Formula One has hired Michael Payne, as part of its restructuring in preparation for the eventual departure of 81-year-old Bernie Ecclestone. Payne will work as the sport’s “chief marketing consultant”, while German Christian Vogt has been appointed marketing director, in essence running the old Allsport Management company, which was previously run by Patrick McNally. Vogt has previously managed broadcasting rights in soccer for FIFA, UEFA and the IAAF.
Payne has spent the last eight years running his own Monaco-based sports media company, offering consulting to governments, media groups and corprorations, with one of his clients between 2004 and 2008 being Ecclestone. Prior to that he was marketing director of the International Olympic Committee from 1988 to 2004, having joined the organisation from ISL Marketing back in 1983. Before that he worked for a marketing agency called West Nally, which had some peripheral involvements in motor racing.
Vogt and Payne replace David Campbell.
Well David Warren left last week by ‘mutual consent’. The paddock club hospitality is now being run by FOM (Karen’s boss in fact) although I think we are to assume it is temporary and Allsport is almost defunct. My understanding is that it is all being pulled back into London. Not sure why. Control I guess.
It might be worth noting that Just Marketing have just moved again. No longer in a Bernie owned building. It has been perceived that they are FOM’s official-unofficial marketing agency in recent years.
As you have pointed out Joe, all of this is about re-structuring the business to ready it for some type of sale. Whether it be to a stock market or banks or other.
Wise monkeys being lined up?
The million$ Question is…. When will Bernie step down?
Or….. will Bankers in Bavaria, and the German Legal System, decide for him?
mmmmm???? Jack Flash
Not long now I shouldn’t think.
Random, help please… ignorant Yank here…I’ve loved my time in the British Isles, everyone there was always wonderful to me, I have no complaints of any kind… but there’s always some little thing I just don’t understand… like, for example, “I shouldn’t think”. I would have expected “Not long now, I should think…” What am I doing wrong?
I am not certain as to this, but I think we have a tradition of inverting and doubling negatives.
Expand the above: “Not long now, I should not think.” and you get “It is not long now.” Just cancel them out.
One of my favourite etymologies is that is “Ain’t” which I have loosely heard pronounced also (by a red bearded Scot lovely monster) as [sic] “amantay” or am I not, the not coming as a contracted “n’t” before the “ay” = “I” != “yes”.
My late partner loved nonsense poetry, and was really good at writing it. Unfortunately, the best I can manage is nonsense, and a rare attempt at poetry. However this is what you end up doing with a classical education . .
It gets better if you mess up a French birth with English grammar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilaire_Belloc#Poetry
What I was taught was to unlearn grammar, because we have so many origins of acceptable grammar it’s a easter egg hunt to find why something sounds fine, and might not quite seem to have meaning, at first glance.
Also of interest may be Purcell’s “Lewd Songs”, and we have this fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_(music)
Purcell’s trick was to use the mix of phonetics in different parts of speech so that in chorus, if you could squint your ear, you would hear something entirely different. Without a score to hand, you might have perfectly innocent parts sung together sounding “and he pierced the wench under the bench” (random illustration, mine and not nearly as good) . . I hope the idea is approachable though. It’s basically constructing new words by choral timing. This was a early hack against censorship.
Nothing wrong RShack, just Random mixing up a phrase.
While it may make more sense to say ‘should think’ as in he thinks that he is ‘not long now’. However he has broken the sentence down into two sentences which is what has made it a bit weird.
He has said it as ‘Not long now’… i.e. he doesn’t think it will be long till BE steps down. Then followed it up by saying
I shouldn’t think [he will be much longer]‘.
Basically he has metnioed the same thing twice keepign the topic on BE rather than moving it to his idea of it not being long.
Also helped by Random’s respone being a negative, he probably got slightly stuck in the negative.
It’s the same thing. I would say what you said it more correct but both would pass.
Is Mr. Payne a back-scratcher?
Or is he a Payne in the back…
I should think his “above board” fees are eye-watering enough.
As I wrote the other day, I believe it is he who will be responsible for your lack of choice of beer to drink at the Olympics together with it’s vastly inflated price. Possibly also him that stopped the lady selling a few of her hand knitted dolls with olympic rings thereon. Just the sort of guy that Bernie needs to make sure that every possible penny is wrung from the fans.
