Channel Five’s Celebrity Big Brother has once again underlined the extent to which the term ‘celebrity’ has become meaningless. Full of the usual mix of fame hungry has-beens and wannabes, the show is simply a circus showing the inflated and often fragile egos of the contestants as they contrive to win the affections of the viewership.
The depths some people will go to gain notoriety or ‘fame’ is incredible, just ask Natasha Giggs. You would think after being caught having an affair with her husband’s brother, Ryan Giggs, she would want to lay low for a while. But now she is on Big Brother one would hope chasing fame rather than ignominy.
Dublin’s beautiful Georgia Salpa is also hoping her appearance on the show will help her take the UK by storm. However, she is now finding out the hard edge of reality TV after becoming one of the first people (along with some other z-lister) to face eviction.
But while Georgia is one of the lucky ones as she has little to lose and lots to gain career wise by her exposure on national television, most people have little idea of what a double-edged sword the pursuit of fame can be.
Sinead O’Connor’s talent is unquestionable, but the same cannot be said of some of her life choices. And while we all make mistakes and errors of judgement, few would want to broadcast them. However, thanks to Twitter Sinead’s life has become something of a media circus.
But while on one hand she tweets freely about intimate elements of her personal life, which are willing snapped up by the media, she gets highly irritated when journalists begin to focus too much attention her. This led to the headline in this week’s Sunday Independent — “Don’t f**k with me or my husband.”
The problem is when it comes to courting media coverage it is not simply a tap that can be turned off and turned on when it suits.
But just like Celebrity Big Brother, mindlessly embracing Twitter or indeed Facebook is more likely going to turn you into a sucker rather than a star.
Labour leader Ed Milliband was the latest to put his foot in it when he tweeted a message regarding the death of Blockbusters’ former host Bob Holness with the line, “A Generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters.”
But while there are plenty of public figures and celebrities seemingly only too happy to enter the Dumb Tweet of the Year Awards, it is the public’s lack of awareness of the power of Twitter that is shocking.
One idiot has thankfully been arresting this week for racially abusing former Liverpool footballer Stan Collymore via Twitter. While in the US a 16-year-old employee of the pizza chain Papa John’s was sacked after referring to a customer as “lady chinky eyes” on a receipt and then posting it on the social network site.
While we may mock the crass wannabes that are willing to suffer the humiliation and mental torture in a desperate bid to save or start their careers in the Big Brother House, many are willing to ruin their lives or suffer the double-edged sword of media intrusion all for the sake of a dumb Tweet or foolish Facebook post.
However, even for established stars reality television is now so mainstream that its pitfalls almost seem unavoidable.
Singer Brian Kennedy just last week got caught in the line of fire of reality television. He allowed the Daily Mirror’s entertainment reporter Paul Martin get under his skin and ended up throwing a glass of red wine over him during the celebrity version of Come Dine With Me on TV3. But why should such a talented performer be dragged down to the same level as a British tabloid hack? The show’s producers obviously knew what they were doing when inviting Martin and Brian sadly took the bait.
The fact is that while reality television, Twitter or Facebook can give you instant notoriety, it is important to beware — they often bite back.
It appears the Sunday World is trying to beat the British tabloids at their own game, once again highlighting how media standards are on the decline, writes Paul Allen.
In a game where there are seemingly few rules and even less scruples, standards in tabloid journalism are proving to be something of a bottomless pit.
The Sunday World’s ‘exclusive’ naming of the well-know journalist at the centre of underage sex allegations has underlined just how low some of our home-grown media will stoop to scoop the British red tops and try and beat them at their own game.
The News Of The World put pressure on the Sunday World when it broke the story a week earlier. However, even the infamous red top tabloid, currently embroiled in the phone hacking scandal in the UK, did not go as far as mention the journalist’s name. But the Sunday World it seems wanted to prove it is still top dog on its home patch.
The naming of the journalist not only could potentially have legal ramifications for any future court case, it also shows little regard for protecting the anonymity of the girl at the centre of the story while the garda investigate the matter fully.
The relentless march of the British press into the Irish market has brought a mentality that has previously been foreign to Irish media.
Shocking Standards
With deep pockets and minds set on dominating the Irish market, the UK tabloids obviously have set alarm bells ringing in the likes of the Sunday World. So much so that the paper’s brazen move even shocked the most hardened media watchers when it tried to trump the British tabloids by scoring such a cheap shot.
However, one should not be so shocked. The tabloid cancer spread by the ‘Irish’ editions of the British media has rapidly changed the media landscape here.
The Irish are among the most prolific consumers of newspapers and media, and have generally been rewarded with quality products and high standards.
However, if the Irish Sun’s “Devil Otter Ate My Mini Van” frontpage headline on last Wednesday’s edition is a sign of the quality of things to come it will be a sad day for readers.
While a sense of humour can be lacking in some of our better papers, to pitch your newspaper to readers with this sort of frontpage downgrades the offering to that of a comic book. Let’s just hope the typical Irish reader is not going to be wooed by tales akin to that of Freddy Star eating a hamster.
