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Speed Up – Genius at Play

17 Mar

Now that all the beardy types have paused for breath after another SXSW and Austin’s homeless people have gone back to just being homeless again, it is worth highlighting another recent initiative which had innovation at the heart – this one a little closer to home.

A couple of weekends ago, The Urgent Genius Weekender 2 kicked off. This is not, as the name may suggest, a horrific weekend of debauchery in a Butlin’s park somewhere on the coast, but a weekend of ‘spontaneous’ but somehow ‘organised’ creativity. The Urgent Genius operation is to be admired. Set up in 2010, it is an innovative off-shoot of Iris. Tasked with tracking the ‘Power of Real Time Creativity’, it collates and collects some of the most talked about and powerful content on the internet, curating it and inviting each piece to be voted on. The Urgent Genius Weekender is an open call to all creatives to join forces (in teams) to newsjack – produce a piece of content around a newsworthy or viral subject, and get that piece of content talked about, looked at, shared, commented upon etc. The content with the most views at the end of the competition in the winner. It is a real time response to existing internet memes and it is one of the new forms of communication that uses the new weapons of the comms trade – video and social media. Participants get together, pick a newsworthy topic and, within 48 hrs, produce a piece of film which reacts to that topic, hoping to add further talking points to an already popular item and get cut-through for their own piece of content – which will usually look to provide a humourous or irrevrant interpretation of that event. Teams consist of traditional and non-traditional practitioners – social media experts, creatives, data coders and beyond. The winner has not yet been announced, but here is my favourite – a re-working of the Guardian Three Little Pigs advert (which I previously blogged about) for the purposes of The Sun newspaper – ‘Tits, pedos, football’. It’s very funny.

Newsjacking is something that will be around for some time and is on the rise. It is a very relevant and clever way for a piece of content to become talked about. Unlike most traditional PR stories or campaigns, newsjacking capitalizes on an existing ground-base of momentum and exploits this awareness to get its own content looked at. Relatively speaking, content can be cheap to produce and the results can be huge – hundreds of thousands of eyeballs across the internet. At its heart is creativity, but PR’s are well placed to add value to the cause as, in this game, media nous counts for everything. Half the job is seeding the content online, amplifying it via social media and getting the mainstream media to pick up on it – something we PR’s believe ourselves experts at. The real genius comes when content can be produced not reactively in response to events, but pro-actively. Again, one of the talents of any good PR person is to predict what the media will be talking about in advance, and how they might want to talk about it. Producing content with this in mind is probably the holy grail – but then probably wouldn’t be called news-jacking (news-cracking?).

Still, if this is to become a proper client service (in PR) one of the big challenges is to get the client’s messages built into the content. Firstly it takes a brave client to actually sign off any piece of work like this. It goes against all their natural instincts – by pressing the button they effectively sign over control of the project. The brand must be right to do this – ideally it should be young, dynamic and edgy, not a lumbering, corporate giant who would have too much at stake. Generally the latter cannot relinquish control.

One of my favourite things about Urgent Genius comes from their sizzle reel video explaining what they do. Their message to potential clients is basically this: ‘once we’ve produced the content, we’ll meet you for breakfast the next day to show it to you and you had better bring your lawyers (to sign it off)’. That is pretty much the attitude that needs to exist if this type of communication is to take off within the mainstream PR trade and I don’t see why it shouldn’t. Newspapers in print will eventually die and with nearly half of all tweets containing links to content, plus the prediction by Google recently that within 4 years 80% of all internet traffic will be video, the future has to be in creative content like this – use it or lose it.

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And This Little Piggie Went To Propaganda

2 Mar

                                                               

 Bracing and topical stuff from the Guardian’s new ad campaign, Three Little Pigs, which can be viewed here. Created by BBH ad agency, it is, at its very fundamental proposition, a very good piece of content. How is the Guardian positioned? As a multi-platform, adept, versatile, technologically innovative media owner that demonstrates itself to be a source belonging to the new age of media – digital, instant, ‘always there’. The Guardian (or BBH) have really captured the pace and urgency of modern day media here, with social media used as the vehicle to demonstrate how quickly and emphatically news can travel. But there are other tricks employed that make this a great piece of content:

NUMBER ONE: it is based on fairytale – instantly engaging, instantly recongnized, it is a fresh and relevant way to set a story up. Take something nostaligic and give it new meaning or use it to re-tell your tale. Very shrewd move – this is story telling at its best.

