Looking forward to the perfect British summer of media
Jim Marshall says it is no longer enough for a single medium (even TV) to provide coverage of an event in the UK – it only becomes a true ‘media event’ when all the media provide their own unique coverage and perspective…
I’m looking out of the window at the rain splashing down and trees blowing in the winds and thinking: ‘Yup, it’s going to be the ideal British summer to enjoy the media’.
Arguably it has already got off to a near perfect start. Firstly with the Champions League Final – Chelsea’s heroic win and 12 million UK viewers, 300 million viewers worldwide and 4.8 million tweets.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to enjoy this magnificent media event in full because I was at the game. However, immediately following the match I sent instructions home: “Get every Sunday newspaper and don’t, under any circumstances, delete the match coverage.”
I was therefore able to watch both ITV and Sky’s coverage (at least half a dozen times), read every newspaper report and even listen to Radio 5’s commentary on the iPlayer. Clearly not the same as experiencing the media coverage live, but pretty good nonetheless.
And secondly, the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, when the highlight was the Jubilee concert. I, along with around 17 million other viewers, didn’t make the mistake of travelling to the event and we were mightily rewarded.
No-one could deny the fact that the last 60 years of British music has been pretty spectacular: Lennon and McCartney invented modern popular music, musicians such as John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and of course the Stones re-introduced the blues back into America and created the foundations for modern rock music. Punk not only created a whole new popular music strand but also a new culture (or more accurately, a new counter culture); and Britpop, with bands like Blur and Oasis, created the next wave of modern popular music and stadium rock (and made being a Brit cool again).
Against this rich background we got (among others) Gary Barlow, Robbie Williams, JLS, Cheryl and an irritating American bloke, who can’t spell his first name properly and wears baseball jackets – not even cool in the 1970s when they first appeared in the UK.
Paul McCartney was the headliner but he mainly played McCartney tunes as opposed to Lennon/McCartney numbers, again proving John Lennon’s phenomenal talent. It didn’t matter, the Royal family had a ball; the crowds loved it; and, most importantly, us at home enjoyed the latest media spectacular with some ‘decentish’ music, light shows, fireworks and so on – without having to get wet, without having to suffer the iniquities of public transport, without getting stuck two thirds of the way down the Mall and therefore being unable to see or hear anything. A great way to spend a damp Monday evening.
Now we are already over a week into the Euro Championships. To some this is yet another football tournament. But in truth it is another major international ‘media event’, with the football as centre stage but supported by a raft of human interest stories and other related issues – for example the furore caused by the Panorama programme on racism in eastern Europe, which made the front page of a number of newspapers and featured prominently on social network sites.
How will England do? Following audiences of 15.6 million against France and over 16 million against Sweden, I’ve discussed this at length with my colleague Matt Platts and we’re both quietly confident that England could surprise.
We’ve agreed that a semi final isn’t out of the question and it could be against the perennial adversary Germany, at which anything could happen, along with an audience of over 20 million (?). Whoever eventually wins is not important – it’s not the winning, or even taking part that counts, it’s how it is portrayed across the media.
(And anyway, you can be confident that John Terry will be part of any celebrations and the ‘lifting of the cup’, no doubt fully kitted out, including shin-pads and probably a union jack jock strap, which will be another media story/event in itself.)
In the modern world of multi-channel and multimedia, it is not only very comforting but also slightly surprising that the media still have the ability to unify the nation’s attention and interest. Shirley Manson, of Garbage fame (though not alas featured at the Jubilee concert), recently said: “There’s something amazing about living on an island where so many people are watching the same thing, reading the same papers, ingesting the same news – it creates a feeling of community in the UK that doesn’t exist in the same way in the sprawling mass of America.”
There’s nothing new about major media events – arguably one of the very first was the Coronation 60 years ago. However our modern world of media, a bit like fast food, has become very much a ‘repertoire’ market.
In fact there are frightening parallels between our usage now of fast food and media: they’re both on the increase; they’re both of very variable quality; and they’re both of widening cultural influences.
Most importantly, an event in the UK only becomes a true ‘media event’ when all the media provide their own unique coverage and perspective, thereby creating a ‘whole that is greater than the sum of its parts’.
It’s no longer enough for a single medium (even TV these days) to provide the coverage. I think there is an important lesson for advertisers here…!
In the meantime, we can look forward to the continuation of the Euros, followed by the Olympics and the Paralympics and then into the autumn for new series of The X Factor, Strictly and a host of other shows and events. It’s going to be great, as long as that bloke Will.i.am is taken off the menu.