Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The pretence that this blog is a weekly thing really has to stop. One month since the last one, fact fans. I’ve had THINGS TO DO. Not least going to Brussels and Croatia, where I went on holiday and did NOTHING other than read and swim and be horizontal. It was awesome, and as a result I now look less like this and more like this. No really, I do.

BUT that was then and this is now; I have returned to a world in which the internet spends all its time railing against the evil of corporations and then…er…goes incontinent with grief over the passing of the head of one of the world’s largest corporations; in which Silvio manages to somehow become even more ridiculous and offensive;  and a world in which somehow one of the members of 1980s pop combo Hue & Cry has become a consultant on games, play and ludic theory. We live in interesting times. Here are some totally insignificant bits of online ephemera to help distract you from what appears to be the total meltdown of civilisation which is going on all around us. Christ, I sound like an old man.

Socially responsible graffiti on a Croatian beach hut

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“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness; close bosom friend of the maturing sun…” – or that’s what Keats said. Personally speaking, I think Keats can do one, as can September and Autumn in general. Everything smells of wet dog and regret, it’s cold and miserable and it’s now just the long, slow trudge towards another season of crass mass-consumerism and endless, interminable, incomprehensible perfume adverts (NB – anyone who works in advertising who reads this, please feel free to explain to me why perfume advertising is so oblique, as I have literally no idea).

Think, then, of this edition of Web Curios as the lightbox to your SAD, the plaster to your axewound (for future reference, an unpleasant conjunction of words to Google), the United Nations to your genocide. I’m here to help. To that end, here are some recommendations for awesome stuff you can do in London over the next few months (NB – that last link is one of the best things I’ve seen in years, very much recommended. Oh, and for an interesting take on Libya, you could do worse than read this). In the real world! NOT ON THE INTERNET! Crazy but true.

But for now it’s still all about the internet. Well, on this particular blog it is, anyway. If you don’t like it, you know what you can do (though I’d prefer it if you didn’t; I’m needy, and low-to-moderate traffic figures are all that’s standing between me and a P45).

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I had an opening riff all worked out for this week, webmongs, but that was before I saw this amazing news story. Poor the confused,  sweaty-palmed masturbators! That aside, though, it’s been a relatively uneventful 4-day week, apart from the British press redeeming itself slightly for Gareth Barry John Terry Ryan Giggs-gate by actually doing some proper investigative journalism – which, inevitably, led to literally nothing changing whatsoever in the no-way-at-all-corrupt HQ of world football; and perhaps from the best story likely to appear in print anywhere in the world in 2011. Oh, and if you were traumatised by goats as a child (and let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t been) then THIS IS YOUR MONTH.

The rest of you, though, for whom it is NOT your month, will simply have to content yourselves with the following collection of webthings. Apart from The Man – for it is always his month.

Alice Was A Lot Less Innocent Than Is Often Presumed

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I am in the slightly surreal position of writing this Curios whilst our blog is in fact broken (a fact in no way due to incompetence on the part of anyone, no sirree), meaning that there is NO GUARANTEE that any of you will be able to read this sparkling prose. It’s strangely liberating, much like the fact that I am sitting here clad in nothing but a tshirt and a winning smile. I could say ANYTHING!

I won’t, of course; I need the money that webmonging provides. Instead, I will pause a moment to reflect upon a week in which it turns out that God’s not quite ready for us yet (unless of course the Rapture in fact happened and it simply turned out that He took a good look at us and thought “Actually, hang on, none of this shower is worth saving”.  It wouldn’t be that surprising, given, you know, stuff like this); in which Ryan Giggs realised that you can’t in fact sue the internet (an aside – does anyone else think there’s something STARTLINGLY VULGAR about the incredible speed at which the Imogen Thomas cash-in vehicle is now moving? The full-page Paddy Power ads in this morning’s Metro were a particular highlight; well done, everyone, aren’t we CLEVER!), thus hopefully putting an end to this startlingly tedious superinjunction business (or that’s what Giles Coren hopes, anyway. Out of interest, if I just write Gareth Barry’s name here does that mean that I go to jail too?); in which some of the most powerful men in the world met in London (and they let The Man play too!) to take part in what appears to have been the worst game of table tennis ever played; and in which over 13,000 people LISTENED TO MY VOICE – on that point, in the unlikely event that anyone from Radio 4 is reading this and you fancy mixing up your roster of continuity announcers a bit, I am absolutely open to offers. HIRE ME, RADIO 4.

