Borkowski Weekly Media Trends
Kim K's Unapologetic Unattainability
You may have spent your week anxious over the pandemic’s second wave, frustrated with party politics, or arguing online that your taxes should be going to feed hungry children. Whilst the rest of us mere mortals struggled with ongoing existential dread, Kim Kardashian West flew 30 of her closest friends to a private island off the coast of Tahiti to celebrate her 40th birthday.
KKW shared the story of her trip with her 67.1 million Twitter followers, and the strange humble-brag spread like wildfire across the platform, with countless memes and reposts of that infamous GIF. Just two days later, KKW broke the internet again as she shared a video of a hologram of her late father, who professed how proud he was of Kim for marrying the ‘most, most, most, most genius man, Kanye West’ - a birthday gift from the self-proclaimed genius himself. Whilst most of the world would keep such tender moments and milestones to themselves, KKW bared all, in Klassic Kardashian fashion.
People are complaining about the lack of awareness and failure to read the room, but we think they’re entirely missing the point. KKW has never been relatable, and has built an empire showcasing a life completely unattainable to the average person. Kim and her family are marketing experts, having used a decade of vitriol and controversy to their advantage to become one of the world’s most influential families - this is no different.
Count your lucky Starmers
This was the week that Sir Kier Starmer crashed into a Deliveroo driver, sending them to A&E with an injured arm. The tabloids loved it - splashing Deliveroo puns across their page 4 headlines.
Yet… the public didn’t really seem to care. Granted, it is not a major story: The juiciest part was a mundane misunderstanding - Labour’s official statement said he had spoken to a British Transport Police officer at the scene, when in fact it was an off-duty British Transport Police staff member. Kier swapped insurance details with the cyclist before reporting to the police station for questioning that evening.
Boring, yes. But a prime opportunity for ridicule regardless (if it were Johnson or May or Corbyn, or even Miliband, we’d have a field day). Instead, Sir Kier gets a lovely pile of the benefit of the doubt.
Even then the scrutiny was soon replaced with the (almost equally unwelcome) publication of EHRC Report into antisemitism. Starmer had a chance to score some brownie points with the public at large by suspending his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn for his defiant (some would say pigheaded and conspiratorial) response.
What’s for certain is that he is working hard to stay on the right side of the nation’s moral compass - deftly dodging any opportunity for mockery or doubt. If this week is anything to go by, it’s working - with Labour taking a
5 point lead in the polls.
Facebook's Fate
Back in October 2019, we predicted the following:
Facebook pitches and sways already - but as we enter the stormy seas of a Presidential election we could see it capsize. This will be the last Presidential election that Facebook enters as a titanic company. By 2024 it’ll broken by a combination of regulation, polarisation or user exodus - all driven by mistrust.
A year into that prediction and we still feel quietly confident. This time next week, Biden will probably be President-Elect and speculation around whether Facebook's most steadfast critic Elizabeth Warren’s pitch to be Treasury Secretary has worked. Whether she gets it or not, her vow to ‘break up big tech’, will surely resonate through the legislature. As for our prediction on polarisation, well - look at the news. Lastly, we predicted a user exodus, which has already begun in North America. Last quarter US users numbered at 198 million, now it has 196 million. Maybe not a torrent yet, but Facebook is beginning to look shakier.
BBC Civil War
The BBC’s new director general Tim Davie has wasted no time cracking down on journalists’ public expression of personal opinions, particularly on political issues, in what are described as ‘anti-bias’ measures.
This was a controversial move. The BBC’s need to avoid bias is consistently held up as an excuse for platforming what most subjective but clear-thinking people would consider extreme, even dangerous views. But the criticism went deeper. Speculation was rife that, given Davie’s
close connections to the government, their famed ambivalence towards the publicly funded broadcaster, and the rising levels of vitriol aimed at their handling of the pandemic by BBC journalists Tweeting ‘in a personal capacity’, there was an ulterior motive of limiting channels through which the corporation’s representative could potentially damage Boris and his merry band.
This week things took a
step down a path which suggests there is more at play, one that will almost certainly exacerbate the contention surrounding the initial measures.
Journalists have been banned from ‘virtue signalling’ - an ill-defined and politicised term itself, and one which many interpreted as an attack on journalists expressing any opinion that could be considered left-wing. Journalists have also been banned from attending ‘politicised’ LGBTQ events including associating themselves with certain aspects of Pride. This is speculated to be a wish to steer clear of the utterly toxic culture war around trans rights but it’s set the BBC’s ‘anti-bias’ agenda on a collision course with its employees’ freedom of expression, one that could be more dangerous and sinister than any reporters going to Pride or, say, expressing support for Marcus Rashford.