Guilty Past
The British tabloids operating here will constantly claim that they are ‘Irish’ products. But no matter how the ‘Irish’ editions try to distance themselves from what they no doubt perceive as their titles in ‘the mainland’, the sins committed by their UK editions still cast a long shadow.
Ray Houghton and Ronnie Whelan discovered this when they were forced to disassociate themselves from the RTE programme Premier Soccer Sunday which is being sponsored by The Irish Sun.
When the former Liverpool players realised the association with The Sun, which is still boycotted by Liverpool fans for the manner in which it reported lies surrounding the deaths of 96 fans at Hillsborough in 1989, they had little choice.
The current phone-hacking scandal in the UK shows the tabloid press continues to push the boundaries. Indeed, the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker actually feels sorry for the hacks who churn out tabloid garbage, because hanging onto the “belief that tabloid journalism is a worthwhile use of your brief time on this planet must require a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo.”
The only positive thing to note after the Sunday World’s shocking decision to publish such a story was that no other media outlet in Ireland decided to follow suit. The lesson for the Sunday World must be that when the British red tops draw the line at following your lead it is time to realise surely have gone too far.
Things have never been fair in love, war or product placement. Just ask Guinness: management in St James’s Gate must have felt pretty bitter when former US president Bill Clinton was photographed sipping a pint of Murphy’s during his trip to Ireland in 1995.
As the then leader of the free world sat in Cassidy’s bar in Dublin, the Guinness publicity gurus were probably rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of the priceless photo opportunity.
But they hadn’t bargained on the ingenuity of their counterparts at Murphy’s who allegedly smuggled a keg of their brew into the bar to sabotage Guinness’s moment in the limelight.
Now, with US president Barack Obama set to visit, savvy product placement gurus have been at it again, with Dulux reportedly helping to paint his ancestral home town of Moneygall.
But will the relaxing of product placement regulations by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland force brands to play by the rules and pay, rather than rely on one-upmanship and ingenuity, when it comes to getting exposure for brands?
This new era in product placement arrived in Britain earlier this year, and Nescafe¤ was one of the first big brands to jump aboard. It paid a whopping £100,000 (€113,000) to have its Dolce Gusto coffee machine feature on the set of ITV’s big budget flop, This Morning, for three months.
Industry sources estimate the new rules allowing product placement will bring in an extra £100 million in revenue to the commercial TV channels in Britain, while Irish channels could share up to €6 million.
However, the reaction has been lukewarm, probably because long before the new rules, brands have always found ways to get their products in front of the public.
Just like Murphy’s got one over on Guinness, the people at Corona bypassed the GAA’s commercial department with their very own ‘ambush marketing’ masterstroke, when two Cork players wore the beer brand’s logo on their boots during the 2005 All-Ireland hurling quarter-final.
The players involved were believed to have pocketed just €500 each for the deal, a fraction of the value of the publicity generated for the beer company in television, radio and newspaper coverage. However, while US television viewers are used to being bombarded with product placements, audiences here seem less enthusiastic.
Product placement is even facing a backlash in Hollywood, as director Morgan Spurlock, who took aim at McDonald’s in the documentary Super Size Me, has now set his sights on branded goods and their relationship with movie makers.
His latest film The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, due for release in the US next month, sees him try to fund his entire film through product placement, while exploring how brands are increasingly looking to place their products on television and movie sets.
The reasons are simple: the increase in popularity of Sky Plus devices, which allow viewers to fast-forward through ad breaks, and the growing numbers watching films and television over the internet, have meant fewer are being exposed to traditional advertising.
So, American Idol judges sit with glasses emblazoned with the Coke logo and James Bond roars around in anything from an Aston Martin to a Ford Bronco, while the baddies end up crashing into DHL trucks.
However, research in Britain has found audiences pretty ambivalent about the arrival of product placement on terrestrial TV.
While 73 per cent said they had noticed placements in US programmes, 70 per cent believe seeing a brand in a TV show or film will not change their perceptions of it, according to research by YouGov.
It will be interesting to see how advertising agencies compete with public relations firms as they look to get a bigger slice of the product placement pie. When it comes to brand exposure, advertising agencies tend to think in terms of how much money they need to throw at it.
Public relations firms, on the other hand, tend to explore how to help brands get their product into the forefront of the action, rather than paying for it to sit in the background hoping someone will notice.
Consumers have become desensitised to product placement and, despite the new dawn for such strategies in Ireland, brands will most likely favour a mix of placement and clever commando marketing to help them stand out.
Some advertisers and PR experts will no doubt go head to head to win new business, but the more savvy will most likely join forces. Product placements will be used, but the real victory will be in the clever ways the brand can leverage such placements.
So, while some brands will undoubtedly pay for the privilege of having their moment in the background of Fair City or beside the sofa on Ireland AM, when it comes to getting brand exposure, expect the real battles to continue to be waged using the art of guerrilla warfare.
Article printed in Sunday Business Post, Media and Marketing, 3rd April 2011