Communicator of the Week: Russell Brand’s PR team

Managing to secure high profile media coverage when there is essentially nothing newsworthy to sell to the media is a talent only seen in the very best in PR.

This past week it has been impossible to avoid Russell Brand – believe me I've tried – who has featured in every national newspaper, was the subject of a live blog on The Guardian website (yes, really), has appeared on every possible BBC TV and radio programme going and has even been tipped to become the next mayor of London.

The reason for this Russell Brand overkill is his new book 'The Revolution'.

There is little doubt that Brand is enormously clever behind his faux Dickensian mockney demeanour. He has tried his hand at comedy, acting, writing and, after making millions from these endeavours, has now moved into politics.

This seems a strange career choice for an individual who famously called on people not to vote as he has "never voted, never will". Talking to BBC Newsnight, he suggested that politicians were only interested in "serving the needs of corporations" and that an administrative system based on the "massive redistribution of wealth" should replace the status quo.

'The Revolution' is more of the same. Marxism-lite: listing problems without annunciation of a meaningful solution. Essentially Brand uses this book to let anyone reading it know his anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, anti-many other things views without backing these views up with research, evidence or a viable alternative.

This has led to the book being labelled "sub-undergraduate dross" and a "smug, shallow manifesto". His writing has been called "atrocious: long-winded, confused and smug; filled with references to books Brand has half read and thinkers he has half understood."

The latter review was from The Guardian so imagine what the Daily Mail would make of it.

Yet, despite the quality of the content, Brand has been everywhere. Imagine the scene over the past month or so as the abrupt journalist answers their phone, primed to reply to the pitch from the eager PR with "send it over, I'll take a look" (we all know what that means don't we), somehow Russell Brand's PR team have again and again come up with a pitch worthy of an Oscar, a Pulitzer Prize or perhaps a Nobel Prize for Literature. 

A quick Google search reveals that Taylor Herring are Brand's celebrity PR spinners; it is unclear if this latest PR blitz is all their own work.

Whoever has achieved such a stellar selection of sizzling coverage deserves this week's award and are my Communicators of the Week.

Communicator of the Week is written by Ed Staite.