There are rumblings of revolt, and, far from steadying the ship, the BBC could be heading for another turbulent chapter in its already-rocky recent history.
Oobah the Top
This week saw the return of the internet’s greatest exponent of high-concept pranks under the increasingly half-hearted guise of gonzo journalism, Oobah Butler.
Having made his
garden shed the number one reviewed restaurant on Trip Advisor, sent lookalikes to do his media commitments when it went viral and then made an app - ‘Oobah’- through which people can hire a body double to do tasks they’d rather avoid on their behalf, his next self-assigned mission was to deliver a successful case study for his doppelganger business.
Through some choreography that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of Hustle, Oobah managed to get a man out of doing a
skydive with his wife by replacing him with a (French) lookalike.
In an age when purpose, authenticity and other such serious moral building blocks drive so much of public relations, it’s important to admire a stunt (and when you strip all the VICE and Dulwich hipster mannerisms away from Oobah’s work that is essentially what he is doing) which exists purely for entertainment purposes.
If there’s a lesson here it comes from examining the skillset which gives Oobah such an innate sense of what will go viral: he’s culturally well-connected (watch ‘The Shed’ back and check out how many acclaimed comedians pop up as his mates), he’s funny, he has a prankster’s eye for the balance between mockery and pathos, and he tears through the wafer-thin fabric of shallow ritualism which drives metropolitan life in the 21st Century.
It’s a potent mix, and it’s driving probably the best stunt artist in the world at the moment.
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Borkowski Weekly Media Trends
Reliance on Thames Floaters Stunts PR Profession
Mark Borkowski caused some "unintentional" controversy yesterday with a PR Week Column lamenting the lack of imagination and originality, and the missed opportunity of Amazon Prime's decision to float a giant Borat down the Thames to promote his upcoming sequel.
There have been jokes among PRs about 'float it down the Thames' stunts being the last bastion of the unimaginative for decades now. Not even the joke is original anymore. It didn't feel unduly controversial to call it out, and was done with tongue at least partially in cheek.
And yet clearly this post touched a nerve. Dozens of comments, mostly from PRs, maligned mean old Mark for daring to believe that Amazon's 'Brewster's Millions' approach to marketing might at least buy one original thought.
To be clear, it didn't. Other 'stunts' to promote the film included sending journalists branded mugs, a mankini flash mob in Australia, and putting a mankiki on Dorset's Cerne Abbas Giant - which isn't bad but it's a diluted rip-off of what Beatwax did for The Simpsons Movie 13 years ago.
These tropes might buy a few seconds attention, maybe even a Tweet or a clickbait article but they're ultimately cheap and disposable. If you were a client, would that be how you wanted your product, brand or project treated?
The number of people getting their knickers in a twist in defence of what is essentially a very expensive billboard because ‘it did the job’ or ‘PR is not art’ only serves to underline the jobsworth mediocrity and dearth of imagination that’s dragging this industry further into the mire.
Dave Trott put it brilliantly on Twitter: 'Great anything is art', but even if purism over the creative potential of the craft makes you cringe, anybody in any profession with pretensions of expertise or any degree of vocational self-respect must be dedicated to the pursuit of excellence, to helping their trade progress and thrive. Bluntly, the response to this article showed that PR is full of people not only willing to settle for mediocre, but willing to defend it. Anything for an easy life, eh?
Sky's Stinker
When producing a friendly TV programme – particularly a light-hearted reality show - it’s always important to follow the universal golden rule… no Nazis!
It was a painful week for Sky History, unintentionally but flagrantly breaking said rule in quite some style. No, this wasn’t a documentary about far-right loonies; instead, a new woodwork-based talent show called The Chop: Britain’s Top Woodworker.
In a now deleted Tweet, Sky History teased comedian Lee Mack bantering with experienced woodman Darren Lumsden – a charismatic character covered head-to-toe in tattoos...one of which was an 88 displayed prominently on his cheek.
88 is a white supremacist numerical code for "Heil Hitler", which caught the attention of Twitter.
It gets worse. Instead of reverting to damage limitation stations Sky attempted to double down claiming ‘88’ marked the date of Darren’s father death, which was emphatically squashed by said Father who is “very much alive”.
