Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

Trends this week include (in no particular order); VICE's 'landfill indie' article and the future of fame in music, the new craze of Melania Trump deepfakes, her husband's marketing tactics laid bare, our own dear leader outsmarted by a bookshelf, and Harry Maguire's Greek Tragedy.


Harry's Greek Tragedy

A reputational nightmare unfolded for Manchester United captain Harry Maguire this week, as he faced charges of aggravated assault, resisting arrest and bribery. Whilst teammates for both club and country like (Saint) Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling have broken the mould of a footballer's role in society with purpose and substance, Maguire could send the reputation of the whole profession a huge step back. 
 
We've talked before about what a great comms job England manager Gareth Southgate has done to successfully transform the Three Lions from arrogant, megalomaniac celebrities whose egos outweighed their sense of duty, to humble, hardworking role models making the most of their talent and limelight. But his decision to include Harry Maguire in the squad for the upcoming England games despite the Greece controversy felt like a step back, juxtaposing uncomfortably with his recent decision to drop Raheem Sterling for considerably lesser allegations.
 
Maguire’s reaction could also prove self-destructive. He decided to eschew remorse or compassion and instead adopt a more defensive stance than he does on the pitch - refusing to apologise and pontificating over the details of the story.
 
Maguire needs to hope this blows over and no new charges come to light, otherwise he might have a Greek tragedy on his hands, and - in an age where reputation and virtue are everything- few friends left in football. 


Melania's DeepFakes

Another week, another satirical deepfake of Melania Trump doing the rounds. This time, pop-culture meme account Saint Hoax posted a video of Mimi (affectionately so-called by commentators speculating about her true colours) denouncing her husband and offering solidarity to those affected by his presidency.

Back in January, Facebook announced that they were banning deepfakes, but continuing to allow ‘parody’ and ‘satire’ videos. One has to wonder, as deepfakes become increasingly easy for the public to make, and grow in significance as a meme format, who will be drawing the line between comedy and fake news?
 

VICE's Landfill Indie 

VICE gave us a throwback this week that arguably defined a key moment in British pop-culture history, sharing the Top 50 ‘Landfill Indie’ tracks alongside a brief retrospective of the era (the second half of the 2000s when the indie genre was still popular but arguably running out of creative steam).
 
This was a generation of artists who failed to develop their sound; and move with the times, not ready for the streaming revolution.
 
How far we’ve come,,,
 
But with the brave new digital world comes challenges. This week we saw the Korean boyband BTS top streaming charts and smashing records, until Spotify removed almost half of their streams amid a global crackdown on ‘stream farms’.
 
This seems incredibly harsh. We’ve seen BTS stans unite in their millions supporting political causes including BLM – so why can’t they break streaming records. Is something sinister going on here? Have the culture wars, already permeating every aspect of our life, penetrated Spotify's algorithms?


Boris vs Bookshelf
 
A couple of weeks back we talked about how old fables and urban legends can be powerful communications tools. So too can some very basic literary symbolism or intertextuality, even employed in the most on-the-nose manner. 
 
Enter a school librarian with a sense of humour and imagination for a fantastic demo. Boris gave one of his triumphalist speeches from in front of a bookshelf and, as the word salad slurred into mulch, attention turned to the books behind him; The Twits, The Resistance, Betrayed, Farenheit 451, The Subtle Knife. 
 
Simple. Punchy. Brilliant:You’re a fool Boris. People are Against You. You’ve Let us Down. You're anti-intellectual and anti-eduction. Yes I did do this on purpose. Not a person who saw that bookshelf didn’t get the message. It was, at the risk of sounding hack, textbook communications.


Donald's Trump Cards
 
A brilliant article in the Daily Beast by anonymous Tweeter @TrumpEmail went perhaps closer than any previous attempt to strike into the heart of the Trump machine’s strategy and tactics.
Having analysed 2,000 marketing emails the author identified a seven phase playbook which we’ll briefly attempt to translate into British for you now. 

First: Make the recipient feel special. For Trump’s base this requires bombastic tactics similar to British morning television competitions: ‘YOU could achieve THIS and all you have to do is donate to the Trump campaign’. 

