All I really knew was that I had found the perfect place on the perfect wave, and I had remained there endlessly. Forever.
Allan Weisbecker, from In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road.
There are conspiracy theories, and there is the notion that the prank calls to Andrew Sachs’ answer-phone by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were in fact a set up, calculated to:
1. Boost sales of Brand’s various merchandise, and/or
2. Kick-start Georgina Baillie’s career in pornographic films; and/or
3. Increase BBC ratings once Brand and Ross return to the fray; and/or
4. Propel Andrew Sachs to the front of the queue for a knighthood.
All seem as outlandish as Nihilista, the newspaper devoted to some people called The Satanic Sluts.
But there is another theory doing the rounds. This posits the idea that the media seized upon the Manuelgate story, at the expense of something mundane like the US election, because after weeks of doom and gloom about the credit crunch we all needed a diversion. Indeed, at least one conspiracy theorist goes so far as to say that the BBC (including Lesley Douglas), Ross, Brand, Sachs and Baillie colluded selflessly in a deliberate ploy to lift our spirits. Is this the real truth of Manuelgate – that it was all a set-up, to put a smile on our faces?
We think we should be told. But we fear that the Sunday papers are unlikely to provide enlightenment.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke and Rohit Grover of Spada examine the importance of marketing and PR in a downturn. This article was originally published in Solicitors Journal, Practice Management Supplement, 28 April 2009, and has been reproduced by kind permission.
Environmental Reporting: Trends in FTSE 100 Sustainability Reports
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting. The white paper is available for download here.
Now available for download here is Spada’s latest white paper. Entitled ‘The Laity Bytes Back’, the paper looks at Web 2.0 and the professions.
In this paper, published in the International Journal of Business and Economics, David Brock, Tal Yaffe and Mark Dembovsky scrutinise large law firms, their strategies and measures of their effectiveness.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke, MD of Spada, looks at how US law firms should approach hiring a UK PR agency. The piece is reproduced from Strategies – The Journal of Legal Marketing by kind permission of the Legal Marketing Association.
Towards 2012 – The New Legal Landscape
Spada’s white paper on the impact of the Legal Services act is now available to download here. The research recently featured on the front page of the Law Society Gazette.
Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Adapt?
George L. Paul, a partner in Lewis and Roca, LLP and Jason R. Baron, Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, discuss the “new inflationary dynamic” of information in this article from the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. How do vast quantities of new writing forms challenge the legal profession, and how should lawyers adapt?
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