coast?

The question arises following the climbdown by the McDonald’s, which used the unusually named boat in a television advert. The global fast-food purveyors did so sans permission of Mr and Mrs Parsons, the vessel’s owners. However, when they saw their pride and joy on television, the couple were definitely not loving it. Their complaint initially sailed into the doldrums, but, thanks to a fair wind courtesy of a local radio station, eventually resulted in McDonald’s withdrawing the ad.

“We’re not into compensation culture, but we don’t expect our hard work to be used to sell someone else’s products,” said Mrs Parsons, as she confirmed to The Guardian that she and her husband were taking legal advice about whether McDonald’s should pay them anything.

We’re not sure that compensation is due. The law does not prohibit the filming of things which are in the public domain. Had McDonald’s filmed the couple aboard their boat and used the footage, a privacy claim might lie, but this does not seem to be the case. Indeed, we wonder why McDonald’s caved in and withdrew the ad at all (though we confess that not having seen the ad, it is difficult to make hard and fast judgements).

So was McDonald’s, the Goliath in the affair, looking to secure some good PR by being seen to understand the perspective of David? Perhaps. But in doing so, has it set a dangerous precedent?

Pictured courtesy of the St Ives Jumbo Association: the beautiful restored Jumbos (images of the Badger were unavailable).

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.