On that note, and with the threat of both jail and, I would imagine, the sack hanging over me, on with the internetstuff. Happy Friday, my children, happy Friday to one and all.

I have no idea why, but I love this picture very much indeed.

Things About The Internet:

• These aren’t new news, so I won’t dwell on them as you’ve doubtless read about them on some other SOCIAL MEDIA GURU’S blog, but Facebook has added the ability to tag Pages in photos (thus giving us all that longed-for ability to link to Coca Cola’s Facebook page from our pictures. Hear that sound? That’s the sound of thousands and thousands of souls, fizzing sadly into nothingness as we take one more step towards being nothing more than dead-eyed marketing shills!), and has also updated the manner in which its ‘Share’ functionality works, allowing users to share links with specific Groups / Friends. There’s nothing evil about that, I don’t think.
• This IS New – Google Correlate – New cleverness from Google, allowing you to map search terms against each other to find patterns. It’s appallingly hard to explain, or at least it is for me; they do it rather better on the site, so I suggest that you go there.
• Social Search and Filter Bubbles and Stuff: Both Google and Bing hace recently been wanging on about their increased commitment to integrating social into search; that is, factoring in data from your Facebook and Twitter profiles when compiling search results. WHY IS THIS A GOOD IDEA? Ok, so I’m possibly being a luddite about this, but my friends are not necessarily experts on stuff I am searching for. Just because 8 morons who I used to go to school with and haven’t spoken to in 16 years happen to ‘like’ a story from the Mail Online doesn’t mean I want it appearing at the top of my search rankings. Ok, so obviously it’s more sophisticated than this, but this is a prime example of the growing problem of filter bubbles, as brilliantly explained in this recent TED talk by Eli Pariser (it really is interesting, I promise) – that is, information filtering based on existing tastes / preferences, and the problem of sourcing that this can and does create; when the web can learn our tastes, can provide us with prioritised information based on what our friends – who are likely to be like us – are consuming, what are the long-term consequences? This isn’t a new concept – after all, people have been reading the newspaper that best reinforces their existing worldview for years – but one that will become increasingly relevant as automated curation becomes ’smarter’ (or, at the very least, more ubiquitous). Perhaps we should all make an effort to take our news from a different source each week? Just a thought.
• NOT STRICTLY ABOUT THE INTERNET BUT STILL WORTH READING: A Really Good Article About Making: As an antidote to that, this is genuinely the most inspiring thing I’ve read in ages. I am generally not a fan of motivational / life lesson-type stuff, but this is a truly wonderful piece of writing about doing and making and creativity and the brilliance of being curious. Do take 5 minutes to read it; I promise you that you will be slightly happier and more inspired afterwards.
• How To Win Arguments On The Internet Without Really Knowing What You’re Talking About: This is actually a very smart piece on the psychology of debate and the particular application of it online. Part of a series of essays, and worth a look. Largely so you can up your troll game.

YES!

Some Websites I Have Liked Recently:

• Ana Somnia – I’ve never been a little girl, and it’s unlikely this state of affairs will change in this lifetime; nonetheless, had I been one this is what I like to imagine my dreams would have been like. An awesomely trippy website which is halfwaybetween storybook and art project, and which has one of the most captivatingly creepy and odd soundtracks I’ve heard in a while. Click and play – a lot of it’s procedurally generated, it would seem, which means each of you will experience it in a different manner.
• Vorsong Iceberg Energy Water Feng Shui Brand! – I’m reasonably sure that this is some sort of spoof, but I’m buggered if I can work out of what / why. If it’s not, there are some very, very strange people marketing this water.
• Er, Horseracing? – I don’t read Japanese, therefore my ability to understand what in the name of sweet Baby Jesus this is about is pretty much 0. It’s…just mental, really. Just click stuff until the race starts and watch, mouth agape, at the ensuing oddness.
• Shame Be Gone – My lovely colleague Chris Smith alerted me to this yesterday; it offers the potentially useful service of writing hard emails for you. Want to dump someone? Need to explain exactly why you were cheating on your wife with that glamour model? These guys can help.
• Dumb Tweets At Brands – Sometimes the quality of ‘engagement’ brands can achieve through social media is of questionable value.

