The Elevator Pitch 2.0.


Late Tuesday night, about 10.30, Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift in London. He informs the Twittersphere with a tweet and this photo. In the half hour before engineers release him and his fellow captives, #frylift becomes the top item on Twitter with something like 500 separate comments posted. The two photos he uploads are viewed over 15,000 times in 15 minutes and the national press harvest the feeds for their early editions. A very successful comedy writer even manages to contribute his own spoof.

A trivial event. Yes. A geeky obsession. Yes. Irrelevant to the rest of us. No way. Technology has changed the rules and if any marketer out there thinks they can get away with the slightest distortion of the truth, exaggeration of a claim or defence of the indefensible, they better start looking for a new career. It's not about hiding the truth any more. It never really was. But, these days, there's nowhere left to hide.

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