NUMBER TWO: they have hi-jacked the (recent-ish)news agenda. Real issues such as ’breaking and entering’ (‘Can killing an intruder ever be justified?’) and the subsequent economic debate on how far depression has spread (‘Public Outrage as Mortgage Defaults Soar’) are littered throughout the piece and serve to highlight the campaigning nature of this newspaper – they cover the issues you care about, don’t let the fairytale kid you.

NUMBER THREE: something else boils beneath the surface, not just the Guardian’s telegraphing of their new modus operandi: Open Journalism. The Huff Po described this advert as hilarious.  Really? The Washington Post thought it was ‘viral’. Really? It could be more than this. The Guardian could be, through this consumer facing advertising campaign, sub-conciously re-enforcing their position and authority as THE newspaper that broke the phone-hacking scandal and set British journalism ‘right’ again. By finding the three pigs guilty of framing the big bad wolf (shock horror), they may be showing how, through investigative journalism (in the week that their reporter du jour Nick Davies won a Paul Foot award for hacking expose), the Guardian have unearthed the reality of News International’s supposed news operations and exposed the traditional order to be a fake, a hoax, a make-believe – something they have brought to light.  The point they seem to make is that, without this campaigning and trail-blazing approach to their own industry, injustice would have prevailed. Quite an emphatic statement, taken in context of the current Leveson hearing (Ofcom anyone?). Irreverance isn’t dead though: note the raw (pork?) meat and the rubber chicken layed at the foot of the memorial to the wolf- itself headlined by a graffiti style ‘tag’ on the wall at which it is layed. Creative team joke? Maybe, but isn’t it all?

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Traditional Vs Social Media

14 Feb

 

Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s omnipotent media editor, said in his leader column earlier this week that Twitter is just the place to break news that won’t hold for long, making the point that it cannot compete with traditional media, such as newspapers and broadcast channels, when it comes to proper in-depth reporting.  Apercu, this is true. 140 characters allows for nothing more than a quick announcement and the immediacy of Twitter gives the potential of billions of eyeballs on your story. In contrast, the page space and analytical prowess of the likes of the nationals and BBC, not to mention rolling news channels such as Sky News (who incidentally told their reporters NOT to break news or re-tweet news on Twitter), allows for much quality and quantity of commentary to be dispensed.

 However, this view of the role of Twitter is a bit short-sighted. The social media platform is not simply a tool to say something short and sharp in 140 letters – it is about sharing information and stimulating conversations across a wide cross-section of people. As a result it cannot be badged so easily. It can, for instance, act as the vehicle to in-depth analysis, or to further enlightenment on a given subject quite simply by linking via it. 42% of all tweets contain links to content – that’s almost half of the people who are tweeting providing some sort of further information beyond their quota of 140 characters. Who is to say that a tweet containing a link to a Youtube video is not more insightful than a news in brief in a newspaper, for instance? Sure, that video may not be providing analytical news but can certainly deeper the understanding of someone’s knowledge beyond what can be said on Twitter. With 90% of internet traffic predicted (by Robert Kyncl of Google) to be comprised of video content within a few years, that is a lot of potential to inform beyond Twitter’s word cap.

Furthermore, Twitter has been specifically designed to allow analysis of topics beyond isolated tweets. The hashtag allows for several conversations to be monitored at once, with multiple commentators conveying multiple points of view, all on one screen. This allows for a balanced analysis of a news event and an instant testing ground for points of view – something that should be classed as ‘instant analysis’ and that only Twitter can do.
 
Hacks shouldn’t be overly concerned at this ability of Twitter to provide analysis though – it is part of the same problem of media having gone digital and of print circulations decreasing. There will alwasy be a place for print media of some form, just not on the unsustainable model of several daily newspapers competing for the same diminishing market. Consumers will always like the fold and textile nature of a newspaper in print, the smudge of ink and the crackle of a creased paper, but it must take its place amongst the new media order where news, insight and the canvassing of public opinion are shared, not held by one medium.

