An announcement on their website that “a spectacular name” was to sign for the club invited fans to watch the name’s unveiling on the team’s Facebook page.

Needless to say, an incredible amount of furore was generated and fans eagerly tuned in at the proposed time in their thousands. However, following a short video clip from FCB’s general manager Christian Nerlinger, fans were treated to a view of their own Facebook profile picture, followed by their own name on the back of a Bayern Munich number 8 shirt.

Cue slow clap. It’s not hard to imagine the brainstorming session behind that one. The scene: a smoky little room, the unearthly glow of a dozen iMacs lending a superhuman sheen to the bearded mugs of the creative team. Who knows what blue sky heights they tapped into to get there, but the point is that when that eureka moment came and someone threw this ‘off the wall’ nugget of media disruption into the ether, everyone was clearly too busy congratulating themselves to think for a second about the fans themselves, and the ongoing, human narrative that would arise.

A football team’s stock in trade is the illogical, desperate and oddly beautiful passion of its fans. Football is not just another consumer product, and its fans are not simply consumers. Like the release of a Morrissey album or the unveiling of a new Pope, the transfer window is something that inspires interest and conversation that transcends the rational and borders on the obsessive.

In order to keep fans onside, buying tickets and following the team after the window has closed, the most important thing that a team’s communications need to do is inspire and retain trust. If the fans trust the team through and through, then no matter what disappointments or controversies come their way, they will stick by the team with religious ardour.

Ironically, of course, this ardour and support is something the stunt was clearly trying to acknowledge, and I’m not claiming that FCB was deliberately sticking two fingers up at its fanbase. However, the main shortcoming of creative is that it gets so wrapped up in its own genius that it forgets how the great unwashed actually think. In the eyes of someone who’s skipped a class or skived off that all important meeting just to watch the announcement of a name this is not a clever stunt- it’s a sick joke.

In short, the team weren’t thinking in narrative terms. They planned meticulously up to an initial moment of shock and disruption, but failed to plan for what would come after. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, fans have lost some of that crucial trust. While 20 years ago this may not have been such an issue, they’ll now whip each other up into a frenzy via social media, and likely leave in significant numbers.

I encourage clever media thinking, but when clever become smartarse, particularly in a supposedly grassroots organisation like a sports team, you’ve got disaster on your hands. Some good may come out of this fiasco if the suits who run modern sport can be made to see that.

We’ve already had one hysterical moment, with David Cameron turning in a karaoke version of Obama when he rolled up his sleeves yesterday. He may have been trying to look hip, but looked more like the sort of embarrassing school teacher who apes trends remorselessly – two years after they’ve come off the boil. Unlike embarrassing teachers, Cameron made the news.

There’s also likely to be a lot of spoofing going on. Political comedy and spoofs need to be good if they’re going to work. In fact, they need to be funny and to the point. But, if the Lib Dems’ “Labservative” attempted satire is anything to go by, the signs are not good. You cannot crowbar something in and hope for the best. That is not, of course, going to stop anyone from trying.

As a consequence of all this, I have decided to bring back Stuntwatch for the duration of the General Election. Starting this Friday, I will be rounding up the best and the worst of the week’s electioneering stunts. It’s going to be a long, strange four weeks…

From the negative electioneering of mashed up, satirical posters, to the dusting down of the old Saatchi creative team – to deliver up what Cameron’s mob hope to be a coup de gras to Labour (as was done under Thatcher) – its been a long and spectacularly phoney war; one that has, alarmingly, only focused on the media process.

Now, with even more spin and blather lined up to cover over the front pages with its own mutated brand of primordial goo, we get Sam and Dave via webcam, at home in their designer kitchen, the fertile photogenic young couple whom the Tories hope will get them over the winning line. Basically, another lump of undigested PR hype posited for the Westminster Village elite as the media heralds the election date and the gears of war grind into place.

Never before, however, have there been more examples and more critique of the marketing, PR and advertising that goes into an election campaign. As various party marketing grandees fumble with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and guerilla marketing, they fail to grasp that the key issue is going to be whether the great unwashed are actually going to get off their backsides and vote.

The real state of politics is that the nation is utterly disillusioned with the process of power, the government and the corrupt politicians. No matter what the politics, PR and spin are ubiquitous and as a consequence we all mistrust politicians, especially in power. Whether it’s an interesting use of social media or pushing forward a political wife, none of the parties have, to date, proffered any real policies for the electorate to judge.

All we have been given is the slew and spew of marketing and a welter of PR blather. The papers spend more time commenting on new and old media tricks being employed to propel the parties into power than they do on what actually matters – policy!

Have the collective efforts of all the political parties to sell politics been a distraction that has hypnotized a nation? I would say yes, as we have seemingly given in to the Machiavellian forces, hired media hands and the strategies last employed by Obama that will lead each TV debate. This constant distraction and the media obsession with personality politics leads us further away from the real and pressingly urgent issues which are what we should be voting for.

Its an interesting start to the election and leaves me wondering: do the public believe in the theatre of politics at all any more?

