Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 02-09-22
Bojo's Dead Cat Farewell Tour | Eminem & Snoop's 'Metaverse' Misfire | Olivia Wilde's 'Don't Worry Darling' Worries | Corporate Twitter's Latest Meme
Boris’ Dead Cat Farewell Tour
As we bid a fond farewell to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (in that most of us are fond of the fact he’s saying farewell) there’s a certain comfort in the knowledge that he has learned absolutely nothing from his rise and fall.
No sooner was he back from his sabbatical-esque summer holidays than he was doing what he does best; distracting people from his and his government’s ineptitude by doing silly things that go viral. The almighty dead cat.
His first post-hols hit was a masterclass of Borisian word salad during a speech about the cost of living crisis in which he sagely advised people to save £10 from their energy bills per year by spending £20 on a more efficient new kettle. Given bills are going to be thousands a year for some, not only is this terrible advice, but he delivered it in the semi-coherent waffle of someone who could not care less how cold, homeless or dead this crisis might make people.
Clearly feeling the need to beef out his YouTube highlights reel, Boris promptly went viral again after joining the police in a post-Notting Hill Carnival drug raid (the racial profiling of Carnival was reported this year is a matter for another day…) and being filmed appearing at the end of a bewildered rapper’s bed like some nightmarish not-so-slender-man fever dream.
Ultimately this will be Boris’ legacy. The class clown who’d do anything for attention however much it undermined his competence or dignity. One last performance by the Great Buffoon.
EMINEM & SNOOP’S METAVERSE OF MISERY AT VMAs
2020 was a turbulent year that saw a section of the tech world obsessed with the advent of Web3. Tech evangelists were waxing lyrical about the future of the internet - an empowering network where users could own their data whilst freeing themselves from the shackles of big tech. As a result the metaverse exploded into the mainstream and, for a fleeting moment, it was a significant talking point in business, education and entertainment.
Flash forward to 2022, and nothing has changed in our everyday lives. The metaverse is still a niche part of the tech industry, with cryptocurrencies and NFTs crashing down in value from all-time high price points. Most in the know expect the metaverse to play a large part in our lives but expect it later this decade.
There are clingers onto the dream cast in 2020. Brands like Bored Ape Yacht Club still infiltrate popular culture with lame, stale live shows and one-off events. This week, Eminem and Snoop Dogg performed a brand-new single live at MTV’s Video Music Awards as virtual avatars, transforming into their Bored Apes: #9055 (Eminem) and #6723 (Snoop). They generated noise with thousands of headlines reporting the stunt, but most with a groan. It was a shoddy gimmick accompanied by awkward and clunky visuals and no genuine chance for fans to interact with the performance. This is a blue chip NFT project throwing money at household names, crossing their fingers in the hope of finding a kernel of success.
The mainstream NFT space is devoid of creativity yet desperately clinging to its former cultural significance. This stunt (*cough* The Gorillaz) might’ve turned heads in the 2000s, but in 2022 it’s miles behind the mark.
The metaverse and web3 are currently finding pockets of innovation from some of the brightest minds in tech. However, moments like this are some of the final mainstream attempts to reignite the public’s interest in the metaverse. Of course, those with established fanbases, like Eminem and Snoop, will keep collecting their paychecks to shill this muck. At the same time, true innovators are hard at work creating immersive worlds and projects that are genuine game-changers.
Maybe Olivia Wilde should ‘Worry Darling’ about this PR mess
The publicity saga around ‘Don’t Worry Darling’, the new film directed by Olivia Wilde, speeds up in the final days before the premiere. We have already seen suggestions that the star of the picture, Florence Pugh, was paid significantly less than Harry Styles, her co-star. We have also seen memes about Styles being a terrible actor cast purely because of his relationship with Wilde. Just today, Jordan Peterson’s name was off-puttingly dropped into the mix.
For the past week, however, one particular scandal has been reigning supreme: the Shia LaBoeuf clash. In an interview with Variety, Wilde said that LaBoeuf was cast for the role currently played by Harry Styles, and subsequently fired by her personally. The reason for the sacking was that Wilde wanted to create a ‘safe, trusting environment’ on set. It was implied that the decision was made for the sake of Florence Pugh’s safety. It was easy to assume that the issues with LaBoeuf were of a similar nature as FKA Twigs’s allegations that the actor abused her during their relationship.
Immediately after Wilde attempted to position herself as a champion of women’s safety, LaBoeuf strongly denied that he was fired, and claimed he quit. And LaBoeuf - not usually known for his crisis comms savvy- brought receits: a video in which Wilde begs him to return to the production, condescendingly calling Pugh ‘Miss Flo’. One could think this amount of press about a star-studded film could only bring more people to the theatres. Unfortunately for Wilde, an increasing number of discontented fans are taking to social media to announce boycott of the production.
Needless to say, Wilde's dangerous game with the Variety interview failed to pay off. Understandably worried about the negative chatter around the film, she attempted to boost her own credentials by using the tired #MeToo formula. She has already been portrayed as a victim of her ex serving her with the divorce papers on stage while she was hosting CinemaCon, and perhaps the low-hanging fruit of LaBoeuf-bashing was just too tempting. If the publicity rollercoaster around ‘Don’t Worry Darling’, but mostly Wilde herself, can be a teachable moment, then the truth it conveys is quite simple: sometimes less is more.
There’s a new corporate Twitter Meme in town: But does it matter?
A new meme hit corporate Twitter today, with brands spontaneously posting one-word tweets with a word that is designed to ‘sum them up’.
While it’s not clear exactly how it started, it’s worth thinking about what this kind of exercise does for brands as well as putting it in the context of how corporate messaging on social media has been evolving towards a more informal tone in recent times.
In theory, the trend began when Amtrak (mistakenly?) tweeted the single word ‘trains’ and NPR followed suit an hour later with a reprise of their own:
Soon others started joining the trend, some going beyond the prosaic description to use the moment s a creative format:
Others are relishing an opportunity to drive a particular message home, such as President Biden following up on last night’s ‘Soul of a Nation’ speech with the single word ‘democracy’. Others, such as Ryanair, used it to drill down on their cheeky, confrontational social media persona which has seen them in recent months trolling airlines with cancellations and logistical problems, drawing attention to their own continued profit:
In general, brand social media teams to have captured an opportunity to appear as participating in a larger moment, and yet, perhaps there is something more to this particular meme. Perhaps, in a day and age when every media organisation does so many things that one might very easily substitute in any other number of words for the obvious one, there is something edifying about affirming the core function amid the noise.
After all, a media org like Washington Post is not just ‘news’ in the way Amtrak is ‘trains’. In fact, just writing ‘news’ drastically understating the case—it might be more apt in this day and age to emphasise all of the other things a media organization is. They may well have written: ‘adtech, legal, paywalls, user data, lobbying, algorithms’. Perhaps writing ‘social media’ would have been too rich an irony.
To take another example, SportsCentre modestly stated its remit as ‘sports’, but amid national polemics over team names, taking the knee, and gender participation they easily could have written ‘politics’. In an age where there is no neutrality, where there are no simple mandates and every organisation is pulled in every direction, maybe we long for a period when sports was just sports, trains trains. Maybe this meme is an expression of that nostalgia.
Or maybe not. In any event, the winners today seems to be the brands who used the meme to creative or surprising ends. The French embassy to the US took the prize:
