Borkowski Media Trends: Mark Borkowski on Musk, Tories' Poster Chide & MORE

PLUS: Musicians vs AI ctd. || Are we at peak 'Based on a True Story'?

Mark Borkowski on whether Elon Musk is damaging TESLA:

I’ve been asked by a few people, including the The Guardian, for a communications perspective on reports that Elon Musk’s Barnum-esque pageantry is having a negative impact on Tesla’s sales and share price.

A charismatic figurehead is critical to effectively communicating and ultimately adding value to a business. Still, Musk risks becoming a cautionary tale about what happens to reputations (and, with them, business performance) when charismatic leadership metamorphoses into the cult of personality.

Clearly seeing himself as a value-add, Musk has sought to position himself as inextricably linked to his companies, and as a critical driver of their innovation personally.

There’s a discernible rationale to this; the closer Musk is tied to his businesses in the eyes of the public (and media), the more his personal popularity can burnish their success.

A more cynical assessment of his motivation is that Musk leans increasingly heavily on the success of his businesses to sustain his own credibility.

Essentially, his status as ‘the genius behind Tesla’ protects him from the loss of credibility that some of his publicly-heralded but ultimately backfiring business decisions, political commentary, cod-philosophy, or attempts to be funny might inflict on a public figure with a lesser track record.

But this arrangement, wedding himself to his businesses to use their success as reputation collateral, has put increasing strain on the reputations of the businesses themselves, notably Tesla, the one undeniable success story in which he retains a role.

To put it another way, the sour taste some feel towards Musk personally, might be starting to contaminate their feelings towards the companies and products with which he is associated.

So powerful are these businesses, and so relentless a publicity hound is Musk himself, that this association is still a long way from a death spiral, but it should prompt a rethink from Musk about the high price of notoriety and whether he and his companies might benefit from a slightly more pragmatic, considered approach to communications.

This Week in UK Government: Tories’ Poster Chide, Competent Cameron & Rishi’s Sneaker Snafu

As we continue to gear up for a UK General Election the Conservatives this week released a digital campaign poster that was ingenious in that it is almost impossible to parody.

Unfortunately for the government, that didn’t stop large portions of the internet from giving it a really good go and at time of writing the X (Twitter) advert appears to have been deleted.

The Tories seemed to be trying to appeal to its traditionalist, chauvinist support base with a contemporary twist on British national pride, invoking England’s Euro 2020 football team, Christopher Nolan and Aston Martin amongst other (sometimes questionably British) archetypes.

Combined with a Partidge-esque claim to be the ‘Second Most Powerful Country IN THE WORLD’, and the latest in a litany of crimes against graphic design perpetrated by British political parties, the Poster was a meme waiting to happen.

The aesthetic and content might have appealed unironically to some older Facebook users that form the core of the aforementioned base, but younger and more online punters (those whose votes the government badly need to cling on to their slim hopes of retaining power) were merciless and what little traditional media pick-up the poster got was derisive.

It was also an open goal into which Labour, famously passive and noncommittal, gleefully rocketed a counter-attack in the form of a collage of headlines supposedly outlining the government’s mismanagement of the country.

A little welcome contrast for the Conservatives came in the form of another simple, clear and assured video from Foreign Secretary (and ex-PM) Lord Cameron outlining his proposed next steps on the government’s support for Ukraine.

The issue is admittedly a rare case of low-hanging fruit in terms of its popularity (a video on Israel-Gaza would be a more complex affair) but it was a show of competence the government badly needs. The only downside some commentators have remarked on is the unfortunate contract between Cameron’s self-assurance and Rishi Sunak’s awkwardness, most recently displayed in his attempts to ingratiate himself with the England cricket team and an influencer interview that some claimed was actively damaging publicity for the brand of trainers he was wearing.

The sum total is another tough week at the top for the UK’s embattled government.

Musicians vs AI ctd…

High-profile musicians are again making a public plea to tech companies demanding protection from AI's rapid development. While this discourse is essential to rein in ensuring safe and responsible development of the technology, there are broader questions around AI's tangible threat to creative industries.

No one can accurately predict how AI will manifest in the music industry. It is reflected in the open letter - a catch-all attempt to cover wide-ranging threats AI could threaten artists- signed by household names like Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj to estates representing dead artists like Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley.

For the former, we've seen the damage AI has caused the likes of Taylor Swift that go beyond copying their music like AI-generated imagery sexualising her without consent, whereas the latter will be concerned about their legacy when AI tools can isolate vocals and play them over anything. We've seen this benefit artists, like the recent Beatles song that used John Lennon's voice to create a 'new' Beatles track. But this could easily turn into uglier artistic zombification without consenting estates.

So while it's important for artists to publicly hold these firms to account, at what point do artists broadly accept this is an unstoppable force that won't slow down and start AI-proofing their art? At this juncture, AI is limited in producing anything genuinely creative, raised last year by producer SIXFOOT 5 who said "I want to hear the human element in music, in arts. So, I'd be curious if Adele actually sang the song... because there are just some things that machines cannot do." AI can mimic things well, but there's always a certain type of sheen; whether it's text-to-image generation, writing copy, or creating songs, there are usually signs that AI has played a creative part.

So is the antidote making art sound more human, and what's the antithesis of AI-generated music? Because we've spent a lot of time on this newsletter covering AI's threat to art, artists might consider alternative tactics beyond open letters that cut through the noisy AI news and grab hold of the consumers that on mass, will happily consume AI-generated music if it's quick, cheap and widely accessible. There's an opportunity for artists to take the fight against AI and find alternative ways to fit AI creeping into the culture while also signing open letters and making public pleas. We're still waiting for the that first punch.

Have we reached peak ‘Based on a True Story’?

Netflix’s ripped-from-the-headlines new film Scoop lands this weekend, dramatising the circumstances that led to Newsnight’s groundbreaking interview with Prince Andrew back in 2019 - with Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as the Prince. The film is the latest of a number of recent history biopics to land in the last few months. Next week, the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black is set to arrive in cinemas, trailing in its wake a rather extraordinary amount of online backlash and discourse for a film no one has seen yet.

The art of the biopic is to dramatise the familiar, or, perhaps more rarely these days, shine a spotlight on the forgotten. In more recent years, they’ve played a secondary role for streamers and studios seeking to capitalise on existing conversation, promoting their content by tying it necessarily to something already in the public consciousness, from the Post Office scandal to WAGatha Christie. A plot that doesn’t have to be explained, because it happened so recently, creates a built-in audience, particularly when the events in question played out, at least in significant part, on the Internet.

Dumb Money, last year’s dramatisation of the stock market boom created and driven by the Reddit forum ‘Wall Street Bets’, is a useful example, not least because it’s one of the first major films to look back already on the pandemic – the moment it captures was February 2021, barely two years before the film came out.

Inevitably, there is jeopardy here, both corporate and artistic: Netflix’s own Inventing Anna, a bio-series of fraudulent Russian heiress Anna Delvey, was broadly criticised for its inconsistent tone, while Back to Black has been torn apart by the same audience it ostensibly seeks to court. By counting on existing familiarity with a subject, studios may perhaps miss that audiences are more alive to the events themselves, more eagle-eyed and subsequently more vocal in their criticism – a recent clip from the latter was roundly and robustly criticised online in a way that the studio perhaps should have anticipated, but now certainly can’t control.

With Amazon planning to release their own Prince Andrew series, A Very Royal Scandal, this may turn out to be the latest installment in the battle of the streamers, and Back to Black may well be positively received by critics next week. But recent history can also be ephemeral, and, in Amazon’s case, he who gets there first can often get the last word, too.