Alan Sailer takes amazing pictures. Click the image for more.

The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – This Wednesday was Towel Day, and reminded me not only of the sheer amazingness of Douglas Adams’ work but also how good the original Hitchhiker’s game was. I say ‘game’; it’s more an interactive novel, the whole thing written by Adams’ himself and containing some brilliant gags and some of the most impressive / frustrating (depending on your mood) examples of lateral thinking you will ever find. Take the afternoon off and play it. You too, The Man!

Some Wordy Stuff:

• Ulysses, On Twitter – Literary experimentation in 140 characters isn’t new (I covered this in a VERY early web curios, for example), but this is a really interesting experience. The idea is to recruit a bunch of James Joyce aficionados to take sections of the legendarily ‘challenging’ novel and submit them to a central account, from which they will be tweeted on 16th June as part of Bloomsday (an annual  celebration of Joyce’s life and work) – as the novel unfolded over the course of a single day, so the Tweets will reflect the narrative. Will be interesting to see how it works.
• Live Writing Projection – This might be my favourite thing on here this week. As part of the promotion for New Zealand’s BNZ literary awards, the opening lines of short stories were projected onto public spaces in Aotea Square, Auckland. And then passers-by started to realise that the story being written might be about them…
• Motion Poems – Poetry set to animation. Some really beautiful work on here; recommended.

Katie Alves paints scenes from films on people's eyelids. This is The Nightmare Before Christmas.

VideoStuff! Enjoy – and given the fact that it’s our last bank holiday for AGES, I ORDER you to slack off for the rest of the day and watch all of them.

1) I’m opening with what is by far and away the most rubbish song I’ve featured on Curios for AGES. It’s worth it, though, for the video is all kinds of supervideogamegeekery. See how many retrogame references you can spot – there are HUNDREDS in there. I’m thinking that the audience for this is going to be primarily male. Oh, and if you do like this song then you are a cloth-eared dunce. Sorry, but it’s true. Goldfish, with “When We Come Together”:

2) This, on the other hand, is a great song by a band called Bad Lamps. The video, made by some random off the internet, features what I think is a whole host of clips from porn movies, strung together to accompany the song. There’s no nudity whatsoever, and there’s something weirdly poignant about seeing the nonsex elements of bongo movies:

3) This song about smoking has a fair bit of Johnny Cash’s ‘Boy Named Sue’ about it, which is no bad thing, and the video is very Terry Gilliam / Monty Python-esque, which is also good. Made me really want a tab:

4) Loom is a jaw-dropping piece of animation. Probably not great if you’re an arachnophobe, mind:

5) God, OFWGKTA are SO LAST MONTH. If you never found any of their output upsetting or abrasive enough then you’ll very much like Full Moon by current internet obsession Death Grips:

6) PHEW, THAT WAS A BIT MUCH WASN’T IT? Let’s come down with this, by Black Light Dinner Party. It will make you want to be a New York hipster, just a little bit. Older Together:

7)  I have no idea who this girl is, but her endearingly inept (and very, very sweary) cover of ODB’s “Got Your Money” has made her my new favourite internet person. I bet she’d be THRILLED to know that:

It’s a remote control plane, THAT LOOKS LIKE A SUPERHERO. Amazing. Want one:

9) To close, this week’s eyemeltingly strange video of the week – there’s a point in this that genuinely makes me shudder each time I watch it. ENJOY!!!!

HELLO! This Friday marks what, as far as I’m concerned, is the end of the last working week in April. Next weekend we have death, resurrection and ceremonial chocolate sweats; the weekend afterwards we have a nation descending into drunken, vomitous chaos in the name of a patriotic spirit long-forgotten (oh, and there’s a wedding happening too). As a result of people indulging in this sort of behaviour, it’s unlikely any of us will have got over the jaundice before May at the earliest (NB – Web Curios does not condone excessive drinking unless it’s as an expression of royalist fervour, in which case go for your lives webmongs).