Second: Create time-sensitive urgency: NOW or NEVER

Third: Scarcity: GET THEM BEFORE THE GO (usually some tat merch)

Fourth: Emotional Blackmail: DON’T LET ME DOWN

Fifth: Omniscience: THE PRESIDENT HAS NOTICED YOUR GREAT WORK AND THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE THIS [TAT MERCH].
We rarely allude to our own work in these trends but the tactics the Trump campaign use to feign a personal connection between the president and his supporters are strikingly similar to those used by Santas to convince small children that they know who they are and what they want for Christmas. Of course Santa is far more statesmanlike.

Sixth: Belonging to an Exclusive Club: PLATINUM MEMBERSHIP FOR MY TOP 500 SUPPORTERS

Finally: The promise that your donation will be matched. Like Gift Aid but the gift is fascism. 
It’s cynical, soulless and totally lacking in substance. But it’s persistent and talks language that a significant segment of society wants to hear.
 
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Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

It's been an interesting week for stunt watchers so we're going to look at some of the best and worst.  

Selfridges' Surface-Level Sustainability

When we worked with Selfridges we saw it as our task to reanimate the spirit of Gordon Selfridge who, inspired by PT. Barnum, brought showmanship and visual storytelling to the high street. So we know and have the utmost respect for the brand’s ability to make headlines by combining dazzle with substance.

This  week's story about making high-end fashion pieces available for hire, though it made headlines impressively, lacks just a little of each. Rental has been mooted as a way of dampening the environmental impact of high-end fashion for a while now, and been a constant media discussion for the past year – attracting enough scrutiny that some have questioned how sustainable it really is.

Few dispute it as a step in the right direction, but as an outright solution to the industry’s environmental impact, fashion rental will make as much lasting difference as a ‘Wet Floor’ sign outside Chernobyl. In the new world brands are going to be fighting for their existence and the survivors will be those who offer genuine, radical leadership on wedge issues like sustainability. Paying these issues lip service might be worth a headline today but - unless backed up by a cultural overhaul- will not keep the future at bay for long.


We're Raven About This One Though...

A brilliant silly season scam landed yesterday from no less auspicious a source than the Tower of London. Legend has it that the Tower's world-famous ravens will only vacate their perches when the monarchy falls, and a Guardian articlethis week revealed that those very same ravens have been straying further than ever from home due to 'boredom'. 

Having a quasi-apocalyptic -at least in British terms- urban legend ‘come true’ just at the point when they most need a fresh influx of visitors (which, incidentally, would probably also prevent said onrushing harbinger of national ruin) is quintessential, daft, oddly symbolic, peak 2020 gallows humour and the perfect ammunition for the Twitterati and chief meme officers (now that they’re a thing) all over the country.
 
Proverbs, sayings, aphorisms and old wives tales all have their uses in communications. One of the standout examples is Pink Floyd’s appropriation of flying pigs. It was a simple, powerful image and everyone got the joke. In the age of virality and memes these are priceless characteristics. Well played.


Burger King and Ogilvy make Gamers Twitch

Some words from the big guy. First published on his blog Mark My Words

Another landmark in PR's fast food wars. On Thursday Ogilvy revealed that they had been using Twitch's sponsored text-to-speech shout out service - designed to read fan messages over famous feeds in exchange for a donation - to advertise Burger King. 

The bulk of press coverage for the stunt was gaming press reporting on how incensed the hack made the community. But its impact on the communications game will be bigger. Screw the backlash. This was a game changer.

With the advent of every new media comes the gold rush; the scramble for the advertising, comms and marketing industries to find a sweet spot in which commercial content can gain, or at least hijack an organic audience before the platform undergoes a Facebook style-hypercommercialisation.

What Ogilvy and Burger King have done here is gamed the system, exploited a huge loophole and gained a lot of attention. The fact that it wound some people up will not hurt them – quite the opposite. Before our industries diluted it into anodyne meaninglessness, this is the kind of campaign for which the term ‘disruptive’ was coined.


