February

Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

First, the big story… Mx Potato Head

On Mark My Words this week, Mark B praises Hasbro’s latest publicity stunt—announcing a gender-neutral Mr. Potato Head. He predicts a boom in sales and puts the latest stunt in the context of the Toy industry’s long history of inviting controversy and playing with the cultural codes of the day. Check it out.

And in other trends…

Paramount Plus, Frasier & fond but fuzzy memories of the nostalgia revival

In the past 18 months, the same nostalgia trip that inspired billion-dollar reboots of Star Wars, Jurassic Park et. al. when it visited Hollywood has spread to the world of comedy.

Over here we got a modestly successful revamp of puppet-based political satire Spitting Image (though nowhere near enough to break its host platform Britbox out of the wooden box in which it arrived), a solidly successful revamp of Alan Partridge (not that he ever really went away) in One Show send-up This Time, and an uproariously successful one-off update of Gavin and Stacey.

Across the pond we saw a respectable but unspectacular revival of cult 00s campfest Will & Grace and the largely ridiculed announcement that Sex and the City would be returning without its best character.

Now Paramount Plus has entered the streaming wars; at its vanguard is the return after seventeen years of legendary sitcom Frasier (alongside fellow forerider, a CG revival of cult cartoon Rugrats).

Although many previous revivals have—despite often lacking Frasier’s critical acclaim—been at least a qualified success, this is still a risk. First there’s Kelsey Grammar, whose reputation has been battered by substance abuse, relationship scandals and his divisive politics. He limped to the end of the original Frasier which his national treasure status intact, but the intervening years have not been kind and he’s no longer the box office banker he once was. With John Maroney sadly no longer with us, this places greater emphasis on the return of David Hyde-Pierce, Jane Leeves and Peri Gilpin as his supporting cast which has not yet been confirmed.

Behind the camera there are further uncertainties. Lead writer Chris Harris is surely a fine professional, but his major credit is How I Met Your Mothera show that lost its way so badly it hasn’t even had a streaming revival.

Then there’s Rugrats. For the kids who watched it in its heyday (whose own kids are now appropriately-aged) it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s in the same echelon as Frasier in terms of reverence. In its animation, voice cast and comic sensibilities it was a family-friendly aperitif before the golden-era Simpsons main course. But it faces the same challenge every family reboot does (a recent example in the UK is Dennis—formerly the Menace—and Gnasher) of being able to maintain its carefree weirdness and include jokes for the adults too, while meeting a new generation’s political correctness standards.

Alongside Frasier, it’s been a good announcement in terms of grabbing initial headlines and giving its intended audience a dopamine hit, but there’s a lot still to get right if these reboots are going to the bedrock of a successful streaming platform.


No More Times

This week legendary electronic music duo, Daft Punk, announced their breakup.

Daft Punk’s ability to create hard-hitting house music that was catchy and accessible was unrivalled. They carved their own unique sound, whilst embodying clear references and influences from other genres. They were the first big artists to evolve the Kraftwerk aesthetic for the 21st century, fusing disco, soul, funk, and rock – a massive influence on today’s pop music and the genre bending we see today.

Despite their influence on popular music, Daft Punk had a distant relationship with the media, detaching their brand from the clutches of fame. Whether it was their anonymity in the early days, which clearly influenced The Weeknd or even Gorillaz to boycotting social media, the act had a certain level of mystique.

It was clear, they never played the fame game focusing on the music rather than developing their brand. Despite this conscious effort to stay one step ahead of stardom, their robot personas made the act so much more alluring, with a dystopian edge that makes them more relevant in this information age. They’ve kept their personal lives personal, which is a refreshing change of pace, right to the end. We don’t know why they split up, but Daft Punk have left such a huge mark on popular culture, whether they wanted to or not.

And finally….


The SNP might be on the brink…but not the one you think

Scotland will soon enter its second decade as a de facto one-party state. Like other nations in this situation, a significant factor has been the cult of personality that has formed around the dominant SNP’s last two leaders, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.

Their supporters’ devotion has been intensified by the paucity of scandal-free political talent elsewhere in the UK in this time and the steady, concurrent tribalisation of our political discourse.