This is a hard lesson for Sky – how not to deal with a crisis. The show has been hastily scrapped for now and we’re unlikely to see a return…
Burnham Desire
The political tug of war between Westminster and the North of England came to a head this weekend as Boris Johnson and Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, struggled to come to a compromise over placing Manchester under further lockdown restrictions. In short, Burnham requested at least £65 million in funding from the Government to help support businesses forced to shut. Westminster refused to stretch their pockets, countering with £60 million. Burnham refused.
Burnham was then informed that Manchester would be going in to Tier 3 lockdown with a mere £22 million – on live TV. His raw reaction and passion to provide for his city was captured for all to see, accusing the Tories of ‘playing poker with people’s lives’.
The regional mayor was swept up in a wave of good publicity.
Media on both sides of the political spectrum got on board the hype train. The left proclaimed Burnham ‘King of the North’, and right-wing newspapers published whole think pieces on what made the Labour politician so appealing, elevating him to the height of political PR success – the cult figure.
It’s been a great week for Andy Burnham’s reputation, and one we imagine he hopes to maintain. We all know a regional mayor with a loyal fanbase can go on to big things…
US Election: Campaigning for the TikTok & Twitch Generations
From the legendary and mysterious scratchy recordings of Lead Belly’s satanic solos to Joy Division’s signature high basslines being a result of poor bass amps - culture has always been set within and pushed against the tramlines of technology. Those that ride the wave of change best become era-defining. Politics is no different.
From Clinton’s primitive voter profiling, through to the social media revolution that Obama built in 2008 and ignored until the 2012 re-election campaign. Hillary lost in 2016 for many reasons, but one of them was because she tried to perfect the 2012 tech playbook while the Trump campaign invented new strategies. Many political campaigns lose because they attempt to refight finished wars.
For example, Trump 2020 is using the same strategies as he did last time to ever diminishing returns. His attacks don’t bite like they did last time because he hasn’t adapted. Biden however, has. Covid-19 and his refusal to hold orthodox rallies has forced his campaign into more obvious drive-thru rallies and zoom conferences, but it’s also seen the first push into computer games.
Last week Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez streamed (or played live) a game that drew 439,000 people to watch. She urged them to vote. In September, in-game yard signs appeared in Animal Crossing. Now these things may not seem awe-inspiring in themselves, but they point to a campaign that is committed to finding new ways to reach voters. That is, in a nutshell, a winning strategy.
Borkowski Weekly Media Trends
The Dawn of the Splinternet
The great irony of the internet is that it was meant to bring us together but that it locked us into our affirmatory echo chambers.
Analysts will look back on last night as the zenith of that zenith that fracturing. The internet is poised to become a better regulated place.
The simultaneous town-hall debates were a brilliant metaphor for the splinternet.
Television, the media of a shared experience and settled narrative, symbolically broke under the tensions of the Trump approach to campaigning and allowed a split debate. Nobody could watch both at the same time. That was the point. That is our age.
Not for much longer.
At the same time, Big Tech finally began acting responsibly – independently. Just this week YouTube banned significant Qanon accounts while Facebook and Twitter refused to push the unsubstituted Hunter Biden rumour. This is unprecedented – particularly without direct pressure.
Why? Because Silicon Valley thinks Biden will win. They are more scared of the prospect of a regulatory backlash than of Trump’s pouting. That is, in itself, significant news for nervous Biden supporters.
We have to hope that Trump, the culture warrior, the manipulator of unregulated news channels and the personification of echo chamber politics. We have to hope he has worn out the divisive tools that took him to power.
Are things going South for Dominic West and Lily James?
Actors Dominic West and Lily James made headlines this week when paparazzi caught them getting cosy on a trip to Rome – Dominic’s wedding ring conspicuously missing. Dominic quickly returned to the UK for a photo shoot with his wife Catherine, putting on a united front and handing the photographers a handwritten note insisting they were still happily married. In a pre-filmed interview promoting her new film Rebecca, Lily happened to claim she lives her life making mistakes, and her character “disobeyed her husband, had affairs” and “was basically brilliant”. The slightly bizarre unfolding of events meant that they stayed right in the public eye.
With Lily’s new film released this weekend, and the pair co-starring in an upcoming BBC adaptation we’re not entirely convinced this isn’t all a publicity stunt.
Relationships, whether real or fake, have always been a way for celebrities to promote themselves and their work. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart’s on-again, off-again relationship tended to be on-again just as the next instalment of the Twilight saga was set to be released. Everyone was talking about the chemistry between Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes when performances of their song Senorita got steamy. Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston’s whirlwind romance deflected the attention from the bad press she received during her ongoing feud with Kanye West.
