RUTHERBLOG

According to Wired Magazine, the average American spends 8 to 9 hours a day in front of a screen. Based on the premise that information consumption should be as healthy as food consumption, the magazine suggests this as a ‘balanced diet’ in this information-overload age:

Now, I’m reasonably media-savvy, and the very existence of this blog indicates how much I’ve embraced Web 2.0. But there’s one thing about the research findings and the pyramid that has me perplexed:

What’s happened to work?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Death can be a great career move -- but it takes considerable skill to pull it off successfully.

Elvis is the role model for passed-on profits. The pelvic mumbler may have ingested his last burger in 1977, yet in 2008 (three decades after his ‘bathroom’ demise) he earned $52m. That was 25% more than Madonna.

Having said that,   he’s been seen working the fries at McDonalds in Memphis so, like-for-like, Madge way not be too far behind.

Of course, this is not generated by a flesh-and-blood person; this is a revenue stream for Elvis the Corporation. It’s a brand, a back-catalogue and a devoted fan base determined to keep the man and his music ‘alive’.

This is a global business, and you have to admire the endless creativity of rights owners in fully exploiting both their intellectual property and the gullibility of the public.

ELVIS! LIVE!!

Did you know that you can still go and see Elvis in Concert? He’s touring Europe in 2010. Thanks to a mix of projection technology and the reunion of his ‘former band members’, you can spend an electrically-charged evening (literally) watching the musicians who failed the Cocoon audition try to keep pace with a film of a man on steroids.

A case of sixty, drugs and rock’n'roll.

And while you’re booking your tickets, you can also buy -- “for the first time ever” -- a DVD of the his legendary performances on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Or how about going to stay in one of the ‘Elvis-accented’ rooms at the Heartbreak Hotel? (Read the small print, and you’ll be disappointed to learn that ‘accented’ means there’s a picture of him in each room.) You might want to splash out and upgrade to one of the Elvis-themed suites. There’s a choice -- the Graceland, the Hollywood, the Gold & Platinum and, of course, the honeymooners’ Burning Love suite.

Ahunk ahunk of Burning Love indeed.

And if you can’t move out of your house (a statistical probability for Elvis fans), then he’ll come to you -- at least, you can sign up for Elvis updates. This is a new definition of the word which the student of career death needs to understand:

In my Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘update’ means ‘the act or instance of updating’; in Graceland it means letting you know that they’ve found another tape in a box in the loft, and that a 52-part series (with never-before seen photos) will be available soon.

All of which can be paid for with you Elvis-branded Visa card.

FAB FOUR AND MORE

You don’t have to be entirely dead to benefit from no longer being around. Half The Beatles are still with us, and yet we now have another re-issue of The Beatles back-catalogue: “re-mastered, re-packaged and re-discovered”. And to much acclaim. Read the customer reviews on Amazon, and it’s 5-stars all the way. Then again, if you’d just paid £170 for 12 albums that you already owned in two previous formats, you’re not likely to say ‘I wuz robbed.’

Also this week, the launch of ‘The Beatles -- Rockband’ on Sony PS3, dutifully supported by wall-to-wall Beatles coverage on the BBC -- an entire weekend on Radio 2, and a week of programs on BBC Four. Even my daughter had the good sense to ask why: “Did someone die, Daddy?”

No darling. But one of them is now a pension salesman and the other got divorced.

To be fair, those in the know say that Rockband is beautifully produced and very engaging -- if playing plastic toy guitars and pretending to be a pop singer is your thing. It just isn’t mine.

But don’t think that making money from being dead is a foregone conclusion. The holders of the Presley and Beatle brands are (despite my cynical tone) very, very good at what they do. Wild horses couldn’t drag me to Heartbreak Hotel, but you have to admit -- it’s an obvious ‘brand extension’, and probably serves its target audience very well. Stick of Jailhouse Rock anyone?

The Michael Jackson Estate could learn a lot from Graceland and Cavern Club.

TICKET TO (BE TAKEN FOR A) RIDE

How black must the mood have been in the AEG offices the day that CEO Randy Phillips heard that Jackson had shuffled (moonwalked) off?  Phillips’ company was promoting the 50-date concert series at London’s O2, and 750,000 people had paid up to £75 each. AEG would have to pay it all back.