AI Could Give Improve New Life

When it first became clear that the arts and entertainment industries were in trouble, Mark Borkowski wrote a manifesto for The Stage urging producers to embrace new technology, mediums and platforms to take their artforms to a wider audience. 

Since then we've seen immersive theatre giants Punchdrunk promise a move into augmented reality gaming theatre and this week another spark of innovation in the form of improvbot.ai. 

One of the battalion of creatives bravely trying to create a digital world that will fill the cavernous void left in the arts calendar by the cancellation of the Edinburgh Fringe, Improvbot draws on 8 years of data from the festival to randomly generate concepts for shows, which are then improvised by performers. 

It's a smart use of existing technology. Improv isn't the edgiest or artforms and would potentially be vulnerable in a 'new normal' which was more hostile to the arts, but giving it a twist that will make it accessible to the MineCraft Generation could just be the difference between life and death. 

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This week we're examining a BBC balls-up, another TV reboot and rip-off culture.


The Cycle of Misery

A national scandal that has since been dwarfed by the A-Level ignominy enveloping the country coincided with the reignition of the conversation around the refugee crisis this week.

The reality is that the steady flow of boats containing those desperate enough to risk their life crossing the channel in a dinghy for the chance of a new one continues.
But that’s not how it’s been portrayed in public discourse, and although the news story itself is nonsense, it’s a useful case study on the malfunctioning gears of our news cycle.

The re-emergence of the refugee furore in the news cycle can be traced to what Marina Hyde described as a ‘second wave of nonsense’. The (currently unelected) Nigel Farage posted a video just post-lockdown in which he remonstrated with the use of public money to temporarily house asylum seekers in a hotel. The video was picked up by almost every UK media outlet, many of which enthusiastically sought comment from Nige, providing the spark needed to reignite the narrative that ‘floods’ of ‘migrants’ are ‘invading’ the UK by crossing the channel.

Our national broadcaster then saw fit to send a (rather sturdier) boat of their own onto the channel to effectively gawk at a group of Syrians baling out their leaking dinghy with a bucket. Sky News gleefully followed suit. The proximity between the rather fancy news boats and the low stakes of their journeys, and the life-and-death situation playing out on the dinghies created the uncomfortable effect that the plight of the less fortunate was being repurposed as a spectator spot, as entertainment.

The first part of the cycle – demagogue given undue support and political significance by the media, proliferating their narrative- is simply a fact of life these days. But handling the story so crassly is a(nother) massive own goal for the BBC. Expect a litany of complaints and a stubborn yet unconvincing public statement in the coming week or so.


Purpose in Vogue

In our fast-paced digital economy, rip-off culture has been a growing force.

Accessibility trumps originality – if you can provide a free product that everyone wants to use nothing else matters. Look at gaming – the free-to-play Battle Royale model has already been rinsed post-Fortnite, or Instagram’s brand-new Reels, the “TikTok clone”, consumers flock to platforms they’re comfortable with and they don’t have to fork out their cash for.

This week, we saw two ways brands deal with the culture. 1) Apple (in a similar style to the Hugo Boss takedown of small Welsh company Boss Brewery) represented the humourless behemoth, suing Super Healthy Kids spinoff Prepear over the usage of a pear as its logo despite being, well, a different fruit. 2) Evian showed them how to treat an actual rip-off with panache and grace when the French water merchants called out Coors Light on Twitteracknowledging the blatant rip-off of their brand in a light-hearted fashion.

Whatever the merits of each case, it's clear that branding is increasingly playing its part in the culture wars.


The ReFresh Prince

The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was a show which was consequential as much for its content - which swivelled from broad slapstick humour to impactful drama in a moment- as what it symbolised, class and culture conflicts and inconsistencies in America, but particularly black America, in the 90s.  

It made a global superstar of Will Smith, and hit headlines again this week when it was announced that a fan trailer for a grittier re-boot ‘Bel Air’ made on spec in 2019 had been picked up by Smith for development.

The fan trailer story is compelling and, combined with the high quality of the trailer itself, almost too good to be true.

But Smith’s consistent past claims that he’d allow The Fresh Prince to reboot ‘when hell freezes over’ suggest that if wasn’t a stunt - unless it was choreographed to unprecedented levels of perfection- and that he’s genuinely been swayed.