The result: Salmond and Sturgeon became iconoclastic figures, synonymous with the independence movement and with political nationalism; that’s a lot of ideological eggs in a couple of baskets.

This truth was illuminated by allegations against Salmond that, despite not amounting to a criminal conviction, painted (at best) an ugly picture of his attitude towards women.

Had the SNP been able to distance themselves from their former leader, who has been out of frontline politics for more than five years, they’d still be cruising. But Sturgeon has been implicated, accused of breaking the ministerial code by lying about when she first became aware of the allegations.

This truth was illuminated by allegations against Salmond that, despite not amounting to a criminal conviction, painted (at best) an ugly picture of his attitude towards women.

Had the SNP been able to distance themselves from their former leader, who has been out of frontline politics for more than five years, they’d still be cruising. But Sturgeon has been implicated, accused of breaking the ministerial code by lying about when she first became aware of the allegations.

Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

This week’s audio debrief features special guest Lottie Wilkins, our head of Corporate PR. (Plus, listen all the way to the end to hear Mark Borkowski’s Trend of the Week!)


The perils of fame

Demi Lovato has become the latest celebrity to create a tell-all documentary about their life in the limelight (think Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana on her struggle with her public image; Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out on the body shaming she endured whilst in Little Mix) – ostensibly to set the record straight about her experience.
The trailer for Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, which will release as a Youtube Original in March, sees clips of interviews with Demi, her friends, family and fellow celebrities, cut with footage showing Demi’s ascent to stardom, and her public struggles with mental health and addiction – culminating with a near-fatal overdose in 2018 that, the trailer reveals, gave Demi ‘three strokes and a heart attack’. It’s a soundbite that has already earned international coverage.

It’s an understandable move by Demi to reclaim her narrative when, like so many other stars, the media has dictated the discourse around her life—her career, health, body and all—for years. But there is an inevitable tension here. Demi’s documentary is a critique of fame and the damage it can cause, and yet it is also a publicity exercise in itself: the more publicity the documentary drives, the more Demi’s critique of the fame and the media will be heard. And, importantly, the more airtime Demi’s upcoming music projects will get.

Is Demi playing the media at their own game, or submitting to the system that broke her? It is undoubtedly both at once. It feels poignant in a week that saw the release of Framing Britney Spears, which tells a similar story with a wholly different outcome. Britney, manipulated and demonized by the media, attempted to lash out against the system, and found herself paying the price: her autonomy was taken away from her.
We must ask if Britney’s story would’ve been different if she had found fame ten years later. As Demi’s story shows, maybe. Social media has always given Demi and her peers a voice in a way that Britney never had, though not without them sacrificing some part of themselves to the industry. It remains to be seen how the child stars of today cope.


Deplatforming the deplatformers

The right-wing punditry are gathering around the Tory government’s ‘War on Woke’. Charities are being summoned to the headmaster's office to explain why they criticize Britain’s colonial past. (Mentioning that Churchill was PM during the Bengal Famine which killed 3 million is evidently not the message that a “proud and confident nation” projects.) Boris has announced plans for a free speech czar who will clamp down on progressive Student Unions to make sure they don’t get to tell their teachers who speaks on campus. And the MailOnline now have a front page section featuring triumphant Victories from the ‘War on Woke’.

Despite some stalwart conservative voices (not least among them Lord Ed Vaizey) warning that the war on woke is one that the Tories can’t win, the Tories evidently see an opportunity to provoke further outrage about statue iconoclasm. Though we are sympathetic to some of the concerns about cancel culture and de-platforming, these are aspects of a larger escalation of dogmatism on both sides of the political spectrum, which are the result, and not the cause of, the collapse of public fora for debate. Because ‘free speech’ can also be used as a blunt weapon to muzzle… speakers, the Tories’ actions further fracture the body politic (while the real baddies—who literally profit from division—escape stage left.)