But that is all before us. Here, we look back – back at the week that was on the internet, a week in which people got very upset about a 17 year-old London woman’s *ahem* full and frank discussion of her personal life on a rap freestyle (NB – it really is full and frank and very NSFW); in which, through listening to this man’s voice, I learnt that I occasionally get this; in which I totally failed to get on a plane to Amsterdam to deliver a presentation at a conference (thus incurring a debt to The Man unto the bargain); in which it was proven that £50million does not always guarantee quality;  that it’s entirely possible to make clothes from blow-up dolls; and in which a former boss of mine was bathed, naked, by a strange, bearded man in the name of art. It’s been interesting.

As a result of the imminent HOLIDAY, this week’s Curios is going to be relatively light on work-related stuff. Obviously, though, it’s all still GOLD. ENJOY, DAMN YOU.

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Contrary to what you may have feared, I AM NOT DEAD! Put away your wreaths, unveil your faces and break out the bunting, for Web Curios is BACK (I just tried doing a Google Image search for Web Curios – beautifully, several of the initial results are pictures of The Man. Hello, The Man!). Admittedly it’s only back for a week, as I am on HOLIDAY next Friday, but frankly you should be grateful for whatever you’re given at this stage.

In my absence, webmongs, I have seen things of which you can only dream. I have seen Slough and a Tesco’s so large that approaching it is like that opening bit in the first Star Wars film with the massive spaceship that goes on and on and on and (Slough FACT: there’s a pun in Slough town centre called the Wernham Hogg, named after the fictional company in The Office (which was of course set in Slough); I can’t work out whether this is a brilliant piece of self-satirisation or actually one of the saddest things ever, though I know which way I intuitively lean). I have been to Barcelona on a stag party, accompanied (amongst others) by a charming man known as ‘Big Sam’ who was recently cleared of common assault after breaking a man’s jaw on the fotball pitch (needless to say Big Sam and I didn’t really have much in common), where I danced to techno like a teenager and was thrown out of a nightclub (I came back in again 5 minutes later though).  Oh, and I’ve done work as well, some of it actually not that bad.

Obviously, though, this is all utterly immaterial in the face of the world’s continued descent into what appears to be total chaos. Better people than me have written at length about everything that’s been going on over the past month (and worse people – check out this spectacular piece of ad placement from last week’s Metro), but can I suggest that you perhaps donate some money to the relief effort in Japan? Or if you prefer music, maybe buy tickets for this? Oh, and if you’re interested in the geopolitical upheaval sweeping the Middle East and its potential implications for China you could do worse than read this piece by Francis Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal this week (don’t get smug, though, Franky – you were still totally wrong about the END OF HISTORY thing). Or, if you prefer your commentary a little more raw, there are few people more on the money about conflict than The War Nerd.

Oh, and one last thing before I wang on about the internet and cats and stuff. I was reminded this week about the way in which Facebook is used as a tribute site when people die, particularly in the case of the young. This is, of course, perfectly fine. As someone who relatively recently had to administer the page of someone young who died, though, can I please point out that WHAT YOU WRITE MATTERS. I don’t mean to come across as stuffy (HEAVEN FORFEND) but I’m not entirely convinced that the term ‘RIP’ benefits from an exclamation mark (hey, kids, punctuation changes emphasis. You idiots) or indeed that a sad smiley is an adequate response to death. Just saying, like.

Ahem. Oh, and one last thing – Web Curios this week contains no Rebecca Black whatsoever. You can thank me in the comments.

One of a series of posters designed to commemorate the Fukushima earthquake. Click for more.

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Hello All! Welcome to another edition of the Financial and Professional Services team’s Friday Fiver. Big thanks this week to Dave Chambers, Peter Roberts, Rachel Griffiths, Matt Battersby, Helen Searle and Clare Coffey.

This week we look at the new ASA rules for corporate websites; the fairness of the ECJ ruling and its impact on insurance; the shortcomings of the FSA’s Retail Conduct Risk Outlook; Mr Murdoch’s acquisition of the remaining stake in BSkyB; the impact of the rising cost of children and what Charlie Sheen could learn from Bob Diamond.

