The Cameron Poole Affair

By Life's a Pitch
I figured you'd all want my expert publicist opinion on Cameron Poole and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Here goes: one of your employees stealing £560,000 from your publicly-funded organization makes for Bad Publicity.

And that's why they pay me the medium-sized bucks.

But who couldn't love this headline?

Orchestra boss 'on the fiddle to the tune of £560,000 to fund luxury lifestyle'


Or this chipmunk-cheek probably-from-Facebook photo?

CameronPoole.jpgI mean, really? The Daily Mail couldn't find a more official image? If any of my clients started stealing from orchestras because they had three kids under three years-old and conservative politico ex wives, I would at least make sure a nice headshot went out.

Sadly, no one involved seems to be talking to the press. The orchestra declining comment strikes me as odd, but I don't know the gory details so will not judge; I'm sure it's all wildly complicated. If anything, though, shouldn't they have been the ones to make the announcement? Get ahead of the story breaking?

Yesterday, Luke Hibbert, a solicitor with Kester Cunningham John which is representing Mr Poole, said: 'I don't talk to the Press.'

A spokesman for the orchestra declined to comment.

This morning, the excellent Twitter feed of BBC Music Magazine pointed out that the UK's Evening Standard got the London Symphony and the London Philharmonic confused both by name and photo in their initial report. Awesome!

BCCMusicTweet.jpgSometimes, though, as a publicist I'm torn: these unmitigated disasters for classical music--smuggling, broken instruments--usually result in mainstream press coverage. No, I'm not advocating scandal and despair as press tactics, but it does make me think.

November 23, 2009 4:37 PM | | Comments (5)

Categories:

5 Comments

His wife is the most loving and amazing woman you would ever meet - she put me through my teacher training and she was such a true inspiration and role model - my love goes to her and her beautiful children

The LPO recoded the sound track from Lord of the Rings, not the LSO...

Actually the LPO did record Lawrence of Arabia and the Rings trilogy. Star Wars was done by the LSO.

Well the article in the Standard is still not correct. Recordings for Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Rings Trilogy were made by the LSO.

At least they got Sir Thomas Beecham right.

Oh well.. too late.

Saw that Twitter post. By the time I saw it, though, the article was down.

It is strange that some editor hadn't checked the story to make sure that they had the instition correct for their piece. Whose job was that?

Leave a comment

This Week

Jan 18-22, 2010: This week, we're hosting a virtual panel on when and how artists, managers, journalists, presenters and publicists single out musicians for being "special" in their promotion and career-building efforts. I'll be joined by a musician, pianist Jonathan Biss; a manager, James Egelhofer at IMG Artists; a critic, Matthew Guerrieri, who blogs at Soho the Dog and writes for the Boston Globe; and a presenter, Michael Kondziolka at University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

- Isn't That Special
- It's the music, stupid

more entries

About

Life's a Pitch Why don't we apply the successful marketing and publicity campaigns we see in our everyday lives to the performing arts? Great ideas are right there, ripe for the emulating. And who's responsible for the wide-reaching problems in ticket sales and audience development? Boring artists? Greedy managers? Overstretched marketing departments? We're beyond debating who owns the problem. Let's fix this thing.
more

Amanda Ameer left her position as Publicity Manager at IMG Artists in June 2007 to start First Chair Promotion. She currently represents Hilary Hahn, Gabriel Kahane, The King's Singers, David LangEric Owens, Michael Gordon, Hélène Grimaud, Sondra Radvanovsky and Julia Wolfe, and serves as a consultant to Chamber Music America.
more

Contact Click here to send an email. more

Subscribe to the Newsletter Fill in your email address here.
more

Twitter I gave in and answered the siren call of Twitter. Click the button to follow:

Twitter.jpg
more

Archives

Archives: 384 entries and counting

Sites

Now Play It
This site has musicians teaching viewers how to play their most popular songs on the guitar via downloadable video. more
MOMA - Eye on Europe
This microsite for one of MOMA's 2006 exhibitions is a(n extreme) lesson in what can be done digitally for special projects (world premieres?).
more
Spoon
This website makes me feel impossibly uncool, and I love it for that very reason.
more
The Metropolitan Opera
Sometimes, when the (performing arts) world gets me down, I go to The Met's website and feel better about it all.
more

Resources

RSS Feeds 
RSS is an acronym for "RDF Site Summary," or "Rich Site Summary."  RSS is a family of XML-based Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. 
more
YouTube 
YouTube, created in 2005, is a free video sharing website where users can upload, view, and share video clips.  YouTube uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos.
more
Wikipedia 
Wikipedia, created in 2001, is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project.  Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.  Articles are written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world.  Wikipedia is one of the largest reference sites on the internet, with at least 684 million people visiting the site yearly.  It contains more than ten million articles in more than 250 languages (over two million in English alone). 
more
MySpace 
MySpace, launched in 2004, is the largest social networking website in the United States.  A free-access website, MySpace allows anyone aged 14 and over to create a personal profile.  Unlike other social networking sites, MySpace allows users to personalize their profiles by entering HTML into certain areas on their pages, thus displaying video or flash content instead of text.  Users may also customize the colors, backgrounds, and fonts on their profiles through the use of CSS (cascading style sheets). more
Facebook 
Launched in 2004, Facebook is now the second largest social networking website in the United States (behind MySpace). The free-access website allows users to easily connect and interact with other people, and it is now also possible to create a Facebook profile for an artist, band, brand, or business. Users can add themselves as "fans" of an artist or business, write on an artist/business profile's "Wall," upload photos, and join other fans in discussion groups. more
more resources

AJ Ads


AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
critical difference
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Dog Days
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Performance Monkey
David Jays on theatre and dance
Plain English
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Real Clear Arts
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
Creative Destruction
Fresh ideas on building arts communities
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PianoMorphosis
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Another Bouncing Ball
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.