Or not. In a stroke of genius -- and commercially, I don’t think the word is too strong -- Phillips re-invented the very nature of ‘ticket’.

Consider the usual purpose of a ticket: it is proof of purchase, a receipt for a transaction that is not yet complete. In effect, the purchaser is exchanging one promissory note for another: ‘I promise to pay the bearer…if you promise to provide a service that will entertain me’.

(As a Southampton fan, I’m not sure how that works…but that’s for another day.)

Not so, said Phillips. It’s not a ticket at all; it’s a souvenir -- albeit of an non-event. In a stroke, Phillips created an entirely new market: the virtual memento. So what if something doesn’t happen? There’s still a merchandising market opportunity for it. To join in the fun, I am open to offers for my Led Zeppelin 2009 World Tour jacket.

Anyway, this wasn’t just a common-or-garden ticket. This was a MJ ticket. The man himself had hoped that people would ‘keep it as a reminder of the memorable evening that they would share together’. He had personally been involved with the design. And it had been produced using a Lenticular printing 3D process.

So fans had a choice: refund or non-ticket.

PRECIOUS MEMORIES

Websites and blogs were hot with indignation. Out of respect for Michael, and out of respect for Michael’s  fans (and their respect for his respect for them), how could AEG do this? It was immoral. And anyway, “I bought a £75 ticket and my friend only bought a £50 ticket, so I’m paying 50% more than her for a memory of an event that didn’t happen.”

Yes -- but your non-existent memories would have a clearer view.

Despite the absence of respect, AEG later claimed that ’40%-50% of ticket purchasers had taken the option to receive their tickets’. Worst case, that’s 300,000 people who are now spending time thinking about the evening they didn’t spend together. With or without Michael.

(If that wasn’t enough, at the end of October Sony Pictures releases a film of the concert that never happened. Remember that 30-second rehearsal clip that Phillips showed as evidence of Jackson’s well-being? It’s now going to be a motion picture event, and ‘a gift to Michael’s fans’.)

It will give them something to cling to while they wait for the next non-performance.

Just yesterday, the much-heralded Vienna Tribute concert collapsed, with many of the promised stars failing to commit an appearance. It’s now being rescheduled, to London in June 2010.

Tickets start at £44 -- although no-one seems to know what you’ll get for your money. Not that an absence of content seems to stop any of the riders on the Jackson bandwagon.

DEAD CERT?

This looks like a chronic case of ‘more haste, less speed’ in the Jackson camp, but with an army of would-be Colonel Tom Parkers out to make a buck or two, Jermaine and Co obviously think they need to strike while the body’s still warm. (Fancy buying the Jackson Opus, and 38-pound book with -never-seen-before-photos? Yours for just £109).

Whatever your opinion of the man (repugnant) his music (infectious) or his dancing (the best on film since Astaire and Kelly), watching this soap opera play out could some day become a business case worthy of Harvard or LBS. The Wacko side of Jackson won’t be a hurdle: as pop-commentator Paul Gambaccini pointed out shortly after Jackson’s death, Judy Garland was a washed up, alcoholic mess when she died. Today, she’s an icon.

The collective memory will paper over Jackson’s cracked behaviour, and remember only the performances. More difficult to call will be the management of the core material -- the ownership of which will become a bloodbath. There’ll be some very rich lawyers at the end of all this, and probably a very bitter family.

Meanwhile, the man in the mirror will either become a billion dollar enterprise, shadowing all that has gone before, or a forgotten footnote.

It’ll take 30 years and a generation to decide.

Popularity: 17% [?]

“It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consistent of believing, or in disbelieving; it consists of professing to believe what he does not believe.” Thomas Paine

It is Sunday morning. Ben and I sit in the kitchen. I skim the pages of a broadsheet, while my 13 year-old son reads one of yesterday’s supplements; he’s found a review of a new X-box game that, at a guess, involves disembowelling vampires.

BEN: That’s really cool.

ME (not looking up from the Arts section): Have you played it?

BEN: No. But it’s got 5 stars in here.

ME (wondering about getting tickets for the new ‘Godot’): And that makes it ‘cool’ does it, because it says so in there?

BEN: Well, it’s why we buy the big papers, isn’t it?

And I realise that I am at one of life’s key parental conversations. We’ve talked about sex, about bullying, about drugs. Now it’s ‘truth’ in the press.