ASA Is Watching You

On 1st March the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the watchdog for the advertising industry assumed new powers to regulate “companies’ own marketing claims on their own websites and in other non-paid for space they control“, as the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising was rolled out to cover online properties. The industry reaction has been mixed and there has been a good deal of chatter online about the impact this will have for companies, but it appears that the ASA will take a fairly collaborative approach in enforcing these rules. Regardless though there are plenty of website owners and social media moderators wondering what this means for them, plenty of lawyers doing their best to interpret and not much clarity so far. Certainly there will be a few social media moderators watching what they retweet or share on their Facebook pages.

Is this good for the industry? Probably and certainly for advertisers (and their lawyers) targeting children and young people. Is this good for the internet? who knows – it’s certainly not the free and unregulated space that it was before. One would assume that the originators of the 4,500 complaints that the ASA has recorded since 2008 will be happier. Though from the perspective of a PR man that has heard many times the exasperated cry that ’the ad agency just doesn’t get what we do’ I’d be surprised if the first adjudications have anything to do with the work of a PR agency.

Looking for a cheap deal…?

Women drivers braced themselves for the full impact of equality this week with the European Court of Justice’s ruling that men and women must be treated the same by insurers when assessing risk.  According to the Association of British Insurers, women under the age of 25 could see their car insurance premiums rise by an eye-watering 25%, although men will pay slightly less than they do now.  As we all know, despite the tedious jokes, women are statistically far better drivers than men and therefore a safer bet for insurers. 

Show's Over Sheilas

But it’s not just the Sheilas who are upset.  The ruling has drawn extensive criticism from all from all quarters, from Conservative MPs to consumer groups, to the unlikely (or so you might think) ABI themselves.  Although their members might stand to gain from an overall increase in premiums paid to the industry, the potential disruption along with the marketing advantages of being able to offer competitively priced products, mean the ‘mistaken’ ruling is something they’ve been looking to avoid.

Also, the implications of the ruling are not just confined to car insurance.  Dr Ros Altman predicts that the eight out of ten annuities currently bought by men (less relevant if you are a woman and likely to live longer) are also likely to take a hit as a result of the ruling.

All in all, there appear to be very few winners from this ruling, and gender could be the thin end of the wedge. As Catherine Barton from Ernst & Young points out in the Telegraph, there are many other ‘discriminatory’ factors currently being used to measure that may come under more scrutiny.  So, the question is, when exactly does equality become unfair? 

Less risky conduct?

This week the Financial Services Authority issued its first ever Retail Conduct Risk Outlook. Previously incorporated into the FSA’s Financial Risk Outlook which accompanies its Business Plan, the separation of conduct risk from prudential risk anticipates the FSA’s separation into two new bodies in 2012.

Conscious of recent conduct failures that have had a dire impact on consumers’ experience of financial services and products – Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) mis selling, unclear mortgage terms, and bank’s complaints handling to name a few, the RCRO is an attempt to mitigate and identify potential conduct failure in the future. However, reviewing the RCRO’s list of current issues, emerging risks and potential concerns it is striking how few of them are in any way new. Indeed, most of the risks identified are covered by work already underway as part of the Mortgage Market Review and Retail Distribution Review. Therefore it will be crucial that in identifying new conduct risks, the nascent Financial Conduct Authority must have the tools and powers to do more than shine a light on potential risks and be able to intervene early to avoid market failure. Failure to do otherwise will result in history repeating, albeit under the eye of an authority with a different name.

Rupert completes his Monopoly set….

Pass Go and collect £8bn!

Yesterday’s news that Rupert Murdoch will be allowed to purchase the remaining stakein BSkyB throws up a number of issues. There were two chief complaints made by other media outlets. One, that the deal impinges on the ‘plurality’ of media outlets in the UK by giving News Corporation a far larger stake against their rivals. As Andrew Neil argued, this increases their ability to cross-sell and to subsidise their loss-making newspapers, damaging the position of their broadsheet and tabloid rivals. And two, that the purchase of Sky News (albeit in a separate company of sorts) would mean a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the 1980’s when broadcast news was controlled by just two superpowers, the BBC and ITN.

