unicornnews: 3am take on Team Andre

So, the ongoing battle between the fiercer of the celebrity PRs and the bolder of the gossip journalists went public this week when the Daily Mirror’s 3am.co.uk gossip team decided that Peter Andre’s people had gone just too far with their demands while offering the tabloid five minutes with their man to talk about his latest celebrity endorsement deal, as the face of Costa Coffee’s latest hot, caffeinated drink.

On Andre’s big coffee day the Mirror hacks wrote on their website: “Do you know where we’re supposed to be right now? At a central London coffee shop, waiting for five glorious minutes with Peter Andre. However, instead we’re going to tell you exactly why we won’t be obediently trotting along to meet him”.

Was it because coffee is a lovely drink but a tedious topic of conversation? Yes. And because Andre’s management, Can Associates, had apparently insisted on a contract being signed beforehand ensuring that there would be no talk of anything else but the reality TV star’s sudden passion for the caffeine drink.

And while they were at it, they demanded that no pictures of Katie Price come anywhere near the finished article, that all photo captions would be positive, and that Can and Andre would be allowed to approve the whole thing before it went online.

The Mirror continued: “We’ve all seen contracts like this before, particularly those of us who’ve worked on celebrity magazines, but nobody is more controlling than Can, who might want to look into changing their name to Can’t”.

So, 3am returned an email informing Can that “we’re simply not prepared to agree to such ridiculously strict terms… we wouldn’t agree to these insanely restrictive terms for Britney or Brad, so we’re hardly going to for Peter”.

The result? Can are now refusing to allow 3am access to any of their clients ever again. 3am, meanwhile, are informing all their readers to go to Starbucks.

Posted Friday January 29 2010 by Chris Cooke

Related categories: Celebrity PR