Monthly Archives May 2014

May 28, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update  No comments

All customer contracts for the supply of goods and services need to be reviewed as a matter of urgency as on the 13 June the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 comes into force.

These new Regulations replace the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling Regulations) 2000 and the Cancellation of Contracts made in a Consumers Home or Place of Work Regulations 2008 (known as the Doorstep Selling Regulations).

The new Regulations implement the EU Consumer Rights Directive that brings together a number of disparate existing rules...

May 23, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, News, Public Relations practice  No comments

Members of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) have watched in horror as high profile showbiz publicist Max Clifford was charged and is now serving a lengthy custodial sentence for a string of highly serious sexual offences against vulnerable young people.

Clifford never applied for membership of the CIPR in his entire career and if he had when I was the CIPR Chairman of Membership, I would’ve rejected his application.

The full extent of Clifford’s deception wasn’t known to many of us who in fact had previous dealings with him but I was aware of how he conducted his business and the way he manipulated clients and the media in order to make himself extraordina...

May 22, 2014,  Events, Guru in a Bottle, News, Thought Leadership  3 comments

Indian voters are pinning their hopes on their new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist BJP, to make good on his promises – a factor that eventually forced the Congress Party to lose its grip on power and suffer crushing defeat at the hands of its rival.

Former India PM Manmohan Singh claims that the legacy of his presidency is a far stronger Indian economy compared to that when he took office a decade earlier.

But the octogenarian became susceptible to a string of corruption scandals within his own party as well as political paralysis where he was seen as being too aloof to stop.

Modi will be sensitive and mindful of the short-comings of his predec...

May 21, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

In a landmark ruling, a German court has ruled Jesus Christ doesn’t hold copyright for works published in his name.

Frankfurt’s higher regional court held that the late American psychologist Helen Schucman, and not Jesus Christ, should be regarded the legal author of a book that Schucman claimed had been dictated to her by Jesus in a series of “waking dreams”.

Germany’s New Christian Endeavour Academy, a registered association, last year published extracts from A Course in Miracles, originally published in 1975, on its website...

May 21, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update  No comments

In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models.

Colette Pelissier wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.

By 2009 they had launched X-art.com and had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague as Malibu Media. The website promised its customers erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models from the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond...

May 21, 2014,  News  No comments

Apple and Google have just announced they are calling a cease fire on all patent litigation. According to Bloomberg, the two companies have filed an incredible 20 lawsuits against each other in the US and Europe.

In a joint statement, Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies and “…have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross licence.”

The latter part of the statement means that both sides are holding onto their intellectual property (IP) rights and not cross-licensing these to the other side...

May 20, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, News, Sponsorship News  No comments

May 17, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Public Relations practice  No comments

This may appear to be an obvious, even a trite question. But in fact it turns out to be incredibly important for all of us that claim to work in the business of public relations today.

When I was speaking at the World Communication Forum in Davos earlier this year, I got to know Paul Holmes and I felt that he was one person in our industry that wasn’t afraid to express his opinion or even ask difficult questions of agency heads that appear to have answers to any question about the industry at their fingertips.

My view, for what it’s worth, is that we are in the reputation business...

May 15, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Sales practice, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

Yesterday I had a wonderful lunch at my club Bafta in Piccadilly with a great friend of mine, Lena Robinson.

Lena is one of the most gifted business development professionals I’ve ever worked with when we were together at WPP and she now runs an incredible business development powerhouse for agency entrepreneurs called KiwiGirl.

Check it out!  Lena is an inspiration of ideas and new ways of thinking. And yesterday she shared something very special that I wanted to share with you too.

But before I share this with you, let me take you briefly into the conversation we started with over sausages, crab bites, burger and chips and a very nice bottle of wine!

We talked about Guru...

May 13, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, News  No comments

Google and other search engine providers like AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft Internet Explorer have been dealt a major blow after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Google must delete links to personal information about individuals from search results on request.

The ECJ ruling is likely to open the floodgates to a wave of similar requests from users wanting to remove potentially embarrassing or harmful information about them from Google search results after it enshrined the “right of erasure” (previously known as the ‘right to be forgotten’) in European law.

The ruling doesn’t mean that information will be removed from the internet but removing it from search result...