Borkowski Weekly Media Trends: Celebrity Big Brother is back & MORE

PLUS James Blake vs TikTok | Cerveza Cristal

Celebrity Big Brother: Fancy another one?

When Big Brother’s civilian series was revived last year, squirreled away on ITV2, it was largely considered a return to form for the once hegemonic reality show. The first series since 2018, it played heavily on Y2K nostalgia and its status as the “first ever social experiment.” Yet it was hard to escape the feeling that it was effectively a trial run for Celebrity Big Brother, which has become, in recent years, the headline-grabbing sister to the arguably tired original. Given a fresh coat of paint and the 9pm slot on ITV1, this is a slick, eye-wateringly expensive enterprise: Sharon Osborne, the first ever “Celebrity Lodger”, is reportedly earning £500,000 for a five day guest stint, as well as getting her own bedroom and one phone call a day to Ozzy.

But this is, still, Celebrity Big Brother, the show that brought you George Galloway pretending to be a cat and, latterly, the post-modern misunderstanding of “David’s Dead.” In a preview of tonight’s episode, Sharon sits eating a Magnum, opining to Louis Walsh and Love Island’s Ekin-Su that Kate Middleton’s uncle Gary is a “liar”.

While I’m A Celebrity… thrives on schadenfreude, Celebrity Big Brother revels in absurdity – its conflicts and tension are miniscule, magnified by our preconceptions of the people inside and the media cottage industry that exists around it. To an extent, it necessitates a level of camp – in its Channel Five incarnation, scenes like Luisa Zissman’s secret mission to make Liz Jones laugh or the mere mention of “Frank Carson’s dressing room” were always vastly more enjoyable than the nastier, darker conflict of the final series.

Much of the discourse so far has surrounded Gary Goldsmith and what he may or may not know about his niece and her health (the answer, so far, seems to be precisely nothing). ITV’s genius, however, has been the casting of Osborne and Walsh, who bring not just a genuine rapport but the sense of an old guard of celebrity that doesn’t exist anymore – if there was a way to relaunch what is, in real terms, a televisual dinosaur, it was with this kind of dying glamour, which comes with no filter, and stories and opinions on everyone. While Channel Five made sure every series was stuffed to the gills with the latest American reality imports, ITV have ensured their own success, on social media in particular, by simply letting their star signings talk and giving us the opportunity to enjoy their company. Once Osborne leaves it may be a different story, but the higher-ups at ITV needn’t worry: they’ve already got their money’s worth. 

James Blake vs TikTok

While artists criticising the broken economic model of the music industry is nothing new, TikTok’s impact is uncharted territory, mainly down to the platform’s sudden and seismic clasp on the entire industry. The trend coupled with streaming services 'rinsing' every artist on its platform bar the top 0.1% of artists, aka music’s titans, leaves the industry 'broken' unless you’re at the top of the corporate pyramid. And the scariest part is this trend stretches far beyond the music industry.

But why discuss this now? Well prominent UK artist James Blake has recently voiced his frustrations citing hip-hop artist French Montana releasing six different versions of each song from his new mixtape totalling 126 tracks. Each original includes variations from pitch to tempo, instrumental to acapella to maximise his chances of a viral TikTok/Reels sound.

Blake points to the “effect of TikTok/Reels on the core songwriting and arranging of music”, identifying a growing “attention deficit” in listeners. He also identified a possible breaking point - “if we want quality music somebody is gonna have to pay for it”, referencing his cover of Frank Ocean’s Godspeed that went viral while neither Ocean nor Blake making a dime off its TikTok virality. If consumers demand quality without directly supporting artists via buying records, supporting tours or buying merch, something has to give. And as we saw with the five-month-long writers strikes, we are close to a tangible crisis.

We will save the inevitable PR pitfalls from artists to labels for when all this eventually happens and instead raise an excellent piece by Ted Giola who zooms out and investigates the potential death of traditional entertainment, pointing toward a culture of distraction which major companies like Disney, Paramount and Universal are all struggling through. And like Blake referenced, TikTok epitomises this through fast-paced ‘doom scrolling’ that exploits our brain chemistry - overloading our dopamine sensors and resembling addiction patterns, which tech giants have been advancing for decades. It’s a terrifying trend, one that will unravel for years to come that we’re seeing in episodic moments like this James Blake story.

Cerveza Cristal: The Viral Stunt with a Long Tail

Around twenty years ago, before the existence of social media or online ‘virality’, beer brand Cristal’s Chilean agency contrived an ‘ad free’ edit of Star Wars that replaced commercial breaks with edits that ludicrously crowbarred their product into the film itself, with even John Williams’ classic score momentarily elbowed aside by a rambunctious “Cerveza Cristal!” jingle.

This week the internet exhumed this (award-winning) stunt and reanimated it as an internet meme that has spread around the world and been edited into scenes from just about every classic film for comic effect, spilled over into media coverage, and in the process provided extremely visible brand placement for Cerveza Cristal – bolstered by the distinctive can design and uproariously catchy jingle.

One of the issues plaguing modern communications is that ‘to go viral’ has become a principle that has usurped such fundamental drivers as ‘because it’s quite funny’ – which ironically are far more likely to produce a viral phenomenon. Cerveza Cristal’s cartoonishly overblown product placement is from a land before virality, and therefore untainted by the pernicious and cringeworthy trend of brands cynically attempting to manufacture it.

The fact that something so unselfconsciously daft can have such a long tail in terms of the (good natured) attention it attracts is a resounding endorsement for communicators to do fun (and daft) stuff for its own sake instead of trying to outthink the algorithm.