Handheld cock-up…

Well, despite PR Week eventually catching up with The World’s Leading in reporting that Inferno has picked up the Palm account (something we posted a fortnight ago) it did manage to uncover a rather interesting angle on the story…

It seems that there were two agency shortlists in play. The first – drawn up by now (unsurprisingly) departed EMEA Corp Comms and PR Manager Andrew Phillips – included Bite, Cohn & Wolfe, CompanyCare and Weber Shandwick. A sneaky second list of three (including Inferno) was drawn up by Palm EMEA V-P Roy Bedlow.

With Inferno taking the account, clearly the whole process was a complete and utter waste of time for the agencies on Phillips’ shortlist. In our view, they’d be well within their rights to be rather pissed off. In fact surely Palm should be proposing some level of compensation for those agencies that would have applied a not insignificant amount of time and resources to the stillborn pitches?

Still, it has reminded me of my favourite ever TV out-take. A kids’ TV show hosted by actor Brian Blessed, who was required to demonstrate the winner’s prize - a Palm Pilot - but couldn’t get it open. Increasingly frustrated, he ended up screaming (as only Blessed can)….”Palm Pilot?! It sounds like a fu*king wa*nking machine”