“Professional amateurism” as authenticity (once you can fake that, you’ve got it made…)

This, from chapter 3 (on the 2019 election in the UK) of “Johnson at 10” by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell, leapt out at me

Brooks, like Levido, was an alumnus of [Lynton] Crosby’s consultancy and had worked with him on the 2019 Australian campaign. Attempting to replicate their antipodean successes too would be left-field communications agency Topham Guerin. It had pioneered a digital messaging strategy which drew on a mixture of memes, slogans and a signature style of ‘professional amateurism’ – content which intentionally looked error-strewn so that it would receive mocking shares and retweets, thereby boosting engagement and spreading the reach of core messaging.

(Seldon and Newell, 2023: 109)

“Authenticity,” sitting alongside irony, dank-memes, shit-posting and all the rest of it. All in the mix as part of corporate comms strategy.

O temperature o mores….

PS – On Topham Guerin – see also this – https://goodlawproject.org/how-palantir-and-topham-guerins-plan-to-discredit-us-unravelled/