On a day’s reflection, the first of these is likely to be a far bigger problem than the second, for which there is a strong counter-argument. Regardless of the influence Mr Murdoch will have over Sky News, it still represents a third news broadcaster and in that sense the picture is actually better than the ‘bad old days’ of just two television news outlets. It’s also worth noting that the deal is far from agreed yet – as The Times notes today, investors are queuing up to extract a high price from News Corp for their shares. And one final question as well – what does this mean for the BBC? News Corp has now become an entity twice the revenue size of the Beeb. Does that mean the constant pressure on Auntie to cost cut and justify the license fee will diminish?

Not tonight darling, we really can’t afford it…

Interesting that Aviva reckons this is fundamentally impacting parents’ decision on whether to have more children or not. The report found that 66 per cent of parents would put off having more children because of financial constraints.

It’s a fact backed up by ONS statistics, which show that the once typical average family size of 2.4 children, made famous in the 90s TV Show… is now in fact 1.7 children.

The gloomy picture was reinforced by recent Markit Household Finance Index showed that more than third of households are feeling worse off in the last month, backing up the financial concern that could be literally constricting families up and down the country. 

Why never fat cat actors?

Vanity Fair recently published their list of Hollywood top earners in 2010. Top of the list is James Cameron who earned $257m in 2010, mainly on the back of the phenomenal success of Avatar. Johnny Depp and Steven Spielberg were next in the list, earning $100m and $80m respectively.

These figures are so high they might make even the most hard nosed banker blush. So why were there no newspaper headlines slamming ‘greedy actors’ and ‘fat cat’ directors? Why do we accept high pay for some professions and not others? It might  be said that,  unlike bankers, actors have not harmed the world in any way but can we really say that about Jennifer Aniston who appears at number 25 in the list having made $24.5m in 2010? Anyone who believes that obviously hasn’t seen her new rom-com ‘classic’, ‘Just go with it’!

One actor’s pay has been making the headlines this week though as Charlie Sheen continued to self-destruct on US TV. Amongst the many revelations from these interviews came Sheen’s demand that his pay for appearing on ‘Two and a Half Men’ be increased to $3m per episode. This has caused some criticism in an America where many are still feeling the effects of the recent recession.

So could Charlie Sheen’s behaviour lead to more questioning of actors salaries and their benefit to society? If so, then perhaps they should look to Bob Diamond’s expert performance at the Treasury Select Committee in January for guidance on how to manage this scrutiny. Comparing some of his comments to those of Charlie Sheen this week, they could certainly do a lot worse!

Bob Diamond on banks apologising for the crisis:

“There was a period of remorse and apology for banks, that period needs to be over. We need banks to be able to take risk, working with the private sector in the UK.”

Charlie Sheen on not apologising for anything:

“I’m tired of pretending like I’m not special. I’m tired of pretending like I’m not bitchin’, a total freakin’ rock star from Mars.”

Bob Diamond on the perceived invincibility of banks:

“Banks should be allowed to fail…It’s not okay for taxpayers to have to bail out banks.”

Charlie Sheen on the perceived invincibility of Charlie Sheen:

“Dying is for fools, amateurs.”

Bob Diamond on bonuses:

“I would like to be able to isolate bonuses. I am a businessman trying to run a business. I have to balance what our owners want, what our customers want… I am aware of the emotion around bonuses and we will show as much restraint as we can…we are responsible citizens of the world and the United Kingdom.”

Charlie Sheen on pay:

“Blame the studio for giving me this much dough knowing who they were giving it to.”

More from Bob Diamond on bonuses:

“We have to balance the responsibility we have and the recognition of the environment we operate in”

More from Charlie Sheen on… well….. we’re not really sure

“I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”

*Some great research from our client Aviva, but in the interests of transparency we should state that this is not our work

It has been a week of RAGE on the internet. Rage and hate, webmongs. Not, though, coming from me (well, no more than is usual) – this time it’s been everyone else getting all unnecessary about things. And then, and is the wont of the internet, behaving like a toddler with ADHD and completetely forgetting about the thing that made them so angry in the first place and moving on to the next shiny new toy. I don’t necessarily agree with the whole ‘the internet is making you stupid’ movement – you know what? we were doing just fine at being stupid before this stuff turned up – but it’s certainly helping us regress, behaviourally, like few other things.

