Posts Tagged ‘america’

What a depressing week for lovers of football. What a sorry, sad, insane mess played out by fools and halfwits. Ordinarily, the focus would have been on the big game, Arsenal v. Chelsea. Instead, this weekend, our interest in the game will be for all the wrong reasons. So, instead, I have decided to focus on the American version of football, which reaches its colossal climax on Sunday. I hanker after the hype, showmanship and ballyhoo of the Super Bowl.

US and UK sport have always been different – from the amount of body armour the Americans wear to play what amounts to rugby to the way the world views the different sports on each side of the Atlantic. Whatever your view of American sport, however, there is no doubt they are well ahead of the game when it comes to using social media in cahoots with big sports events. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just been reading an intriguing post by that doyenne of the celebrity underbelly, Madame Arcati, querying the disappearance of an article by the Times’s Dan Sabbagh on Sir Philip Green’s involvement in trying to break the X Factor in America.

Arcati, whose blog is the current darling of the blogoshphere and one of its best, sexiest reads, muses, with an amused raised eyebrow, on the possibility that the article – which threw light on Green’s angling for a $9 million raise for Cowell and the idea of broadcasting an American X Factor on Fox to tie Cowell to American Idol for the next two and a half years.

Arcati wryly pricks the egos at work, acknowledging that the story could either be a fabrication or an irritant to the moguls behind X Factor and American Idol. The missing Sabbagh story is either full of “unusually fearless objectivity” or “total tosh” – either could have prompted its pulling.

Regardless, the good Madame, by exposing the article’s vanishment, is gleefully and gloriously helping expose the powerful PR muscle that keeps the X Factor in the public eye.

As we know, the X Factor is the current role model for promoting celebrities, if not neccessarily the ones it is purportedly creating. I’ve been looking at the rise of Cheryl Cole; the Independent asked for my opinion on her success. It all ties in rather nicely with Madam Arcati’s timely piece.

“She is a phenomenon of the moment,” I told the Independent. “There is a time and place for opportunities driven by The X Factor. Marketing is built to capitalise on the moment. With every level of pop, it’s going to be transient. It’s about harvesting the brand at its prime, and knowing their sell by date is firmly tattooed on their arse. There’s no long-term future with Cheryl Cole. You drill your marketing through the ears listening at that moment in time to the music. They’re sinking the drill into the deep well and sucking up the crude while it’s where it is.”

You could say the same about the X Factor and, if the missing Times article is to be believed, the people behind it know this and are pushing to squeeze out every last drop of milk whilst they still can…

Maybe I’ve reached a midlife crisis of confidence in the news, given how long I’ve worked in PR, but the more I read the papers or listen to the radio these days, the more I find myself considering the underbelly of the stories that I’m hearing and pondering on who exactly delivered a particular story and if they’ve spun it so that it would arrive on the particular day knowing what effect it might have on the world. Actually, I think it’s more than that – it may be becoming an illness. I may be developing Churnophrenia, a disease that affects publicists of a certain age and forces them into ever more desperate attempts to join the dots.

Everywhere I look I think I see small stories blowing themselves out of all proportion, being pumped up by the people behind the news agenda, floating in the headlines like ungainly zeppelins spinning slowly out of control. I’m not entirely sure what is imagined and what is truth any more, and so, to try and find out, I routinely find myself picking compulsively over the minutiae of who, what, where, when and why a story might have been spun out to create the biggest impact, all the while playing the news matrix like some vast, infernal sudoku puzzle that MUST be completed.

Take yesterday morning’s news that Harris Tweed has decided to drop all reference to Scotland in their promotional material to “avoid a backlash over the release of the Lockerbie bomber” – I immediately developed a cold, shivering sweat as I considered the possibilities.

The first thought that struck me, like a falling brick, was that it’s perfectly possible that there could be no hidden agenda; there might actually be a backlash. A brief moment of respite from the neurosis! Better than medication, I took the resurgent memory of the time the French irritated the USA in 2003 by opposing the invasion of Iraq, and the Americans renamed French Fries as Freedom Fries in revenge. The chill abated – of course it’s easier by far for an irate American to give up buying Harris Tweed than give up their favourite over-salted fried potato sticks, so there really could be reason for the tweed makers to be cautious.

Then I remembered the debate I took part in last week for the Radio Academy, which made me brutally aware of how many people accept and acknowledge the use of spin to make the news, of how many consume the information knowingly, unquestioningly. And here I am breaking out in a paranoid sweat again. I am Jack’s Churnophrenic sense of confusion.

Not even the idea that there may genuinely be crofters out there panicking about losing sales to the wrath of America can save me now – I can still feel a realisation trickling down my spine like ice: if I were looking for a good way to get Harris Tweed stitched into the national consciousness and talked about the world over, I would certainly consider planting a story about it, connected to a hot topic of the day if possible, primed to burst onto the news agenda on a Monday and help dictate the way the week’s news ran.

My god, it even ties in nicely to the launch of Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol – the hero of which wears Harris Tweed, probably even to bed.

Should I seek treatment for my condition? Is there any hope for me? And, more to the point, am I alone in this Churnophrenic inability to be entirely sure what is truth and what is spin? Worryingly, I think not…

Is there any need to reinvent the dating agency? It seems that there is in America, where a company have audaciously taken the process to its extreme, as a press release announcing the launch of Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com, “The World’s First Dating Service for the Terminally Ill” proves.

Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com claims to be “designed to cut through the superficiality and embrace issues we think are most meaningful – the desire and need for understanding, compassion, empathy and comfort between human beings” but it also offers to help terminally ill people to find others like them, who don’t mind they’re dying, to have sex with.

Are they trying to court controversy? Certainly, if the puns throughout the press release are anything to go by. The press release urges terminally ill people to “join us… if you are truly dying to connect” and promises to help them “to go out with a ‘bang’”.

The press release is spectacularly brazen, offering “the possibility for individuals to connect with other open, accepting minds who might better understand their unusual circumstances” and to help potential clients to find “a singing partner for your swan song”, as well as selling their ability to hook people up with sexual partners as desperate as themselves.

I’m astonished by the audacity of this release and the project itself. It is bound to cause a storm of controversy – all of which will no doubt make it a huge hit when it is launched on St. Valentine’s Day.

They’re quite extraordinary, these Americans.