Borkowski Media Trends: Sidemen's VC Side Hustle, AirBnB's Strategic Staying Power & MORE
PLUS: Cruise Control: Tom's remarkable image rehabilitation
Side Hustle? The bro-ification of business
The Sidemen, the YouTube collective including KSI and boasting a combined 150m subscribers this week announced that they were to launch a venture capital firm, Upside.
This feels like the apotheosis of what we’re calling the ‘bro-ification’ of business.
Whereas past archetypes of masculinity seemed to eschew, or at least transcend financial wealth, the unwashed phenomenons and original vagabonds have given way to a generation as obsessed by physical perfection as they are by filthy riches.
It started with traditional celebrities clearly being well advised about how to invest money they’d made through talent - think Michael Jordan’s sneakers, Jay Z’s champagne, Ryan Reynolds’ ventures from gin to football, and whatever Gary Neville did to get on Dragon’s Den. No longer were these celebs mere mascots wheeled out for an empty product endorsement; they were, at least publicly, CEOs building boardroom empires.
In the past decade this trend has steadily pervaded the mushrooming evolution of influencer culture, and sure enough no current manfluencer is complete without an apparently flourishing portfolio of business interests. Ashton Hall, famed for wasting gallons of bottled water and rubbing banana skin on his face, ensures that his carefully stage-managed daily TikTok routines include at least one highly plausible business call.
The boardroom dreams of influencers have in turn had a knock-on effect on the world of business. Whilst businessmen have behaved like celebrities for decades (Trump, Branson), now James Watt and Steven Bartlett - even Elon Musk- are behaving like influencers: conversely to their online brethren, they use their business success to leverage engagement on their self-congratulatory lifestyle content or memes.
Now the Sidemen, whose entrepreneurial successes include KSI’s Prime energy drink are offering investment, and promotional backing on their enormous channels, to upcoming businesses. Short term the ecosystem described above means that they will attract a glut of prospective unicorns soliciting investment, and there’s no denying the value that the heft of their platform and celebrity could offer to a substantial and well-run proposition, but those latter qualifications might be where they need some sound advice from wider heads with greater investment experience.
A potential warning about the limits of an influencepreneur’s backing came in a City AM story this week detailing the downfall of Steven Bartlett’s first Dragon’s Den investment; potential partners of Upside should be well-advised that the bro-ification of business might also come with potential downsides…
Does AirBnB strategy have staying power?
A fiery article came out on Wired this week, stating that Airbnb is in a “midlife crisis,” not exactly the kind of headline any brand wants.
The premise of the relaunch is to offer curated experiences on a global scale. Position Airbnb as a lifestyle app that offers “everything,” moving beyond just renting out a (Airbnb verified) stranger’s house/apartment/room.
Their first attempt at this was the “Experiences” branch, which offered travellers activities during their stay, ultimately failed to gain popularity. But now, this rebranded app is meant to offering users experiences worldwide, not just for travellers. According to Billboard, it promises “one of a kind experiences to enhance your next trip: Airbnb Services, Airbnb Experiences, and Airbnb Originals.”
The rebrand has attracted some big celebrity names including Megan thee Stallion, Sabrina Carpenter, and Doechii, with select “once in a lifetime” experiences like sitting in on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, spending a Sunday with NFL star Patrick Mahomes, or enjoying a glam day with Carpenter.
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In PR and marketing terms, old fashioned celebrity endorsements can still be a smart move, but these kinds of strategic partnerships need to be carefully considered for the future of the brand. On paper, these experiences sound exciting, but when consumers aren’t sure what the broader relaunch is about, it risks coming across as stage-managed and the experiences somewhat ersatz. This short-term virality of the stunt is highly successful but does not guarantee a substantial long-term brand strategy.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s ideas sound ambitious, however the Wired article paints the Airbnb leader as someone desperate to be embraced by the Silicon valley “tech bros”. In the article he frequently mentions Jeff Bezos and Apple’s revolutionary ideas, wanting Airbnb to be the “next big thing”. In hopes of making the Airbnb brand fresh and new, the rebrand ultimately lacks a coherent marketing and PR strategy (and business plan, one might argue). Launch dates for these celebrity experiences seem so vague that its hard to believe they’ll be available to the public anytime soon.
What might benefit Chesky and Airbnb’s strategy is finding advisors who can offer honest, and realistic feedback. For instance, inviting a journalist to headquarters without a clear narrative or messaging guidance is a risk that didn’t speak to a powerful advisory network.
One line in the article is case-in-point: “he tells me, then immediately regrets it.” It’s safe to say that interview felt like the wild west and that’s exactly the impression you get when trying to understand what Airbnb is really aiming to do with this relaunch.
Cruise Control: How Tom rehabilitated his image
To a time traveller just arrived from the mid-2000s, the sight of Tom Cruise receiving a rapturous reception on the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival might seem odd. Even odder, perhaps, would be the sight of him on top of the BFI Imax, ahead of receiving a BFI Fellowship award for services to cinema.
It’s easy to forget, in an era where Cruise is seemingly universally viewed as the last true movie star, that less than two decades ago you’d be more likely to have seen him on the receiving end of a joke than a prestigious award. But the rebirth of Tom Cruise, slow as it has been, is one of the great PR manoeuvres in Hollywood’s long history. As a tabloid mainstay during his marriage to Katie Holmes, and as Scientology’s most visible spokesperson for much of the 2000s, the public perception was that Cruise was not just weird but actively off-putting. In an infamous South Park episode satirising Scientology, he was parodied; endless late night talk shows made fun of his Oprah couch-jump.
But before our eyes, and seemingly without realising, the world has fallen back in love with Tom Cruise. There are three factors at play in this public tide change. The first is that true movie stars are few and far between (Sean Penn noted, on an episode of Louis Theroux’s podcast this week, that Jennifer Lawrence is perhaps the last one), and we are perhaps more forgiving, at least when the narrative around them is tightly controlled, of the ones we do have. If Cruise is anything, he’s an unequivocal Star, and arguably the last of his kind. The second, which has certainly burnished the perception of his stardom, is that the films, notably Top Gun: Maverick and the Mission Impossible franchise, have been universally acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. As the industry stared into a Covid shaped crater in 2022, Cruise was largely credited with bringing audiences back to the cinema with Top Gun, and his dedication to theatrical releases and cinema as an art have won him plaudits in the industry and beyond.
The third is that he has, somehow, allowed his inherent weirdness, once his most obvious vulnerability, to become something slightly more charming. His media image remains as tightly controlled as ever, but when stories do emerge, like the time he ate two curries in a row in a Birmingham restaurant, they seem strangely endearing, and even humanising.
With the new Mission Impossible set to dominate the box office this weekend, and Cruise roundly rehabilitated in the public eye, the lesson is perhaps that even the most drastic reputational damage can be overcome if the raw material is as undeniable as it is for him – in cancel culture’s wake, we seem to have realised that true stars don’t come around very often. Now widely viewed as an action star, and having saved cinema itself, Cruise’s next step seems likely to be a return to more elevated material, with a starring role in the new film by Birdman director Alejandro Inarritu. “Academy Award Winner Tom Cruise” has a certain ring to it.