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Eyewitness: Paul Dacre at the Leveson Enquiry

6 Feb

The Leveson Inquiry Logo

 The man, who most would describe as the singular most powerful editor in charge of a UK newspaper today, certainly cut a figure of authority as he strode into Courtroom 73, the Royal Courts of Justice, today. Having dispatched with three witnesses in the morning session (Sue Akers: Police Commission - unscathed, Dan Wootton: ex-N0W showbiz editor - inconclusive and Nick Owens: Sunday Mirror investigative reporter - torn apart) , there was certainly a feeling in the courtroom that the ‘main event’ was Dacre and his upcoming defence of the Daily Mail/Associated Newspaper group.

 A minor technical hitch that prevented online streaming of the event to the outside world was quickly overcome, despite it initially causing the Twittersphere to go wild with speculation that something custard pie-esque had greeted Dacre inside the courtroom.

 Dacre was always going to defend the policy and journalism of the Daily Mail on this day, and that is exactly what he did, buoyed up by the sense that British journalism should be proud of the MailOnline’s recent achievement of surpassing the New York Times website as the world’s most visited news site (it should).

 The editor received a far more comprehensive set of questioning than other editors and each side (prosecution and defence) traded blows without landing any knockout punches. Across the marathon 3.5 hours that Dacre was questioned, here are four key observations that came across:

 

DACRE IS STILL A MAN ON TOP OF HIS GAME

He came with a game plan. Unlike his fore-bearers he was able to dictate the tone and pace of the initial debate by arriving at Court with a redemption remedy for the British press. He took Leveson by surprise and won support from media commentators on Twitter by making two distinct suggestions for how to better regulate the press:

 1. Create a new, more effective British press card, complete with kite-mark to set a new standard in press moderation and decency

2. Enforce all picture agencies to join this new body too – and for no picture desk to take images from those who are not signed up       

 That line of attack showed why he has been the UK’s longest serving newspaper editor at 22 years and counting. He also had the foresight to bring with him with him, coverage of how other tabloid papers covered the death of Stephen Gately – knowing that the Jan Moir uproar was to be on the agenda. He was able to demonstrate, through displaying rival headlines from the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, that the Mail had acted with balance and without discrimination (comparatively).

 

THE MAIL REMAINS UNAPOLOGETIC FOR ITS STYLE OF HUMAN INTEREST REPORTING

The big C word of the day was not Corruption, but Cancer. Robert Jay QC asked Dacre to justify why the Daily Mail sought to scaremonger on big issues affecting the UK population, citing a report by the newspaper that ‘turning on the light when going to the toilet in the middle of the night increased the risk of cancer’. Jay asked how this could be true and where this information came from and Dacre, sharp as an arrow, produced a press release from a UK university hospital which said exactly that. It would have been interesting if the QC had a copy of today’s Daily Mail on hand, however, to ask him if he actually believed a real Spider Man was on the loose at a nuclear plant – as appeared in the science pages today.

 THIS TRIAL HAS THE ABILITY TO SCARE ANY WHO COME BEFORE IT (with the exception of Kelvin Mackenzie)

Despite a prepared and briefed Dacre, the man’s nervousness was obvious. He had to ask for questions to be repeated, was told to slow down giving evidence by Jay QC as his nerves got the better early on, and he was visibly shaking as he held up documentation he wanted to show the court. He found his flow as he embarked on soliloquies defending the stance and campaigning nature of his paper, but his will to get this hearing wrapped in one day was evident in this exchange:

 Leveson: I’m sure you don’t want to come back tomorrow. Dacre: That’s the understatement of the year, your honour. 

 WE NOW KNOW WHO ‘DAILY MAIL REPORTER’ IS

Long had PR’s been foxed by the by-line ‘Daily Mail Reporter’. It made an impossible job of getting an inaccuracy in a client story corrected or of pitching a fresh line of inquiry to the nameless staffer who hid behind the moniker. Speculate no longer – this is news agency copy, rehashed into a story by the sub-editor and slotted into a NIB. It also goes someway to explain how newspapers in general are able to make redundancies, but still publish the same amount of stories and maintain the appearance of a full staff by having journalists ‘moonlight’ under these pseudonyms.

 

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