Kent Center Occasional Paper and Swedish Company Rebrand

This 2002 lecture by a former Swedish Air Force intelligence analyst, has a few entertaining anecdotes. Here’s one:

In Sweden we had a company with the name Pressklipp, literally translated “Press cutting.” It was a perfectly adequate name since that was exactly the service that the company offered its customers–cutting out and sending copies of newspaper articles on specified subjects or search-words. In the mid-1990s the company changed its name to Observer Media Intelligence. It still supplied most of its customers with the same press cuttings, with the exception that you could get them by email, along with video-recordings and links to pages on the Internet. This is certainly media information – but it is hardly media intelligence. The word ”intelligence” has simply, like in numerous other cases, been added to attract customers and to create an impression of qualified analysis.

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