Here’s the rub: Oliver Dowden claims that we must not ‘purge uncomfortable events from our past’—meaning, don’t tear down statues to ambivalent figures. Let people see them and decide. He’s right. But history also comes pre-purged of complexity. The statue itself, as a form, is perhaps the least historically complex document that there is. To grasp what makes a society good or worth being part of, people must escape the ideological blindness that accumulates around national symbols. To be sure, the present-day does not have an exclusive claim on moral goodness. To think so would be dangerous and wrong, and amongst Winston Churchill’s badnesses there were no doubt a good many goodnesses. But at the same time, to appreciate the good in a person or a nation means having the capacity to feel ashamed when they have done wrong. Shame is not opposed to pride; it’s the necessary condition for it. Maybe Dowden is right, in that default shame, without historical context, can be masochistic. It’s certainly depressing. But patriotism without the possibility of shame is nationalism.




EdFringe recruits Phoebe to Bridge gap on streaming giants

The arts and culture landscape was transforming irreversibly long before COVID, and an already culturally and popularly-dominant home entertainment scene now utterly dwarfs a live sector that has been dormant for a year.

In this new world the streaming giants – Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO, you could count the BBC too – have taken on an almost godlike role when it comes to influencing tastes, starting trends and creating stars.

This is the reality facing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which retains its billing as the world’s biggest arts festival even as its influence wanes to the extent that some major London-based media outlets no longer even consider it national, let alone global, news.

This week the Fringe appointed Phoebe Waller-Bridge as its first President—a newly-created ambassadorial role aimed at exerting soft power on the festival’s behalf as its organisers look to recover from a missed 2020 and a likely-diminished 2021.

The strategy is clear, Waller-Bridge is an Edinburgh legend, a Fringe fairytale—transported (albeit with the support of some powerful cultural operators) from a 60 seat studio in a cave to Hollywood in a few short years. Crucially, she is known and respected by the industry’s giants, and part of her ambassadorship will be to persuade them that the Fringe is still the place to find the next PWB or the next Fleabag.

It’s not a bad plan but it has its limits. On one hand PWB symbolises the status of the Fringe as a breeding ground for world class talent, but on the other she (through no fault of her own) symbolises a lot of the attributes for which the Fringe is most heavily criticised; she’s posh, she’s white and (although this criticism is mostly localised to the most belligerent Scottish nationalists) she’s English.

The Fringe has a diversity problem, and in an era when all the kingmakers in the entertainment industry are scrambling to platform a wider range of voices, Edinburgh in August isn’t currently seen as the place to find them. It might be where you find the PWB’s but it’s not where they’ll find the next Michaela Coel. Popular though she may be, Phoebe Waller-Bridge isn’t going to alter that perception.


Cruz Flees Storm But Twitter Storm Is The Real Winner

Texas is currently in a state of emergency as a huge storm is sweeping across southern America killing nearly 50 people, leaving millions without power.

As Texans’ attempt to weather the storm, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is weathering a totally different storm… Twitter. Cruz drew widespread criticism after attempting to flee the country mid-crisis. He also appeared to deflect blame by using his daughters as an excuse to flee AND it emerged that he’d left his dog Snowflake behind.

A quite extraordinary decision, from a man who is no stranger to Twitter conflict, recently spatting with Seth Rogen who has relaunched the beef following his response to leaving Texans to ‘freeze to death’.

It’s the way social media has reacted that is most interesting – using memes to raise awareness of Cruz’s clinic on how not to deal with a crisis – documenting the various stages of his disappearance.

The shareability of memes creates astronomical virality for these sorts of events – more so than any news articles or broadcast can do. The way memes morph and mutate as stories progress almost timestamp blunders and Cruz have, once again, been at the heart of the joke. This story has been taken over by the meme and long may it continue!

Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

Weetabix x Heinz Baked Beans

It may not quite have done enough to be named PR Week’s Campaign of the Week (ahem) but a certain food wheeze set Twitter alight this week…

Bringing some much-needed silliness to the table, Weetabix set Twitter alight this week with a picture of two ‘bix covered in baked beans. It was part of a series of posts on Weetabix’s Twitter account showing the breakfast cereal paired with staple British brands (Marmite and an Innocent smoothie featured the other two), ostensibly to demonstrate the versatility of the humble wheat biscuit.