Smith’s involvement gives it heft (and the fun of speculating whether he might be up for stacking on a couple of lbs and taking on the role of Uncle Phil).

There’s social relevance too. The original took place against the backdrop of Rodney King and the LA Riots, the reboot in the charged America of Trump, BLM and George Floyd.

In summary, it’s a project which will generate headlines. The project announcement was of nothing more than the concept, which is now reportedly subject to a 5-way bidding war between all the streaming and network giants. For what amounts to a trade announcement, Bel Air has certainly made its mark.

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Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

This is a week tinged with sadness as one of the founding fathers of this newsletter departs Borkowski towers. We never name names but we'll miss our clarinet-playing Louis Theroux superfan. In the meantime we're looking at another superstar fighting for their reputation, the latest in the purpose wars and the seemingly bulletproof vanguard of bad boy YouTubers.

To Ellen Back for DeGeneres

Ellen DeGeneres might be too big to fail, but she’s had a very brave stab at getting herself cancelled. We’ve been examining the new DNA of celebrity by looking at both cancel culture, and our new breed of Gen Z icons (think Marcus Rashford and Greta Thunberg) and two things stick out about the Ellen case.

We’ve already talked about authenticity, and it’s certainly a factor here; nobody is as nice as Ellen was meant to be and so the image of everyone’s best mate began to wear thin and fade. Even Ellen knew it and tried to redress the balance with that ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’ NYT profile.

The other thing that public figures need to be mindful of is consistency: don’t be a hypocrite. Even beyond masking a toxic work environment with a ‘be kind’ mantra, Ellen was guilty of this in a number of ways; gassing Caitlyn Jenner for being a Republican only to then become BFFs with the almost comically toxic George W. Bush, acting the down-to-earth humanitarian before comparing being quarantined in her ludicrously opulent mansion to a jail sentence, the list goes on.

Here’s the rub; in 2020 you can only project a certain public image with confidence if there’s no chance that social media-friendly evidence exists of you doing something directly contradictory. Hypocrisy kills reputations.


Purpose in Vogue

Regular readers of the Trends will know by now just how important activism and social purpose is to 21^st century marketing. Whether genuine or not, brands need to show that they have something positive and meaningful to offer a world riven by identity politics, increasing inequality and impending climate catastrophe. It’s even more essential for legacy brands, looking to maintain their relevance in a media environment

Vogue UK’s September issue is just the latest example of this trend. Described by Editor Edward Enninful as a “rallying cry for the future”, the magazine features such “faces of hope” as Marcus Rashford, England star turned child poverty campaigner.

But there’s an itch. At the very same time, Vogue Hong Kong chose to feature multi-millionaire entrepreneur Kylie Jenner on the cover of the magazine’s August ‘Action’ edition, an individual who “has done nothing for Hong Kong’s fight for democracy”, as one critic tweeted.

Safe to say, it’s not a good look for the Vogue brand. If ‘activism marketing’ is to mean anything, it has to be backed up with genuine action. Dressing up a privileged, astonishingly wealthy influencer in the trappings of activism simply won’t do.


Jake Paul vs FBI

nternet villain Jake Paul hit headlines this week after reports surfaced that his million-pound mansion was raided by the FBI. Yet another ‘negative’ story for the YouTube enfant terrible whose platform is built on controversy.

Reports indicate the FBI have seized multiple firearms and information continues to drip out. 

Who cares? Excellent question. It does appear that this sort of controversy feeds fame for these high-profile influencers. Whether it’s a misdemeanour or an FBI investigation, it ultimately brings more rock'n'roll notoriety to a Disney kid turned YouTuber than it would to, say, an ageing shock jock musician.

Having recently released a single “Fresh Outta London” early signs are that this case is driving viewers to his content, and prolonging his time in the spotlight. He's profiting from his bad behavriour. 

Silencing these buffoons would require a seismic shift in the current climate; the likes of Logan Paul, 6ix9ine & James Charles have continued to benefit from ‘career threatening’ controversies. 

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