Words Dept.: category

Last weekend my girlfriend bought a coat from TK Maxx in Stockport that contains fur. You wouldn’t know by looking at it, since the fur is on the inside. TK Maxx doesn’t have a particularly good track record in this area. The chain has been caught out previously, selling real fur marked up as fake. Others have [...]

If you ever wanted a snapshot of the mainstream media’s rather depressing agenda and the puerile preoccupations of the public who consume it, you could do worse than searching the phrase #journorequest on Twitter. I’m not sure what journalists did before Twitter. Maybe they phoned people or something. Nowadays though, all they have to do [...]

Today’s CashGordon fiasco has got me thinking about the point of a social media campaign and reinforces the point that simply getting your brand or campaign mentioned on Twitter is not an end in itself. For Tories, the CashGordon strategy was based around creating something that would inflame people on Twitter, and then watching as [...]

According to several newspapers yesterday, Kellogg’s is planning to use lasers to burn its logo on to individual corn flakes in an attempt to foil impostors. Metro, The Telegraph, The Daily Record and Marketing printed this as fact. Since journalists don’t seem to have realised that the story is made up by some PR people [...]

Look at this picture I captured from the news earlier. I’m surprised the BBC allowed Michael O’Leary, boss of “low-cost” airline Ryanair, on air in this get-up. The point is to publicise some new routes from Leeds to fifty miles outside a number of European cities. In the most shameless and embarrassing way possible. I [...]

There’s something a tiny bit contemptuous about Asda’s response to the recent story that its £70 flat-pack bike is only slightly less dangerous than an un-earthed electric chair standing in a puddle downwind from Niagara Falls on a moderately blustery day. Mark Brown, director of the Association of Cycle Traders, noticed that in the TV [...]

The internet webosphere has been awash since Tuesday with the astonishing revelation that a 15-year-old boy and his friends don’t use Twitter. Since this apparently proves that teenagers don’t use Twitter, perhaps it’s time for a breakdown of who does use Twitter. (Yes, it’s another of those cantankerous lists that will offend almost everyone at [...]

I’ve got a question. How is it that people who are expressly employed to advise very senior politicians on “political” matters haven’t got the gumption to realise that by typing offensive words into an e-mail, there’s a risk that those words might be made public? Damian McBride, a “special adviser” to the Prime Minister has [...]

Fear and loathing, moral pomposity, confused lines of argument, unfunny satire, tastelessness and hypocrisy have all been on show as never before in recent weeks as the nation’s newspaper columnists wring their last buck from terminally-ill cancer victim Jade Goody. Here’s a compendium of choice quotes on the subject from the media Twatosphere. Allison Pearson: [...]

I’m not sure which is more irksome. Is it making an extraordinarily stupid video linking the proposed Greater Manchester congestion charge to a violent assault on a young woman, or is it sending out a mud-slinging press release that acknowledges the video has been withdrawn but still seeks to make political capital out of the sorry affair? Well, here’s [...]