M: shows selling up does not always pay off
07 Mar 2013 | by Alec Mattinson
There are few independent agency bosses who could not be tempted to sell up for the right price.
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If a century ago the index of the cost of intermediation (the amount taken by middlemen) in the retail and financial sectors was taken as being 100, by the present day in retail it would have plummeted to one.
There are few independent agency bosses who could not be tempted to sell up for the right price.
One of the strangest aspects of the continuing horsemeat crisis has been the silence of some of the Twitter accounts and other social feeds of the retailers who have found themselves at the centre of the widening scandal.
In their quieter moments chief executives sometimes say the biggest challenge facing any big business these days is in defining the aims of the business in a way that will win the engagement of the staff.
The year may be only a few weeks old, but already there have been a number of articles on the travails of the financial PR industry.
Since the financial crash four years ago the British Bankers' Association (BBA) has fought every step of the way against all moves to tighten regulation.
First it was the MPs fiddling their expenses. Then it was an illegal relationship between tabloid journalists and the police. Now it appears to be corruption throughout our banking sector. The modern British establishment is in disarray, facing a crisis of trust from its citizens.
It never fails to surprise me the way sophisticated companies allow politicians to use them for cheap publicity stunts.
Someone I know moved recently from being a Spad - a special political adviser to a senior politician - to taking a job in a PR and marketing consultancy. Nothing special in that but he said something that gave pause for thought.
In Monday's excellent Panorama on BBC1, Tony Blair's former PR man Alastair Campbell looked at what he believes is the 'growing problem' of excessive drinking by Britain's professional classes.