M: How do you think a newspaper makes money, Ben? Where does my £1.50 actually go?

B: The paper shop?

M: Yes – to Mr Singh, and to the distributor who delivers the papers to the shop each morning. By the time they’ve taken their cut, it doesn’t leave very much for the people who make the papers. So how does a newspaper make its money?

We pause. Ben flicks a page or two, looking for a picture of a hole to crawl into.

All he can find is listings for London cinemas.

B: Advertising.

M: Spot on. The newspapers sell space to companies who want to sell things to their readers. No advertising, no newspapers. So the first thing to remember about newspapers is that their business purpose isn’t to print news. It’s to generate advertising revenue.

B: Cool. So why do newspapers write all this sort of stuff? (He points at a feature about a soap actress in the ‘Property’ section.) Why not just run ads?

M: Because too much advertising wouldn’t be very interesting, then no one would buy the paper. That’s the publisher’s dilemma. It’s a question of balance.

B: So get more journalists writing more stories.

M: Well, that’s good for you as a reader, but not good for the publisher as a business. That’s more cost.

B: But there’s loads of writing in these papers, pages and pages of news.

M: Is there? What is ‘news’, Ben?

B: Um…Stories about things that happen in the world. Gaza and the Credit crunch and things like that.

M: And all the sections of this newspaper are full of that, are they?

B: Well, no. Looking at this part (the listings insert he has in front of him), it’s got records and dvds and films and stuff.

M: A famous newspaper publisher called Randolph Hearst once said: “News is something that somebody, somewhere doesn’t want to see in print. Everything else is publicity.”

B: So what’s this? (He points to the soapstar ‘profile’).

M: Read the final paragraph – the bit in italics.

B: “The Notting Hill flat is on the market for £675,000 with Foxtons”

He stops and smiles. A penny drops, and for the next few minutes he’s ploughing through pages of newsprint, looking for publicity stories: a disgraced MP and his new book; a glamour model and her new TV series.

B: Jokes! (it’s a different language, but I’m keeping up) It’s all Publicity! All of it!

M: Well, not quite ALL. But most of it is. And the reason is simple – it’s cheaper than news. News takes time to research, time to collate, time to write, time to check. And as the businessman running the newspaper, you want to cut your costs – but you need to keep the amount of editorial content, because your readers demand it.

B: So make the journalists work harder.

M: Going to be a media mogul when you grow up? Despite the stereotype, most journalists and editors are incredibly productive. But when the advertising people sell more space, it creates a need for more editorial to keep that balance. So it becomes very tempting to use packaged material from publicists and agents and PRs, who are being paid for by someone else.

B: So the editor can fill more space, while the publisher keeps his costs down. Cool. So is this publicity?

He has found a ‘car of the year’ piece by Jeremy Clarkson. To a teenage would-be petrol-head, Clarkson is a deity.

M: Well, it has no news value, but it isn’t promoting anything in particular. So we’ll call it Entertainment – one of the main reasons people chose their Sunday paper.

B: So what about all this (he points back at the cinema listings).

M: That’s the fifth type on content. That’s Information; helpful facts to help you make decisions. You’ll find a lot of those in the Sundays, especially in the Travel sections.

B: News. Advertising. Publicity. Entertainment. Information. Is that it?

M: Pretty much. It’s a good filter to apply each time you read the paper – especially to weed out the PR man’s dream – Publicity that’s being presented as News. Put it in another order, and it spells PAINE.

B ??

M : Thomas Paine was a man who lived round the time of the American and French Revolutions. He wrote a couple of very famous books, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. He was quite complicated, and no friend of the Church or the English Government, but all you need to remember is his basic philosophy – we should each think for ourselves. So when you read the paper, and to make sure you read with a questioning mind, remember PAINE. Think for yourself, not the way that others want you to think.

Fatherly advice duly dispensed, I head for a morning shower. Twenty minutes later, Ben is standing in the bedroom door.

B: I looked up Paine on the web. He might have written those books, but he died in poverty and no one went to his funeral.

M : Yes, well, ermm…

B : I bet the man who publishes the Sunday paper won’t die poor.

M : Probably not.

B : Although all that stuff we talked about, that’s on the internet for free. So ‘praps he will.

Popularity: 14% [?]