Except this apparent serving suggestion was far from innocent. The image of beans atop crunchy bricks of wheat on an ordinary looking dining table was hugely evocative – due to the unavoidable familiarity of the two foodstuffs to every British citizen – and thus was perfectly pitched to cause maximum uproar. That the tweet feigned nonchalance only fuelled the outrage. Cue the “SURELY THEY HAVE TO BE JOKING”s.

Other brand Twitter accounts quickly weighed in: “This is not a match…” said @Tinder, “U ok hun?” said @Nandos. Specsavers arguably won out with this brilliant reaction. The scramble by other household names to get a bite of conversation bordered on cringeworthy: brands have identified the opportunity to maximise brand trust by crafting witty social media personas, designed to build on consumers’ feelings of familiarity. It’s a feel-good strategy, and it works. But this example may signal the peak of this trend.

Back to Weetabix though, and good job well done. A simple activation that perfectly straddles the provocative and the mundane, thus promoting an emotional response in (almost) every UK citizen. It says it all that the day after the tweet, both Weetabix and Heinz were trending on Waitrose & Partners (via Deliveroo). Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind some beans for dinner…


Is the Sun Rising on a new era in Japan?

Following derogatory comments about women from its chief executive, the Tokyo Olympics committee is navigating yet another crisis, after doubts were raised, in January, about whether the games would be able to proceed at all, amid concerns about another coronavirus outbreak. The former prime minister’s apology and subsequent resignation marks a significant shift in the country’s work culture, which, some young professionals have claimed, remains discriminatory against women, despite former PM Shinzo Abe’s ‘womenomics’, the push for more women in the workforce. 

The significant fallout caused a sharp reversal. Before the resignation of octogenarian Yoshiro Mori as head, almost 400 people withdrew applications to volunteer at the Olympic games, and Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said she would not attend a meeting of Olympic officials in protest. Athletes, meanwhile, called Mori’s statements outdated and sexist. 

The reputational damage to the Olympic Committee takes places against the backdrop of changing cultural currents both abroad and in Japan. Within the country, the pandemic has brought about a new conversation about the relation between men and women (particularly, about how domestic labour is divided up) and brought new light to the fact that less than 10 per cent of Japan’s listed companies have a single female member on their board.  

 Whether or not Mori’s resignation heralds a significant change for Japan’s national work culture, it at least establishes that those representing international bodies will be held to the most progressive standards for equality set by big, global entities like the U.N. and the World Economic Forum. Mori, who reports being ‘scolded’ by his wife and daughters, provides an opportunity to think about how the push for gender equality might manifest differently across different cultural contexts. Recall that the Japanese have typically taken American products and done them better than America itself: think blue jeans, jazz, and bourbon. It is interesting to consider how another American export, the #MeToo movement, will be taken up and modified by a culture whose primary differences— as cultural anthropologists have argued—lie in its emphasis on ‘shame’ rather than ‘guilt’. Crisis managers, keep your ears to the ground.
 

Celebrity Publicists are forgetting Comms #101 and becoming the story

As the commercial clout of traditional media wanes in comparison to the flourishing world of brand and individual-owned channels, the power balance between the gatekeepers of said powerful brands and individuals – agents, managers, publicists- and the journalists they no longer rely on exclusively for their public profile has shifted in favour of the former.

This was the subject of a recent blog by Telegraph music and culture journalist Eleanor Mills in which she recounted creeping growth in the proportion of a profile article celebrity publicists feel it’s their right to control.

It’s easy to understand the rationale behind it; if their client has a social media following in the tens of millions who will lap up their every stage-managed, ghost-written corporate message, then they just don’t need the publicity of traditional outlets unless reassured they’ll get a certain level of benefit from it.

But journalists, at least at the level we’re talking about, are a canny, principled and stubborn bunch, and they have means of keeping the PR machine in line.

However much some publicists may think themselves the senior partners nowadays, journalists possess a nuclear switch we never will. If a publicist blacklists a journalist, that journalist’s career generally goes on – often bolstered by their bold defence of editorial independence. However, if a publicist ends up ‘becoming the story’ in a way that reflects badly on their client, then they are a goner.

Real life showbiz isn’t like ‘Call My Agent’ where the heart-of-gold celebrity good-naturedly shrugs off your misstep and drags you out to drink commiseratory pastis until earlier hours. If you mess up a major profile for your client by getting too involved – however much you were following orders or attempting to save them from themselves- you have an excellent chance of getting fired.