Do they believe in the clusters of smiling supporters hanging off their leaders’ every word whilst the hapless media ruck is ignored? Or Cameron’s one man road show bouncing off the walls? Or Gordon’s team greeted en masse by clapping, grinning party faithful? Or slick, formulaic Cameron making speeches with his white shirt sleeves rolled up in an attempt to demonstrate his youth and vitality? The boyish Clegg photographed with Saint Vincent Of Cable?

I am breathless: its day one and already there’s been stunt after stunt, photo opp after photo opp – both Brown and Cameron more shamelessly proactive than Katie Price.

Please please keep it up! I just can’t wait for the TV debates next week…

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.

You only have to take a cursory look at this year’s Super Bowl to see the difference – this is the year that “social media and the Super Bowl are officially converging” apparently; the year when advertisers, fans, athletes and the NFL are all weighing in with a social media slew of information, opinion and advertising. Twitter is inundated with Super Bowl tweets. And this is for an event that is already swathed in pageantry and hype in the non-digital media.

British sport, by contrast, has only managed to set the social media world alight with the sorry sexual shenanigans of John Terry, the (now ex-) England football captain. And this is in a World Cup year, when you’d hope that the advertisers, fans and athletes would converge in a similar manner to the Americans behind their sport, to push the first vaguely successful football team England’s had in ages towards winning big in South Africa.

But no; the only major trending topic at the moment is Terry’s greed and sex life. In Britain, sport and social media are seemingly united only in gossip, the end result of which is most likely to be the England squad torn apart at the seams.

“Publicist Mark Borkowski encourages his clients to make good use of the web, though he urges caution. ‘You wouldn’t go into a pub and scream out ‘I’m drinking a pint of lager’, but if you sit in a corner and do some people watching, others may join you and have a conversation. It’s the same with the net. The way to make it work is observe first; be a voyeur.’

“Borkowski is a big fan of Twitter but says it is not for everyone. ‘Don’t blunder in because you feel you have to, or you will look like a dad dancing at a wedding.’

“Unfortunately, you can’t control everything online – a friend may tag you in a photograph one drunken night out, and just like the paparazzi snapping a celebrity falling out of a club, years of good work are instantly undone. Similarly, if you post something in an online forum or blog while drunk and the host refuses to remove it.”

To read the full article, click here.

There is no doubt that Barnum would have loved Britain’s Got Talent – a cost-effective format that gathers a collection of strange and strangely determined people into its fold and pushes their saleability, if they have any, to the hilt. It’s nothing new – Russell Birdwell conducted star searches for Selznick International back in the 1930s, the Harry Potter films made a public search for their star. The only new thing in the mix is the ability to spread word on the show’s latest runaway idol to the world in seconds flat via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere.

Cowell is a remarkable man, who puts the business into show with enormous skill. With Britain’s Got Talent, he has recognised, as Barnum did, that there is a vast well of public desire to ogle. They invest briefly in the people that X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent draw out of the woodwork, admire them and root for them for a time when the sing or perform well – within a certain set of strictures – and then watch as they sink slowly and unwillingly back into oblivion.

There is a huge appetite for the fairytale ending on TV shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, but beyond the fairytale endings, real life isn’t that simple. The audience is always going to want to know what happens next. The pressure of expectation, especially on a global scale, is enough to make anyone crack, let alone a woman with learning difficulties who has been plucked from obscurity and plunged into the vast acid bath of fame. Susan Boyle may be an ugly duckling who has become a swan, but what happens when the public find the next ugly duckling to swoon over? What it amounts to, from either end of the process, is too much pressure on the shoulders of Susan Boyle.

Susan Boyle is very unlikely to be anything but a one hit wonder. I’ll stick my neck out and say that it may well be a mega-hit on the back of all the euphoria because yes, she has a very good voice. Britain’s Got Talent has lifted her from obscurity, but the trouble is it also seems to expect her to deal with the pressures of fame on a scale that nobody could have predicted. The show side-steps the well-worn cliché of the long pub tours and constant struggle that has marked the progress to fame in the past – a process which was still no guarantee of steeling the acts it produced for the sudden onrush of the corrosive processes of mega-fame. Despite the quality of Boyle’s voice and the willingness of the public to love her at the moment, I still can’t see this as a lasting love affair.

I’m not attacking Susan Boyle when I say that I don’t think that people will pay to see her perform in six months time. I just don’t think she’s got the wherewithal to withstand the pressures of fame and I don’t believe the public will stick with her, because too many of them are too in love with the moment of her transformation to consider or care what happens beyond the happy ever after moment of that one big hit, other than to watch her implode. She is not a role model because there is no room for role models in the world of ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap’ celebrity.

What I am attacking is the process, the public expectation, the weight being placed on Boyle’s shoulders. As I told the Times, “’You can’t pluck somebody with those issues and fix them overnight. This has been a fantastic soap opera for the fame-makers, Syco [Simon Cowell’s record label] and Talkback TV. I’m not suggesting that they are cynical and deliberately looking to exploit, but they have got their eye on the buck. They’ve done very well out of Paul Potts and they want to see what they can make out of this. We are beginning to see more and more people who are casualties of the process. Jade Goody was over. She was resurrected by her illness.’”

