Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

So looks like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has lost his press secretary and deputy , both of whom quit today. Some of you might be asking: why did they quit?  Why not just ride things out, get to the end of the line at some point and get laid off when the mayor resigns? While I couldn't tell you with certainty what the reasons would be, I can take a pretty good guess. There comes a time for every PR person where their morals clash with what is being asked of them. I suspect these two folks know the real story behind Ford's drug use (or at least know more than they would like to know). Which then puts them in a tight spot. The mayor is clearly going to keep denying things until the last minute. He obviously views this as himself against the world and it's circle the wagons time. Which means at best he has to engage in lies of omission and at worst outright lying. To be the press secretary in such a situation is a tough spot to be in because it essentially means you h...

CNN Money interviewed Bernie Madoff recently and while not much came out of the article, it was interesting to see that Madoff takes responsibility for his son committing suicide. Madoff says he regrets the pain he caused folks, primarily those who invested with him. All-in-all who cares at this point. The only question I find interesting to ponder at present is whether prisoners should be allowed to give media interviews. Madoff is a scumbag who destroyed lives, including that of his own family. He should be left to rot in a cell until the day he dies. Giving media interviews only serves to massage his ego and remind him that he still has relevance in the world. High profile criminals should, as part of their punishment, be banned from giving media interviews. While we the public may have an interest in hearing from them, it's a 'reward' they don't deserve to have.

Well apparently Canada now has an annual Boring Awards and this year Ottawa (my home town) was named as Canada's most boring city . I haven't visited every single city in Canada, so who am I to say, but Ottawa is pretty damn boring! From a PR perspective perhaps the City of Ottawa will take offense and decide to do something about it. But there's not much that can be done in a city that has a huge federal government worker population. Not to mention, at least it seems to me, that the amount of senior citizens in this city is growing exponentially (are all the young folks moving to other cities?) From a PR perspective being called 'boring' is never a good thing!

National Post has catalogued all their infographics. Just tons of them to look through. You can view them here.

Two amazing videos related to the tornadoes in Oklahoma that are worth watching... Kudos to CBS for capturing this story of an elderly woman who finds her dog in the rubble... The actual tornado forming ...

If you haven't been following the story, Rob Ford , Toronto's Mayor, has been accused of doing crack cocaine at some point in his adult past. The accusation comes from an apparent video showing him doing crack. The video has not been released yet and a crowdfunding  campaign - crackstarter - has been launched to raise $200k to purchase the video. Ford has denied the allegations saying: "I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine." The Globe and Mail today ran an article indicating that members of the Ford family actually sold drugs when they were younger. You can read more here.  Ford's Chief of Staff recently was terminated for apparently giving the mayor "bad advice" regarding this scandal by telling the mayor that he should just come clean (which by the way is 100 per cent the right advice).   Here's my two cents on this whole scandal. Did he use crack or some other illegal substance similar to crack in t...

It's been a while so I figured I'd do another post in my series of "Top Ten Reasons this recession will never end". The last post in the series can be read here. So without further ado let's take a look at the variables I've been using to assess whether we're making progress... 1) Crashes Hurt for a Long Time - Better This is the first time this variable has turned green.  The DOW is at all-time highs. The Great Depression took 20 years for the stock market to return to the highs at which it crashed. The crash of 2008 has recovered its 'market' losses in only five years. Having said that, it's with reluctance that I turn this variable to green since the fundamentals don't support the market being at the highs it is at. While stocks have recovered, what you can get on bonds has shrunk to near nothing. A five-year GIC for instance offers a 1.8 per cent annual return (less than the traditional three per cent inflation the economy...

A few weeks ago I pointed out Hyundai's horrible car commercial that used suicide as the marketing hook. It's good to see that Audi isn't as tone def as Hyundai and actually made a kick ass, funny commercial for the Audi S7.

