Borkowski Weekly Media Trends of the Year: 2022 - a year in stunts
Dutch Concert Musicians | Joe Lycett | Brewdog | Liz v. Lettuce
COVID lockdowns feel like a lifetime ago so it’s hard to believe that we started 2022 in their grip, with the contenders for January’s best stunt including the Dutch Concert Hall that re-opened as a barber to protest the fact that hairdressers were open while the arts remained shut.
As things opened up so did the imaginations of the world’s stuntsters. In February, one of the best, Joe Lycett, pulled a cracking prank by releasing an official looking, but absurd spoof, of Sue Gray’s eagerly-anticipated report into the Westminster ‘Partygate’ scandal. Beyond stirring widespread mirth, it also managed to somehow amplify the already-intense levels of ridicule heaped on the government.
There is no denying that Lycett is becoming perhaps the pre-eminent practitioner of the publicity stunt of the age, and this first stunt set the tone for the rest of his 2022. Indeed, Lycett would continue to pop up at various points throughout the year to declare himself ‘incredibly right-wing’ in mock support of Liz Truss (and showcase his derision for ‘objectivity’ standards in UK political broadcasting), before, in one of the year’s best executed gambits, declaring war on former gay-icon David Beckham and his support of the World Cup in human-rights-abusing Qatar. In this, Lycett threatened to shred £10,000 if Beckham did not pull his support, going so far as appearing to have carried out his threat, before revealing, point made, that the money had already been donated to LGBT football charities.
Taking inspiration from the KLF’s infamous stunt of burning £1M, the stunt shocked people into acknowledging the problematic elements of Beckham’s relationship with Qatar and, although Becks was not embarrassed into severing ties with the world cup hosts, his aura took a mighty dent, and he can probably forget about that Knighthood anytime soon.
Stunts themselves got some bad publicity in February when BBC Scotland’s excellent expose of Brewdog was broadcast. Among much more serious accusations of bullying, harassment, greenwashing and hypocritical attitudes towards venture capitalism, Brewdog’s penchant for stunts was held up as a sign of their inauthenticity or untrustworthiness; an important lesson that stunts in the 2020s require substance behind the glitter, smoke and mirrors.
This principle was inherent in a couple of the year’s other contentious stunts. As discussed last week, brands and cultural entities’ attempts to be progressive had mixed results depending on their perceived substance and authenticity, but there was still plenty of room at the table for stunts grounded mainly in fun and knowing pop culture references.
Arby’s and Pusha T’s collaboration on an anti-McDonalds diss track was a brilliant entry into the ‘Fast Food Wars’, taking the hip-hop-fast-food relationship to a more creative place than Snoop Dogg’s Just East jingle or Pop Eye’s ill-advised private jet delivery to Diplo last year.
Other fun stunts on a smaller scale included the Scottish Tories’ baiting of Irvine Welsh by publishing posters in the style of the opening to the famously left-wing author’s Trainspotting. Welsh’s predictable fury at having his work co-opted by his worst enemies increased the advert’s reach a thousandfold. Derry Girls trailed its final season by teaming up with Bauer to create a cover of defunct 90s cultural icon Smash Hits magazine in a mutually beneficial and entirely on-brand ode to the era the show celebrates. Posters for the Northman conveniently lacking the film’s title picked up a lot more press than any film poster has a right to.
Every good PR knows that a stunt doesn’t have to be confined to marketing a product, the product itself can be a stunt. Rhys Frake-Waterfield, a horror B-Movie director, showcased this notion well when he took advantage of classic IP falling out of copyright to produce Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey – now set for a cinematic release in the new year. The juxtaposition between wholesome children’s characters and gory, shlocky B-Horror captured a significant enough section of the public’s imagination to have an actual impact on the success of the project.
In the autumn, Channel 4 also doubled down on the idea of ‘product-as-stunt’ with programming including a show where an audience voted on whether to destroy artworks including an ‘original Hitler’, giving a show to TikTok darling (but rail strike scab) Francis Bourgeois, and dramatizing the WAGatha Christie trial.
Perhaps the most prominent example was the rumour that the sequel to the Oscar winning Joker would be a musical starring Lady Gaga. Frequently outdone in scale and rollercoaster grandeur by Superhero rivals Marvel, this was a clever way to position DC Comics IP as a more artistically adventurous and less formulaic alternative.
And these notorious but insubstantial stunts were sometimes cast in scale; there’s a school of thought that Elon Musk’s $44Bn takeover of Twitter was principally a publicity stunt: a powerplay by (at the time) the world’s richest manchild to remind us all through frontpage news and endless trends that he can buy, blackmail or tantrum his way out of any problem.
Big Tech has largely been covered in our annual rounds ups, but it is noteworthy that the industry struggled for stunts of substance this year, not helped by the continued struggle to define the nature and purpose of the Metaverse. The first onslaught of celeb NFTs is thankfully dying a death but not before that pop cultural titan Royal Mint tried to get involved – a mind-numbing miscalculation of the zeitgeist by our current Prime Minister. Meta’s attempts to showcase horizon world, revealing that its avatars still don’t have legs has been a bit of an embarrassment, but in a space struggling for credibility there are some pioneers out there. Sam Crane’s brilliant ‘GTA Hamlet’, for instance, will perhaps be viewed as the first ‘metaverse theatre’ production, while the haunting prospect of the island nation of Tuvalu having to be uploaded to the metaverse as a virtual world in order to preserve it beyond its imminent climate crisis-induced demise was a brilliant subversion of the new medium.
There were some stunts of substance. Prince William giving out Big Issues on the eve of the Jubilee was a clever signal of a more progressive slant to the Royal Family at a time when the Firm’s future was in the spotlight. And, in stark contrast to flashy but ultimately superficial efforts such as projecting pictures of her late Maj onto Stonehenge, the 72 empty place settings at a ‘Jubilee Party’ in the shadow of Grenfell Tower was similarly a poignant reminder that flag-waving is not an answer to society’s deeper problems.
Although originality is a sure-fire way to provoke a stunt’s desired reaction, some classics never go out of fashion. Beyonce announcing a new album by posing almost naked on a horse reminded us that sex still sells. As does pure shock factor – in the case of the Italian wine merchant whose range of wines inspired by dictators built on its thirty years of headlines with…you guessed it…a Hitler addition…As we moved towards festive season, the announcement that Celebrations were imminently removing Bounties from their selection boxes met a few industry eyerolls but many more headlines.
As we round of this year let us not overlook the Daily Star’s brilliant ‘Lettuce Liz’ prank. Inspired by an op-ed in the Economist that estimated the ailing Prime Minister’s time in power to be ‘the shelf life of a lettuce’, the paper set up a live feed of said salad staple to test the hypothesis in real time, garnishing it with references to the day’s news and putting its ‘victory’ over the now-ex-PM on the front page. Good old fashioned tabloid skulduggery.
Imbued in all of these stunts are lessons everyone in the public eye (and their representatives can learn from). Behind every successful stunt is an instinctive understanding of news values, pop culture, substance of message, audience, platform and modes of communication, while every backfiring stinker has tripped on at least one of these hurdles.