Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 08-04-22
Royal Mint cashing in on NFTs | Renationalisation vs Privatisation: Government fails to pick a lane | Mad Ads
Rishi's Royal Mint NFT Stunt
Cynics have bashed Rishi's latest crypto stunt - a government-sponsored NFT collaborating with Royal Mint, who will issue its collection in the Summer.
As expected, the government press machine has been quick to counter negative sentiment and championed the move as a "forward-looking approach", claiming their foray into this burgeoning market will open the country to innovation by publicly adopting (effectively also endorsing) crypto assets.
Regardless of which side of the coin you fall on, brands as prominent as the UK Government and The Royal Mint embracing a trend that media commentators were writing off back in March 2021 is a strong endorsement for a market with 18% of the British public invested.
The problem is that everyone's guessing how NFTs will be adopted, hedging on projects hoping their investment will be a retirement plan. Liverpool FC's recent NFT drop is an excellent example of the market's uncertainty, selling a measly 10,000 NFTs out of 171,000 available, despite raising £1m for the club and its charity, a figure Liverpool's comms team is proudly running.
It's a market driven by bandwagoning and greed, and in reality, NFTs are commonly associated with corporate exploitation by brands desperate for a quick buck. The government is emerging as a player in this great NFT dog fight without a clear long-term vision. But as Brexit threatens London's role as a financial leader, keen to turn its single market exit into an opportunity to cut back on financial regulation, their NFT play starts to make more sense.
No one has figured out how to deploy NFTs for short-term value and long-term utility successfully, and until someone does, we're going to keep hearing about hastily-conceived NFT drops that will likely retain very little value once Web3 is fully formed.
Renationalisation and Privatisation in the same week – what is going on?
Consistency is one of the key rules of contemporary reputation management and this week we have seen the government disregard this key tenet and contradict itself brutally. Its new flagship energy strategy was met with condemnation for not doing enough to help the millions of families set to plummet into fuel poverty this month.
But there was one surprising preannouncement; they are renationalising the energy management system from National Grid. While we won’t go into the array of pros and cons – it was a surprising move for a Tory government especially when this week they have also announced the privatisation of Channel 4.
Despite evidence that Channel 4 had put an effective case forward that it would remain competitive in the new world of streaming giants, Culture Sectary Nadine Dorris decided to sell the treasured cultural asset, arguing that state ownership was holding her back, ignoring the huge impact it might have on independent production houses and creatives up and down the country.
But in the silos of Government a different argument was taking place. One about the merits of government intervention and state ownership. For years National Grid has been criticised and now, under the immense pressure created by the energy crisis, the government has decided to nationalise part of it in a very un-conservative move.
The irony is palpable; while some Tory MPs rolled out to defend privatisation others were arguing for renationalisation. It was less a case of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing than a case of both hands facing off in a clumsy, unconscious slugfest guaranteed to lead to a self-inflicted bloody nose. This level of contradiction is not often seen in politics but has become part-and-parcel of the Johnson premiership.
Another irony given the derision heaped on the government once again by the commentariat is that both policies remain far from certain, still requiring the passage of legislation to make them happen. Getting both policies, especially the Channel 4 sale, through parliament, will be a bloody struggle, made worse by the cack-handed inconsistency of the comms around the policy’s announcement, and yet the only certainty is that the tax payer will be the victim.
A week in marketing: unintended consequences or ingenious psychology
There were loads of good examples of marketing stunts this week that could either have been ingenious stunts or serendipitous gaffes.
In recent times, particularly under the leadership of Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tories have sold themselves slightly different to their English counterparts; more the pragmatic, unionist antithesis of the SNP than the bellicose, right-wing-populist caterwauling of their Westminster counterparts. It’s been a pretty successful strategy as they have overhauled a moribund Scottish Labour to become the main Holyrood opposition.
This week they abandoned their moderate pragmatism for a new tactic best described as Tier 1 trolling, releasing a campaign poster clearly spoofing the opening monologue of (Scottish independence supporting lefty) Irvine Welsh’s classic Trainspotting, urging voters to ‘Choose life without the SNP’.
They must have anticipated the furious social media reaction they received from nationalists and left-wingers of all stripes, which was to express their displeasure at the poster by sharing it with their followers and amplifying its reach enormously. Welsh himself played into their hands by Quote Tweeting the poster with an expletive – his Tweet has received over 27k likes at time of writing compared to the modest 1,500 of the Tories original post. Welsh’s Tweet was viral enough to appear on timelines of people he doesn’t follow, and thus burst out of the presumably SNP-left bubble of his followers and onto the timelines of unionist and swing voters. So, by deliberately trolling their enemies with the advert, the Tories covertly conscripted them as social media advocates and multiplied their audience several times over.
Another neat piece of viral marketing saw Channel 4 and Bauer teamed up to revive iconic 90s mag Smash Hits in a special issue to promote the upcoming series of Derry Girls. The show’s 90s soundtrack and cultural reference made it a perfect fit for the crossover, but the real winners were the advertorial’s producers. Brand association with a the near-universally acclaimed sitcom will do the publisher, its stable of magazines, and its creative division no harm at all.
Finally, new arty-Viking blockbuster The Northman scored a viral marketing hit seemingly by accident after posters in New York were spotted conspicuously lacking the title of the film.
While a few commuters might have been baffled by the mystery film being advertised to them, others will have been intrigued enough to google or search on social media and will have been greeted by dozens of international press stories and thousands of social posts guffawing at the alleged idiocy of the advertising executives while simultaneously amplifying their advert and plugging their product to an audience larger than they could ever hope to attract on the New York subway. Many are rightly speculating that it’s all worked out a bit too nicely to have been an accident…
Viral marketing is not an exact science but the Scottish Tories, Bauer and Focus Features have shown how trolling, positive brand association and the enigmatic and counterintuitive can all help the cause…