The most successful 'showmance' is arguably Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s. Their rumoured affair was all over the tabloids following the release of their film A Star is Born. The pair denied any relationship, but they continued to dominate the news agenda in the run up to awards season, culminating with that performance at the 2019 Academy Awards – where Lady Gaga just happened to take home an Oscar.
It may be too early to tell if Lily James and Dominic Cooper’s fling is a romance or a fauxmance, but there’s no denying the publicity has meant that Google searches for their names have increased dramatically. More people are seeing the news about Rebecca’s release and reading the reviews. Unfortunately, they aren’t very good…
doggd pursuit of success
For most Boomers among us TikTok is a headscratcher. The platform’s simplicity can be quite difficult to get your head around. You don’t have to like, comment, follow or engage with content, you simply have a personal feed that delivers endless content.
It’s the fastest popular social media platform to generate content. And as we’re collectively getting to grips with it, we’ve seen countless viral moments come and go.
This month, we’ve seen one viral moment break out of TikTok to be a huge splash across the internet and also permeating the media.
I’m talking about 420doggface208 on his skateboard sipping cranberry juice and lip-syncing “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. Here’s the video.
This genuine moment has captured pretty much everyone, in a way that takes you back to a time when social media wasn’t run by evil overlords stealing your data and destroying democracies.
And of course, in 2020, it didn’t stay genuine for very long with Ocean Spray jumping on the trend immediately buying him a truck after going viral, whilst Mick Fleetwood rather shrewdly recreated the video himself.
Unsurprisingly Dreams exploded on the streaming platforms generating over 36 million global streams in the last two weeks alone.
Seems like everyone won here and with his 4m followers and 42m likes, Doggface aka Nathan Apodaca can ride of in the sunset having captured thousands of hearts.
Fatimeme
This week, social media feeds have been, and continue to be, awash with memes in a particular format: a picture of a famous face, captioned ‘[X]’s next job could be in [X] (they just don’t know it yet)’. Some directly took the aim at UK politicians (see Rishi Sunak’s Wagamama dream, and Dominic Raab’s new life at sea), whilst some starred the world’s greatest creative talents, imagining the possibility of Banksy’s next job in dog food tastingor, say, Anna Wintour’s new career in waste-disposal.
The proliferation of this meme was in response to a poster created by QA, a tech educator, for a Government backed scheme to get more people into careers in technology. The ad shows a ballerina, ‘Fatima’, tying her ribbons, with the caption ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet).’
The image prompted fury online: the memes were only half of it, an outpouring of incensed tweets and articles followed too.
The outrage is understandable. The ad condensed into one image what much of the population sees as an ultimate betrayal: The government refusing to offer further funding to the creative industries - those that undoubtedly enhance all our lives – and Rishi Sunak saying “musicians and others in [the] arts should retrain and find other jobs” (according to a, now deleted, tweet from ITV News).
The interesting detail here is that the ad, contrary to popular assumption, was created and released several years ago. Instead, many assumed that the ad followed Sunak’s comments; that it was directly aimed at the arts, tactlessly encouraging creatives to quit their dreams. It was a moment in which the walls of left’s own echo chamber could be clearly seen: anger in the shape of tweets and memes bouncing off the sides, the facts lying out of reach.
The advert does, indeed, speak to the hypocrisy of the government, their failure to value the creative industries that bring joy to all of us. But commentators’ quickness to jump on the fury-train without assessing the facts undermines their argument.
It speaks to the potential of an image that, when timed perfectly, it can resonate so deeply with people en masse. But in such a fast-paced, retweetable world, the immediacy of something’s appeal can also be its detriment: the huge impact that the Fatima ad has had is slightly tainted by the misconceptions surrounding it. Yes, it is comfortable, here, in our respective bubbles of comment and opinion. But facts must be prioritised if anything is to have true power.
Borkowski Weekly Media Trends
The New #ProudBoys
Remember back in June when K-Pop stans
weaponized themselves against white supremacists by taking over the WhiteLivesMatter and WhiteoutWednesday hashtags? It was an ingenious move, one which saw the feeds of right-wing users overtaken with performances by K-pop band BTS. The impact? A redundant hashtag, jammed with K-pop spam, unusable by its original creators.
This felt so significant because of the physicality of the action. For a long time, the internet has been used by people to shout about what they believe in (and shout at those who don’t), but this very practical form of political action feels like a development. It establishes hashtags and feeds as physical places, ones that can be, quite literally, invaded and occupied.
This week saw another deployment of this tactic - this time by the LGBTQ+ community against the far-right ‘western chauvinist’ group Proud Boys - after actor George Takei mused to his followers about taking over the
#ProudBoys hashtag with images of gay pride. Within hours, the tag was flooded with images of gay couples kissing and celebrations of LGBTQ+ love, overpowering the messages of hate being fired out by the Proud Boys and their supporters. Unsurprisingly, when some Proud Boys subsequently made a move to rename themselves as
#Leathermen, the gay community were quick to oblige...
This is yet another blow for Proud Boys, who just last week were denied of their iconic uniform – a black and yellow Fred Perry polo-shirt - when
the British brand denounced the anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, anti-women group, and suspended the manufacture of the style.
At a time when much of our political activism is reduced to a flurry of tweets and captions (whoever can yell the loudest) these very physical barriers to the Proud Boys visual and vocal expression feel all the more powerful.
Gunnersaurus on the Brink of Extinction
How does that saying go? You can’t put a price on a sporting mascot. When it comes to football, fans and cynics alike often find common ground on the extortionate role money plays in the ‘beautiful game’. And this week is a shining example following the news that Gunnersaurus – the beloved Arsenal FC mascot – was let go as part of the club’s cost-cutting measures.
For those unaware, Jerry Quy – the man behind the mask – missed his brother’s wedding to suit up for an Arsenal home game. A household name for the Arsenal faithful, fans immediately took to social media to voice their thoughts, paying tribute to Gunnersaurus’ 27 years of service.
Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke is not known for his bedside manner at the best of times. He and his cronies made a huge error in failing to understand the value of Gunnersaurus, and their brand suffered for it. The disparity between footballers’ wages and those that run the club on the ground is enormous and is a point of contention for many, and one exacerbated by COVID-induced financial constraints.
This is an appalling decision from the Arsenal execs, showing such little regard for staff who breathe life into the corporate machine of England’s topflight football clubs, particularly one of Football’s
most famous and beloved mascot.
In the end, it was an Arsenal player that helped the club out of this PR nightmare – Mesut Ozil offered to reimburse
Gunnersaurus' full salary. A touch of class, although many claimed the former superstar could make himself most useful by just putting the costume on!
An Allegra Allegory
The most annoying part of politico-media land is its inability to feign interest in anything outside of London. Do you remember when central Manchester flooded over Christmas and it barely got a front page? Imagine if the journalists, commentators and politicians had had to bend their commutes around flooded underground stations… We would be getting TV dramas, government resignations and annual days of mourning until the turn of the next millennium.
However, this sin of self-indulgence needs to be overlooked when it comes to the new government. That’s because this government is run by journalists. Johnson and Gove are both ex-journalists. Cummings is married to a journalist at the Spectator. The newly announced spokesperson for the government is Allegra Stratton, an ex-Spectator journalist.
It is a rich irony that this government is full of ex-media people that don’t fear the media.
Does that tell us that these journalists turned politicians always understood the limits of the pen? Or does it show us a government who understand that the closer you pull the media, the more their neutrality is tarnished in the eyes of the public – and without that, there is less to fear from them?
The Nigerian Spring?
A reminder of the global power of social media has been simmering across Twitter for the past couple of weeks, coming to the boil again in the past 48 hours. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and one of the world’s most widespread diasporas, whose complex and, at times, tragic 60 year history belies its short lifespan, has played host to a number of viral protest movements which have dominated worldwide trends on the social media site.
First came
#Nigeria60AndUseless. A straight hijacking of Independence Day celebrations highlighting corruption, economic mismanagement, poverty, post-colonial divide-and-conquer stoking of ethnic tensions, and a greedy obsession with oil.
Then this week
#EndSARS became the number one trend worldwide, protesting police brutality in Nigeria and expressing solidarity with a physical protest calling for the disbandment of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. John Boyega Tweeted his support and our own national hero of the hour Marcus Rashford had his replies flooded with Nigerian fans begging him to take up the cause as his next campaign.
Those touting social media as the saviour of human rights in 2010-11 during the ‘Arab Spring’ have gradually been eating their words over the past decade. Nobody in 2020 is suggesting that social media is a silver bullet for free speech and government accountability. But these campaigns serve as a reminder that it can amplify voices that otherwise – especially in our Western-centric bubble- might go unheard.