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The French president's PR team brought the Sarko & Carla show already perfected in their home country to London this week with similarly successful results

Becks may have virtually bared all for Armani, but the Special One has played a cannier PR game in the past few days.

The author of The Long Tail is fighting back against "lazy flacks" by listing spammers on his blog.

The London 2012 Olympics organisers appear to have scored another PR own goal

The potential presence of Camilla at the forthcoming 10-year memorial service for Princess Diana dominated the media for a number of days. Was it a PR disaster or just a hapless attempt to further assimilate the Duchess of Cornwall into the hearts and souls of British royalists?

To queue or not to queue, that is the question. Recently, fashion and retail publicity, with Madonna, Kate Moss and now Lily Allen turning their hand to clothes designing, has demonstrated a real lack of imagination when launching new season's collections.

When you feel yourself to be in control, you give more away and can wind up quite out of control of a story.

After a poor performance against the minnows of Andorra, the England football manager, Steve McClaren, simply walked out of the post-match news conference, telling the media: "Gentlemen, if you want to write whatever you want to write, you can write it because that is all I am going to say. Thank you."

Bernard Matthews has launched an ad campaign to rebuild the brand after the bird flu scare, but it would have been better if they hadn't behaved like headless chickens for the first few days.

Just as a thousand liggers sharpened their patter to pass the clipboard test to slither into post Oscar parties, four days later in London I suspect the wannabes will try to assemble at Matthew Freud's send off hurrah for his arch lieutenant, Kris Thykier.

It's been a good year around the world for the outdoor media market. Unlike Britain - where we are still flogging campaigns that win awards rather than consumer cut through - publicity connoisseurs have feasted on a new generation of living outdoor ad sites, retail theatre and publicity stunts that capture front pages. This hunger for wild and wacky stunts to engage the ad weary punter, has never been so vital.

Channel 4 is on a roller coaster ride. Every hour this week a new scenario shifts the media agenda and the current interest in Big Brother is at an all time high. The media and the public has been fixated - and transfixed - by the bullying and supposed racism in the house. And whether it is going to derail Jade Goody Inc. Is this all just publicity fall out or manna from heaven? We will soon discover if all publicity is bad publicity?

Two paths that come together on one journey shape a new dimension of meaning and possibility, a co-creation of power and passion.

On a day of a million conspiracy theories here is another one for the cynical and the jaded to chew over. Pinch me hard but am I the only one to notice a classic example of news management today.

The trouble with being 'alternative' is that if you do it often enough you become predictable - and then you're not alternative any more. And that is what has happened to Channel 4 with its annual 'alternative' Christmas message.

There seems to be a "mcflurry" of PR activity in the food and confectionary world. Burger King and Cadbury have both taken proactive steps to pull advertising and sponsorship. It is brilliant brand opportunism perhaps driven by the deep sense of paranoia that these respective industries are consumed by that has forced safety first action.

Sport and homosexuality have never been the best of bedfellows. And there's a sad and salutary lesson to be learned from the attempt by a professional wrestler called Chris Kanyon to combine the two.