The Harper Government apparently spent 23 million dollars, over two years, monitoring conservative MPs in the media. Read the story here.  This BLEW MY MIND. 23 million dollars?!!!! I mean, you could hire thousands of people to monitor the media for you for that kind of coin.  If you had told me he spent five million I'd be shocked. I would expect media monitoring to cost somewhere between one to two million a year, NOT $11.5 million a year! I really don't have any comments on this other than... Wow, just wow!

Canadian newspapers are hurting .  Both Torstar and Quebecor saw first quarter sales drop 16 and 64 per cent respectively.  " Both companies said they have not been able to cut costs fast enough to offset plummeting ad sales." It's not surprising really... we're in a RECESSION. I laugh when I see headlines in the media, of which there are plenty, suggesting the recession is over. It's not over, it never ended and it's not going to end (for the next five to 10 years anyway).  Which means any product that requires the end user to buy it is going to suffer. Consumers are having to make tougher choices as to where their dollars will be spent. Given almost all of the news is available online for free, it's no surprise that the actual sale of newspapers is declining (and associated revenues from print advertising).  It's kind of sad in many ways because there's something about 'print' journalism that embodies serious journalism....

So A dobe is moving its Creative Suite services into the cloud . Programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc., will now only be available for a monthly subscription fee (ranging from $20-50 a month). With 12.4 million Adobe users it's not hard to see why Adobe made this move.  Why hit your user base up for a one time fee when you can churn and churn revenue out of them on a monthly basis for the rest of their lives. The move, however, in my humble opinion, is bad for their brand. I've always held the view that the cloud is a tricky proposition. People like to control their software, which is to say they like to buy it and own it . When you take that away from them and merely offer them 'access' to the software, they tend to not like it. Can you imagine if Microsoft suddenly started ONLY selling Windows for a subscription fee of five bucks a month? People would be outraged. Now, some companies can get away with the cloud propositions, but they are a...

Wow... you can now get 15G of free storage on Google Drive . For PR folks, if you don't have an online storage service you should look in to it. Great way to store and share content.

I love this infographic... hands down my favourite one ever. Every PR person should print this out and keep it on their wall. Personally I think it's a list of all the things a PR person shouldn't do, but I could see some people seeing it as a list of PR "tactics". In the later case I would at the very least classify them as 'dirty tactics'. You can view the full image here .

Canuck Politics on YouTube has a listing of Canadian Political Ads. Worth bookmarking / subscribing to if you want to stay on top of the ads the political parties are releasing.

I guess Hyundai thought it was being clever, but their new ad blew up in their face big time. The ad depicts a man committing suicide in his ix35 Hyundai car, but ultimately failing because the car doesn't emit carbon monoxide but rather water vapor. Now can you ever make a funny ad using suicide? Sure, anything can be made to be funny.  Bridgestone did such an ad years ago.... Bridgestone was smart though. First they used a dog. Second they kept it sort of light. Third, you cheered for the dog when the car stops. Where Hyundai screwed up is the ad is too damn realistic. The viewer knows that there are people who commit suicide that way and the tone and ambiance of the commercial is probably what their last moments are actually like. When you create that sense of realism you can't then flip-the-script at the very end and expect people to find it funny. As to be expected the ad upset some people who had actually lost their father to suicide in such a fashion. Wa...

If you haven't heard 6/49 (Canada's national lottery) is raising its ticket prices in September from $2 a ticket to $3. It was only back in 2004 that they raised the price from $1 to $2. So in a mere nine years, the price of a lotto ticket in Canada has jumped 300%. This comes on the back of a recent story about how salaries for OLG (Ontario Lottery Gaming) executives have risen by 50 per cent in the past two years. So what exactly is going on? It doesn't take a genius to realize that the government views the lottery as a means of generating more revenue. Approximately 30-40 percent of revenues from the lottery feed back into provincial governments (the rest is spent on prizes and operational costs). I don't know the exact math they did, but it's pretty easy to ballpark the rationale used here. It would go like this: We have 100 customers, each paying 2 dollars a ticket, generating 200 dollars of revenue. We increase the price from 2 to 3 dollars a t...