Weekly Content Roundup - 26/07/20
Anarchy in the Old Bailey!
Vivian Westwood, dressed in a yellow pants suit and channelling her best Timmy Mallet impression, was hoisted into a birdcage outside the old bailey on Tuesday. Why? She was protesting the continued imprisonment and attempted extradition of WikiLeaks top brass Julian Assange. But did the message land? The canary in the cage metaphor forewarns danger, but what’s the forewarning here? Where one is punished for exposing the truth? Extradition to the USA?
The problem here is a lack of focus between product (Assange) and campaign (‘Tim’ Westwood). The case with Assange is not simple; as well as being accused of various crimes in different countries, the Wikileaks information released (for which he’s wanted on espionage charges) could point to collusion with Russia - Wikileaks certainly started as a champion of truth in public perception; now, however, a more sinister element has seeped into public perception. Is he a journalist? A hacker? Or a criminal?
Now tell me, does Vivian Westwood, dressed as a canary in a cage help you understand anything more about this convoluted case? Me either. It’s the job of communication experts to take a topic and boil it down to its concentrated form, into an element so clear that a single signifier can represent it. When you’re selling a car, you can get abstract; when you’re protesting on behalf someone accused of international espionage, simplicity is key.
One example that uses language in a particularly creative way but still retains the essence of good communication is the job roles at Disneyland. You’re not a retail exec or project supervisor, you’re a performer or a stage manager; it works because the language used gives a better insight into the role and the expectation, unlike Westwood’s canary stunt which only made us more confused.
Booking.com, Booking.karma?
OK, I’m a bit late on this one. Private Eye picked up on Booking.com’s pandemic profiteering; it seems the online agent was hawking beach hotels to its mailing lists (along with some content marketing in quiz form) just hours after some of the local councils of said beaches declared a ‘major incident’.
I was wondering if it might have been an automated campaign, but the content is too specific (unless they have some wickedsmart algorithm that automatically sends out mailers when the temp hits 25°c. So someone made the conscious choice to send that. Just as interestingly, the site seems to have avoided any potential heat from the faux pas, besides in Private Eye . But in an act of divine retribution, the bad customer service and countless cancellation issues (no doubt caused by COVID) have ensured at least some bad press for the travel giant.
Niccoli M - What’s on your mind?
Colin Kaepernick, Muhammed Ali, Facebook - what’s the connection?
There was an interesting piece on how Nike (as far as I remember) passed on endorsing Ali, because advertisers during that period were wary of political activism and the divisiveness it caused. Everlast stepped in and have arguably been living off their association with Ali ever since.
So when Colin Kaepernick took a knee and made the front and back pages, Nike saw their opportunity for (financial) redemption. While NFL teams got scared of associating with Kaepernick, Nike was more than happy to give (use?) Kaepernick and the #BLM movement (for) publicity. Stock prices went up, and that’s all they wrote.
Jump forward, and Facebook is increasingly being boycotted by big brands because the platform won’t address its tiny little issue with a barely-worth-talking-about problem called hate speech. Here’s the connection: brands using activists is evolving to brands as activists.
And the cost of these ‘principled’ decisions? SMEs outweigh big brands in financial value to Facebook and the platform provides an undeniably well-valued option for businesses with smaller ad spends and local reach. In short, Facebook probably doesn’t care (its share price is back near peak) and SMEs can’t afford to. And the boycotters? Free PR, of course! I expect to see Ben & Jerry’s (et. al) back on Facebook when it pays to do so.
PBS Spacetime
Consistent uploads, supreme backlinking, and free to watch - the PBS Spacetime channel on Youtube is excellent. It’s done a lot to bring physics into the mainstream, and it provides a welcome respite from the increasingly naval-gazing attitude of everything else (Iunderstand the irony of posting this on a site that uses my name).
PBS’ latest release? The Boundry Between Black Holes and Neutron Stars - it takes the complex matter of detecting huge events in space by identifying the gravitational waves they produce (side note: Saturn’s rings were supposedly created because a moon went inside Saturn’s Roche Limit - the line a smaller celestial body cannot pass lest it be destroyed by the tidal forces of a bigger celestial body; Saturn’s gravity literally ripped a moon apart - thanks to Prof. Brian Cox for that one).
Anyway, since 2016 scientists have been detecting huge celestial events (think merging black holes) by measuring gravitational waves; that alone is astonishing - the information has always been there but until very recently we’ve not been able to capture the data (what else are we missing?). In the video’s example, Matt O’Dowd explains how recent data shows the fine line between Neutron Stars (extremely dense but small, a former star that exploded and collapsed under the weight of its gravity, which is now billions of times stronger than Earth’s gravity - so strong, in fact, that to leave the neutron star you have to travel half the speed of light) and black holes (a mystery of the universe, a collapsed star that, like a neutron star, has an extremely high density in an extremely small space, which also results in insanely strong gravitational fields, but is impossible to escape - oh, and we don’t know what happens inside except time appears to be frozen).
PBS, the BBC of the USA, has used social media and content channels extremely well to create new audiences and increase its reach. PBS Spacetime alone has over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and helps generate ad revenue for the non-profit. Similar to This American Life’s Serial podcasts, PBS is using the channels available extremely well to push their content.
And that backlinking is genius. You can easily get lost down the rabbit hole of far-out ideas as each YouTube video leads to more specific info on the topics covered (how can you talk about black holes and neutron stars without mentioning the 2017 neutron star collision?!).
Numan Ad
“Erectile dysfunction is common among men.”
Specifying men leaves an already comedy-susceptible product open to more jibes. Indeed, if we look at erectile dysfunction in women, the rate will be 100%. Maybe there’s a market for such a company there?