Long had an interest in what happens when Bernie steps down, (or whatever). Love him or hate him, he’s kept F1 running for decades & is pretty damn good at it.
Every well run business needs contingencies in place and in the case of F1 a succession plan as it has been run more like a family business than a large corporation. With the key principal being in his eighties its fortunate he has not “died with the boots on” as they say. To his credit it appears he has put together a top class team to succeed him, in a way it is apparent how talented a businessman Bernie is at 81 when it takes a team to replace him. He would have looked quite foolish if something had happened to him and there was no provision for the changing of the guard so all this is really overdue. Good health to Bernie hopefully he guides this team for sometime yet as he has done a good job building up the series.
Now just keep all the best heritage tracks with pedigree and interchange all the ‘new world’ attractions on a tour like basis
Joe, how come I found this from the BBC, rather than your own WordPress blog?
Found what?
There was a link from the BBC website yesterday, but the items have only appeared as new threads in the index of your WordPress blog this morning. (Sat)
I suppose my question is, how do I refresh the index?
Thanks
I have no idea.
Rodger, simply clear or refresh your browser cache to ensure you get the latest blog posts.
Better still, subscribe to Joe’s free RSS feed. Most modern browsers contain a feed reader. Click on the orange/blue “radar type” icon in the url bar, and things should happen for you.
Thanks Colin
Rodger J,
apologies in advance, but skim for the dope:
strange things often seem to go on with WordPress blogs. Back when, some boys thought to write something called MySQL and advertised it as a database. They conveniently ignored most of the (difficult to write) useful reliable bits of a database. WordPress amongst many others likes to run on MySQL. Reason being, it is so cheap your teeth hurt. Things are much better lately, but I rather fear strange things happen still as a result of that legacy. And then you have the fun which is PHP, which runs the bits you see. You can learn PHP in a weekend. Very cool stuff. But doesn’t make you a ace programmer.
I would of course love it if Joe had a Bentley class engineered website, but until that can be gift wrapped and not be a real project headache for him, or we collab to skunkworks something very cool, I’m not pushing it. Has to have a selling point that’s not obscure, IMO. (personally I love the typographic style of e.g. Le Monde, really easy on my eyes)
Then again, it could be nothing to do with here at all. The BBC might be using a redirect on their webserver to measure clickthroughs, and that could have flaked.
Never a bad idea to hit CTRL + SHIFT + R, which tells your browser to ignore everything and load the real page. Most if not all ISPs locally cache high traffic websites (and this one counts) to reduce their load. I believe only two UK companies give you straight up internet, Zen and AAISP. I know the latter lot, but have used the other also and been impressed.
The world is strange. Google have pushed their datacenters out as far as they can, in other words as close to you or I as they can get. They loaded the Chrome browser with a special protocol that may (big debate as to tricks) speed up HTTP, and so Chrome works superbly fast. (this is on a new fiber optic line, and not kidding, Chrome whoops other browsers just now, nothing to do with my line) I happen to be interested in what they are up to in advertising, so use the vanilla version, but try the rebuild, Comodo Dragon, which strips their potential monitoring.
Side thought: there is a movement for what is called Net Neutrality. It’s about as successful as communism, but if you care not to be tracked every minute of your life, net neutrality helps the little guys. Then the little guys need to make some money, and their page will not even display properly unless a bit of javascript talks to a ad agency somewhere . .
A little utility I use is CCleaner, which will walk you through cleaning up caches of all kinds, and other dross, and Secunia just sits in the background updating almost any application to save you the bother.
You may be amused, that hardcore appliances such as HP TippingPoint or Cisco IronPoint undo funny faffery at wire speed. Businesses like to pay for their privacy. Most people would prefer a awesome holiday than pay for one of those, though . . yet you know the low hanging fruit of the security game is out of season when Microsoft gives away security software as good as anything else sold to consumers . .
Sorry if a bit much, but
My apologies for cutting short a description of Michael Payne’s career, but he has never run a Formula Ford team? That is nice and impertinent to know.