If Boyle overcomes the caustic nature of fame and makes a real go of it – wonderful! I’ll gladly be proved wrong. But I honestly believe that she will have one huge hit and then slowly disappear, most likely because the public will have found another fairytale to follow. If that happens, I just hope the realization that it’s all gone away doesn’t destroy an already palpably fragile woman. She doesn’t deserve that.

I think the Supreme Being will be pulling cosmic hairs out of his signature big white beard with frustration. This sort of reactionary fundamentalism is plain silly. The Catholic Church is missing a trick. They need to embrace the myriad of platforms available and use them. If the church was to think creatively about what could be achieved by hooking up to the gaming universe, mobiles and social networking sites, it might just become relevant.

I am not suggesting a repeat of some of the stunts that have emanated from the odd funky priest – sermons in txt or text voting for hymn choices. No, I propose something much more immersive; to use church buildings and communities as the springboard for a major digital rethink.

Get the game play right for a religiously themed Xbox game and think about the potential of communicating with groups of gamers. What about apps on Facebook and iPhone? There’s a whole generation out there that any religion that wants to try can only reach by becoming digital missionaries.

The Vatican needs to grasp vitality and stop proffering a hair shirt!

Alright, there are the net conspiracies about social networking brands and how they are allegedly linked to information-gathering for the NSA (that’s the USA’s National Security Agency of course, not the UK’s National Sheep Association) but this is not a serious, concerted force; there are people leaping up and down about blind emails and viral marketing, but no complaints have really registered about how technology is monitoring people.

Monitoring is back in focus at the moment, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude, which is based on the Google Maps service. It allows people, through their computers and mobile phones, to keep tabs on their friends and family by pinging out their location to anyone who’s part of the service. Given that this is Google, and that they dominate the tech market, there is some fear as to what latitudes Google will allow themselves with the gathering of information and how they may use the data that such an application gathers.

In light of these concerns, Google have announced that they will not be keeping information on Latitude users who wish to hide their location, but is this the most effective way of managing the potential crisis in confidence for a company whose ideals were once trumpeted as being pure as the driven snow? The PR machine behind Latitude, both on and offline, is to be congratulated on the way it has so effectively quelled any seeds of unrest.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been greater outrage about Latitude, however; Latitude seems to me to be little more than a covert widget to make Google’s advertising model more effective; one that impinges on the privacy of anyone using it. Added to that, a Latitude-enabled phone could be easily stolen and used against the person the phone belongs to. It’ll be interesting to see if any human rights group make like French lorry drivers and park a protest right in the middle of Google’s information superhighway in the near future.

Disney never sued Paul Krassner, who conceived the satirical Orgy poster in the wake of Walt Disney’s death, never ordered that the poster be suppressed – although they did take umbrage at a full, commercial run. They were surely aware that the poster actually added to the viability of their brand, to the longevity of the icons Disney created, and that to suppress it entirely would be to suppress the desire of the people who were amused and/or titillated by it to interact with the brand in the future. They were aware that adults need the freedom to play with a brand for future iterations of the brand to reach the audience it is intended for – in Disney’s case, the children.

This is where Morris dancing is failing. Its form has changed little in the last 90 years, since Cecil Sharp saved it by recording Morris dances in The Country Dance Book and setting up, with others, the organisation that is now known as the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Here is an extremely rigid organisation noted for its unwillingness to allow change, being stuck in a mould where participants are perceived as beard-wearing, real ale-loving people over 55 who are prone to shout “Judas” at musicians who defy the sternly stratified traditions. As playful as the Morris may seem, its inability to change or accommodate new ideas is precisely what is neutering it. Where Disney allows satire to breed and change to come, the Morris train-spotters are protectionist and will not allow other traditions to infiltrate and strengthen the brand. Simply, they have no sense of fun and thus no entry level for newcomers.

The same is true of many brands in today’s market – they allow for no undercurrent of anarchy that allows for change and strengthens tradition. Morris men and PR companies, account managers and advertising executives alike pander to their clients’ fears of change and job loss and falling market share and so stay static, which means that they are far less likely to survive. They are selling a process, a structure, an unbending way of doing things that hasn’t changed for years.

Companies like Apple, with the iPhone, and Facebook do it differently – they survive by allowing others in to create new things within the bounds of their platforms. They allow creators in to play. Even Fox TV, a huge structure, part of the behemoth that is the Murdoch media empire, allows a certain amount of fun to be had at their expense by their biggest brand, The Simpsons.

This is a year when everyone must give up the idea of being comfortable, when brands, PR and even Morris men must bring in new people via new ideas, new ways of doing things that are transparent and exciting and engaging for a wide spectrum of consumers and traditions. Those who will survive will eschew process in favour of an open mind. Allowing people to play with brands is the big mantra of the coming months – it is necessary now for us to get away from the fiefdoms of the past and allow fluidity for the 24/7 credit crunch agenda.

It has been speculated that there will only be worldwide peace in the face of an alien invasion; the credit crunch is the beginning of that invasion as far as brands and PR are concerned. Now all we need to ask ourselves is “have we the ability to allow this change to happen?” If not, then we will find ourselves on an endless Escher staircase of ever-diminishing returns.

The Realist