James Herring, Sky News Online

Friday, April 18, 2008

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Interview: James Herring, by James Silver, media reporter.

With the latest series of The Apprentice and Doctor Who underway, April is the busiest time of the year for public relations chief James Herring.

Herring - who founded Taylor Herring PR with his wife Cath Taylor in 2001 - runs the publicity operations for both hit TV shows.

With annual fees of over £2 million and a full-time staff of 30, his firm also represents Robbie Williams, Richard & Judy and High School Musical, as well as corporate media brands including Dave, More 4 and former US Vice President Al Gore's Current TV.

But it is the national newspapers' seemingly insatiable appetite for Apprentice-related stories which currently dominates his working week.

From Taylor Herring's backstreet base, in an industrial estate beneath the rumble of a West London flyover, 39-year-old Herring oversees a 24/7 operation.

"There's no beginning or end to a week on The Apprentice," he says.

"We have literally hundreds of enquiries from the media a day."

Many of those enquiries are about the candidates on the show and when Herring's phone goes on a Friday, in particular, it is usually because the Sunday tabloids have dug up dirt on at least one of them.

"It's amazing how you don't think you have 'a past' until you start appearing on national TV," he says.

"Suddenly exes, friends, former colleagues or even school-teachers start crawling out of the woodwork with stories to sell."

The PR's job, he explains, is to weed out the more outlandish claims to ensure that they don't end up in a newspaper headline.

TV show juggernauts like The Apprentice aside, much of Taylor Herring's day-to-day work involves brand promotion.

The firm's award-winning campaign for the TV channel Dave is a case in point.

It succeeded in transforming a little-known brand - UKTV G2 - into a near-household name.

"Good PR is all about story-telling," says Herring, who has memorably been dubbed "the dark lord", by spoof blog The Secret Diary of a TV Controller aged 33 ¾.

"What we try to do is unearth editorial jewels that will give journalists plenty to write about and carry across a brand message for our clients.

"In the case of Dave, the client gave us the strap-line 'The home of witty banter' to work with.

"So we did a nationwide poll on the wittiest Brits, opening it up to a public vote, and it was covered in every newspaper from the Daily Telegraph to The Sun."

An earlier publicity stunt saw Richard & Judy's faces carved out in crop circles in the week Mel Gibson's hit sci-fi movie Signs was released.

The resulting picture was splashed in the tabloids.

But while stunts and creative campaigns are a key part of PR, undoubtedly the toughest part of the publicity business is 'fire-fighting' or 'crisis management'.

When a celebrity is embroiled in a sex scandal or a brand tarnished by bad publicity, PRs are required to come out spinning.

So what does Herring make of two recent PR fiascos - the chaos at Heathrow's Terminal 5 and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg's toe-curling claim (in a GQ magazine interview with Piers Morgan) to have had "no more than 30" sexual partners?

"Clegg's mistake was thinking we want to read confessional interviews with political leaders," he says.

"If you haven't met Piers, who's not to be underestimated, doing an interview with him is a very high risk strategy.

"I remember arranging for Sir Alan Sugar to be interviewed by him [for the same slot].

"Sir Alan said: 'Piers is a tricky bastard, isn't he? I'm going to take him up in my two-seater plane and do some 360 degree no-hands flying over the south of England and we'll do the interview after that!"

For the Terminal 5 debacle, Herring blames poor PR emergency planning.

"The lack of planning was beyond belief," he insists.

"In all the time they planned every aspect of Terminal 5, it's amazing they hadn't worked out to the Nth degree what the PR damage limitation strategies would be if things went wrong."

But no amount of 'emergency planning' can protect a client from tabloid 'dirty tricks'.

Herring has been highly critical of some of the tactics used by red-top newspapers in their pursuit of salacious stories about celebrities, royals and 'reality TV stars'.

He was one of the few PRs to speak out about reporters and shady private investigators hacking into celebrity mobile phone voicemail accounts.

While he thinks that particular practice has died out since the prosecution of News of the World Royal Correspondent Clive Goodman, he says similar techniques continue.

"The proliferation of media outlets and competition has only made them hungrier and more aggressive about how they get stories."

Meanwhile ubiquitous - and rapidly improving - video-phone technology makes life ever-trickier for celebrities and their PR minders.

"It's got to the stage where you can't really, as a celebrity, go out to a nightclub or a restaurant in public anywhere and expect not to be snapped," he says.

In which case, what does he advise his clients to do?

He thinks about this for a moment.

"I tell them that they'd better start learning how to cook at home!"

How that particular piece of advice went down with Sir Alan Sugar is anyone's guess.

:: You can read more articles by James Silver at www.jamessilver.net

Posted by James Silver - On Friday, April 18, 2008

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