Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 11-02-22
Savage x Fenty Men-girie || Adele x Brits || Kurt Zouma || Birmingham Crypto Millionaire
Spear’s of Influence
Just a moment to congratulate Mark Borkowski on being named as one of Spear’s Magazine’s Top 10 reputation managers of 2022:
“Among the UK's most sought-after experts on crisis and reputation, Mark Borkowski’s guidance has shifted public discourse on how careers are made and broken.”
Men-girie: Empowering Men or Cheap Stunt?
As the biggest hallmark holiday of the year approaches, and inboxes are stuffed with outlandish suggestions for every ultimate declaration of love from chocolates and flowers to little lace numbers, Savage X Fenty released a product that managed to cut through even in this incredibly competitive media landscape.
Glossy Flossy, the newest addition to their already expansive line, is the brand’s first foray into ‘men-girie’ which is, indeed, lingerie for men.
Critics are divided: cheap stunt to garner headlines, or much needed new way of empowering men to break taboos, throw away their inhibitions and embrace more than just boxers and briefs?
Fenty X Savage at its core has always been about inclusivity and producing collections for women of all sizes, so it was only a matter of time before they turned their hand to men’s underwear in all sizes from XS to 3XL, and grabbed the resulting low-hanging-fruit of headlines and acclaim.
But is there really a market for it, and has it really impacted consumer behaviour? Savage X Fenty claim eBay searches have increased by 60% for men’s lingerie but make no indication of what the true search figures are, or how this translated into sales. The ‘success’ of this campaign has ultimately been hung on a pretty weak statistic.
So, for all the media hype, is this a stunt whose ‘success’ is based on a PR spinning modest numbers into percentages, or did men really feel hindered enough in their choices to create demand for cheap lace thongs in men’s sizes?
Adele’s Amends after Brits Ambiguity
Following appeals from Sam Smith and Will Young, organisers of the Brit Awards came out with a statement last November announcing the scrapping of gender-based award categories. Aside from a minor and apparently misquoted Brian May criticism and a couple of expected ‘woke bashing’ articles in the Daily Mail, the public managed to carry on until the fateful day of the next Brits.
On Tuesday night, accepting the award for Artist of the Year, Adele finished off her speech by remarking: ‘I understand why the name of this award has changed but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really proud of us.’
There are two ways to read this statement. One: Adele was showing solidarity with her fellow female nominees, acknowledging the disadvantages they have faced in the music industry, saying it’s a feat to be proud of, and that getting rid of the gendered awards can lead to women being under-represented amongst the nominees and the winners.
The issue raised by the apparent snub of Ed Sheeran was that gender-neutral categories mean reducing the number of the main winners from two to one, which risks making the decision-making process more openly political. Would there, for instance, now need to be a quota to ensure female, male and gender-non-confirming representation in each category?
Adele’s comment was read by others as a dig at the trans community, and, in an apparent attempt to nip any suggestion of transphobia in the bud, Adele showed up at the G-A-Y night in Heaven on Thursday. She was seen hitting the pole, fangirling over drag performer Cheryl Hole, and reportedly addressing the crowd: ‘You’re all women who identify as women’.
Probably consciously, however, she left the heart of the issue unaddressed. Gender categories were not scraped because of trans women, but partly because of non-binary artists who would not want to be identified by the awards as either women or men. Adele affirming the femininity of trans women will win her little favour with this group and their allies.
Adele is riding a wave more artists will have to soon, as it looks like the gender-neutral awards are here to stay. A back-to-binary U-turn is unimaginable at this point. And when hitting the pole is not an option available to all contesters, better planned comments should be.
Don't F**k With Cats
From relative obscurity to household name, footballer Kurt Zouma has been trending this week for all the wrong reasons after a distressing clip of the West Ham Utd defender kicking a cat went viral.
Zouma's heinous actions left the country in shock. We are a nation, indeed a world of animal lovers, and in the forum of public opinion animal abuse is one of the most severe crimes, which has left Zouma and his club West Ham in crisis.
The story broke on Tuesday, the same day West Ham were playing. As one of West Ham's best players, Zouma’s selection was a huge talking point, and most expected West Ham to exclude him and avoid adding fuel to the fire of the story. Instead, their manager David Moyes decided to play him, condemning Zouma's actions, insisting he loves animals, but ultimately deciding that his duty as a football manager trumped his moral compass. Football-wise it may have paid off, but communications-wise this was a bad decision, exacerbating and implicating the club in the negative headlines.
The RSPCA has seized Zouma's cats, and he won't participate in West Ham's game this weekend. But by failing to drop him immediately, West Ham failed to prevent the story causing serious wider issues for the club.
Then, in an interview with Sky Sports, West Ham star Michail Antonio questioned whether Zouma's actions were worse than racism. This instance of whataboutery was provoked by comments made by (white) football coach Chris Kirkland earlier in the week, and has complicated the discourse around the story, causing more headaches for West Ham. It gets stickier; West Ham then announced they had fined Zouma two weeks' wages (amounting to £250,000). While they reportedly had the good sense to donate this sum to animal welfare charities, a small contingent of West Ham's players were furious. It is now public knowledge that Zouma is the highest-paid player at the club, and some of West Ham's highest earners are now demanding pay rises.
West Ham has no plan to deal with this crisis and has failed to calm the storm. As a result, even when they weren’t inflaming the narrative, they were a step behind every breaking news story. Developments around Zouma have been appearing thick and fast. For instance, Zouma was an ambassador for a charity that raised money for big cats. The RSPCA will now decide Zouma's punishment, pending investigation. It's not going to get any easier for Zouma or West Ham.
A Tail of Two Medias
This week threw up an almost-perfect example of how some elements of the media operate in 2022.
Twenty year-old self-made crypto millionaire Hanad Hassan was subject to a luxuriously complementary BBC News article about his rapid rise to success, with a (presumably equally cloying) documentary to follow.
Lesson number one: ‘self-made crypto millionaire’; in our brave new world, where a trusted media institution uses a headline that would be too tacky for a LinkedIn bio, a buzzword can become a news value overnight.
Lesson number two; for all our iconoclastic cynicism, there exists within our media and cultural landscape a desperate race to unearth and venerate marketable new talent. This has always been the aim of entertainment moguls, brands and the communications and promotional infrastructure that serves them. Now this scramble has become part of some traditional media’s interminable search for the next exclusive.
Which introduces our final lesson; for every idol we create, another falls into the merciless, ubiquitous jaws of Cancel Culture (not necessarily undeservedly, but always quickly, messily and without mercy). And so it went for our hapless young crypto trader after The Guardian’s Jim Waterson and others on social media pointed out that he had left a lot of people disgruntled by setting up his own coin, Orfano, and then failing to communicate its downfall to its investors.
The BBC’s response was scorched earth; the news article was taken down and the documentary pulled before it had a chance to air. The whole incident begs the question of whether the public would be better served by a media who investigated the good, the bad and the ugly elements of figures and stories of interest, and then presented a balanced view, than one that chases trends, hastily creates idols around them, and then just as quickly tears them down.