Spare a thought then for Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ publicists who, blatantly against the wishes of formidable interviewer Simon Hattenstone, sat in on the film star’s Guardian profile and attempted to deflect a series of difficult questions about how Chopra Jonas reconciled certain apparently conflicting values. Their interventions were duly written into the piece along with subtle but firm hints of defensive diva behaviour on the part of the interviewee.

It wasn’t a total hatchet job – one of the agencies apparently involved even shared the coverage on Twitter- but Simon Hattenstone’s profiles have been launching, relaunching, and occasionally saving careers recently. Suffice it to say this one won’t do that for Chopra Jonas and she certainly didn’t share the piece on Twitter.  The balance of power may be shifting, but it occasionally does us folks on this side of the fence some good to remember who’s boss…

Borkowski Weekly Media Trends

Goats on Zoom

This week, the Borkowski team were following closely this story about a Lancashire farm, who have raised over £50,000 by renting their goats out for corporate zoom calls. Ever one to jump on a trend, we did a deep dive into the history of goats, and what we found knocked us off our hooves.  

Before Ozzymandias the ‘Kid of Kids’ gambolled on to our weekly team meeting to say meeeh, we looked into the history of the representation of goats throughout art. It turns out, goats have always vacillated between two images. Symbols of pastoral innocence on the one hand, they were also associated with the sensuous excesses of wine, music, and the perils of Bacchic frenzy—a duality that many celebrities to this day struggle to navigate in their public persona.

We’re in awe of the PR genius of Cronshaw farm owner Dot McCarthy, who realised exactly what the moment needed: a dose of absurdism, and a window into a far-away, pastoral landscape, driven by the natural cycles of birth, feeding, sunrise, sunset—the beautiful union of doe-goat and buck—of the bucolic imaginary hundreds of miles away from our bedroom-ridden existences.  

McCarthy told the BBC that the number of people who have paid for the ‘Lulu the kid’ to goat-bomb their corporate calls has been ‘insane’. (We did some quick maths, and, at £5 a pop, this means at least 10,000 people have booked in goat zooms.) Industry people: take note, this is the best PR bump the Goat Lobby has received since G.O.A.T. became the ubiquitous internet acronym for ‘the greatest of all time’. More like greatest digital strategy of all time.


Jeff Bezos

At first glance of the news that Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon to focus on other, more philanthropic projects, an optimist would be forgiven for hoping this might mark the long overdue move by Bezos to start distributing his gigantean wealth to good causes. If that was the case, it might mark an overhaul of Bezos’ image, and a much needed one at that: Over the past year the public’s idea of Bezos has shifted from ‘uninteresting, unemotional tech-bro’ to ‘evil capitalist overlord’, a change accelerated by the news that the legions of Amazon staff working through the pandemic were not being fairly paid, or sufficiently protected against Covid 19, whilst Bezos’ wealth grew by 13bn in just one day, bringing his total riches to almost 200 billion. 

In 2020, consumers started to feel fully the toxicity of their relationship with Amazon. Lockdown had us shopping online more than ever, but also made us increasingly aware of the perversity of it all. Convenience-fuelled shopping addictions lured us into cycles of unnecessary consumption – pumping out waste and lining the pockets of a man who could solve world poverty with a click of his fingers.  

People started to boycott Amazon. If it were any other business, and you might see the CEO trying to stop them. But Bezos doesn’t seem to care, and this makes sense when you understand that Amazon, contrary to popular knowledge, is not just an online retailer. Amazon, rather, owns a vast amount of the digital infrastructure we use day-to-day, most notably the cloud that hosts the likes of Netflix, Facebook, BBC and Linkedin. Amazon’s success really, really does not depend on whether we buy our new doorbell from him or our local Homebase.

And it shows. Bezos’ ‘other projects’ do include some charitable causes, but critics note that the bulk of his wealth will go towards his continued path to world (or rather, universe) domination – spearheaded by his space project Blue Origin, to which he invests most of his money. It sounds like egotistical Silicon Valley dreaming. But in Bezos’ view, this is philanthropy: laying the groundwork that will see future generations populate space; using other’s planet’s resources to preserve Earth as a mostly residential area.  

This doesn’t sit well, given the amount of aid that is desperately needed by humans alive right now, ones whose living conditions are unquestionably being worsened by the likes of Amazon. As The Guardian puts it, he ‘seems less interested in protecting the future of the planet than protecting the future of capitalism’. For now, at least, Jeff Bezos is going to remain a public enemy. Whether, in years to come, he winds up as quite the opposite - the father of space-civilization, a pioneer of humankind, the saviour of Earth itself - remains to be seen. 
 

READ IT AND UNDERSTAND IT

If you haven’t heard the name Jackie Weaver screamed at you on a lo-res zoom call, have you even been on the internet today? Friday, 5 February 2020 a star was born. Her name? JACKIE WEAVER. It took a viral Parish council meeting for most of us to discover Jackie, but since the footage surfaced, we haven’t looked back. 

This is yet another case study on how the ‘15 minutes of fame’ has evolved thanks to the mainstream meme culture. We’ve seen Alex from Glastonburyfour lads in jeans and the Wealdstone Raider elongate their 15 minutes to full-blown careers as influencers. 

Jackie Weaver has been quick to capitalise on her moment in the spotlight, interviewing on Woman’s Hour and even used to announce Gordon Smart’s return to News UK.  

There is a darker side to this story, one of mansplaining, sexism and bullying. The cruelty of ‘the meme’ reduces clips to their shortest form, devoid of any context and stripping down for maximum enjoyment. During Handforth Parish Councils most chaotic moment, we see Jackie Weaver ejecting disgruntled Zoom attendees as they laugh and shout at her. Jackie is portrayed as Karen-like busybody, winding up council members with her no-nonsense approach to managing the meeting. 

However, when you watch the full version, the aggressive men were inexplicably angry and the rest of the meeting was harmonious, showing Jackie Weaver’s marvellous sense of humour and ability to target the gay community's support, tactfully choosing ‘Britney Spears’ as her choice of name when the groups laugh at a council member tagging himself as ‘Handforth PC Clerk’, despite not properly being elected. 

This has created a unique opportunity for Jackie to platform her side of the story and with it a career as a hilarious icon that navigated a Zoom call that encapsulated the worst parts of video comms that we’ve all experienced (on steroids).
 

Golden Globes Under Fire 

Major awards ceremonies are embattled. True, the advent of the meme has extended the lifespan of various  funny moments that in ages past would have more quickly been lost to the ether. But that’s where the good news ends. The digitisation of our culture has allowed for more immediate, in-depth interrogation of the processes that drive these ceremonies. We know exactly how the sausage is made and we have strong opinions.  

In ages past it was harder to challenge bodies like the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s self-image as the ultimate showbiz authority, the judiciary of a system we plebs could never hope to understand. Now, though, social and digital media have created a new Estate to which these arbiters of taste are accountable.

Beyond accountability, the age of pile-ons and cancel culture has birthed new means by which to visit brutal vigilante justice on those seen as corrupt, prejudiced or tasteless.  

This reality has converged on the Golden Globes this week. A year ago we were arguing about virtue signalling speeches and whether  Ricky Gervais was still funny. This year the collective outrage of the internet is directed at the nominations, specifically the perceived snub of  I May Destroy You, and the inference that the acclaimed drama’s lack of recognition symbolises the racial and pro-establishment prejudice of the Hollywood elite. 

For some it’s about artistic merit  (versus such theoretically inferior products as Emily in Paris). Anyone prioritising that argument doesn’t understand the Golden Globes, which is voted for by red carpet journalists and not critics or artists, and has therefore always prioritised slightly tacky glitz over less broadly accessible art.   

What’s galling others is that even in an age that’s apparently more socially, culturally and racially aware, in which POC are making hit films and television that get the audiences and reviews they deserve, the ‘best’ television still just happens to be what USA Today described as “blindingly white”.  

It should be noted that the Golden Globes improved its diversity in other areas. But major awards are all about balancing the favourites of the court with the mood of the proletariat. Reaction this week suggests they’ve got it wrong again.  

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