Anyway, so Tuesday saw everyone (well, every single media tool in London, at least) getting REALLY REALLY IRATE at a video made by PHD Worldwide in what would appear to be an attempt at self-promotion. If you’re reading this then you are probably one of the London media tools who’s already seen said video, but on the offchance you haven’t, you can watch it here. It’s undeniably cringey – stage-school kids spouting a whole load of mediaguff about THE FUTURE and how brands will need to market to them in NEW and EXCITING and DYNAMIC ways if they are to capture the attention of the POWER CONSUMERS of the future – and certainly deserves a bit of ribbing. It probably didn’t, though, merit the frightening level of vitriol directed at it online.  Just a thought – was some of the anger directed at PHD (who, it must be said, dealt with the whole thing very graciously and with a sense of humour) possibly borne of self-recognition? Ask yourselves, media tools of London, have you never used terms like that when trying to shill your services? Was the reason that so many people were moved to such staggering levels of bile that they saw themselves in it? It’s one thing to come the big social media guru in a client meeting when you’re met by the blank-eyed, slack-jawed stares of incomprehension that immediately precede the opening of chequebooks by the terminally confused; it’s quite another to be confronted by the horror of the words you regularly use when they’re coming from the mouths of children. Just saying, like.

BUT! We all swiftly forgot about that on Wednesday, when we met Binkie. The original Telegraph article’s been removed, presumably to spare the poor girl any further humiliation, but the damage has been done. By Wednesday afternoon she was trending in London, people were full of IRE at her privilege and background and nickname and wealth, and kind-hearted people on Twitter had dug out her Facebook profile, found out where the wedding was happening and were talking about how ‘fun’ it would be to gatecrash it with White Lightning (an aside: I have just discovered they no longer make White Lightning. Teenage Matt is saddened by this) and how they wanted various calamities to befall her.

Look, I know this is all ‘harmless fun & games‘, and heaven forfend that I be puritanical and preachy about this sort of thing, but it does make me sort-of-agree with Milo Yiannopoulos and this article he wrote in the very same Telegraph earlier this week (aside from the ‘lefty’ rubbish). Remember the Two Laws of the Internet? Well this is all about the second one. Never forget Wheaton’s Law. It should be easy; if it’s not, perhaps you might want to consider sterilising yourself.

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I’m not as angry as I was last week. This is all relative, of course; I am still full of (entirely justified) rage at the industry in which I work; the sort of impotent rage that will achieve nothing other than slightly raised blood pressure and the heightened probability of an aneurysm before the age of 50. This week the rage has been mostly caused by people’s seemingly unthinking insistence on using the words ‘influencer’ (NB – note to readers: If you are ever being presented to and someone uses that image in a presentation, you have EVERY RIGHT to spit in their face and call them a clueless shyster. No really, you do) and ‘engagement’ in completely arbitrary fashion. CAN YOU DEFINE THE TERMS YOU ARE USING? OH NO, THAT’S RIGHT, YOU CAN’T, BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST THROWING THEM INTO YOUR SENTENCES LIKE THE BUZZWORDS DU JOUR THAT THEY FUNDAMENTALLY ARE.

*Ahem*

Look, I know that there’s nothing wrong with the words ‘influencer’ and ‘engagement’ per se; I just get really, really upset when they are used so casually. If you can’t define what an ‘influencer’ is with any degree of credibility (and here’s the rub – in terms of the online world people really struggle, which is why Klout and Tweetlevel are ultimately pointless, masturbatory exercises (at the moment, at least)), then don’t use the term; if by ‘engagement’ you mean ‘talking to people’ then just say ‘talking to people’ and bask in the knowledge that people won’t think you’re anywhere near as much of a social media tool.

Christ alive, I was calm before I started writing this and now I am all het up and unnecessary. I am going to take a moment to attain the state of zenlike calm that I normally bask in when writing Web Curios – join me in contemplation of this beautiful image, and we’ll continue after the jump.

Fill in the blanks yourself. It doesn't get any less disturbing.

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I’m not in a good mood today. This blog might reflect this. Apologies in advance and all that. Oh, and to the three people who read this who aren’t somehow involved in advertising / marketing / PR / etc, feel free to skip down to where the first picture is, as the next few paragraphs will probably mean very little to you. I mean, feel free to read them if you want – my prose, after all, is captivating – but don’t expect to get too much out of it other than a feeling of slightly grubby disappointment.

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