One of the most dispiriting things about the age of outrage and thought leaders and brands-as-political-activists is just how predictable the culture is.
We use the word “cycle” all the time now, appended to more than just “news.” You know that the current cycle, whatever it is, will be soon forgotten, replaced by another. After a while, you can see where things are going well before they happen. Some ad or celebrity or politician, or indeed some nobody, will be hauled to the stockade of public opprobrium. The usual suspects will indulge themselves in bacchanalian shaming, and the usual defenders will object. The words will be as though read from a script.
This predictability is bleak for a disinterested citizen trying to think and feel their way through our culture in good faith. But it’s not bleak for marketers, viral aggregators, and other feckless manipulators.
Consider what I call “dunkbait.” This week produced two paradigmatic examples of this phenomenon. First, a Twitter account for Pop Tarts posted a tweet showing two of the snacks sticking out of what Americans call a “fanny pack.” The accompanying words read, “I like my tarts where I like my money. Right in my fanny.” Now, even the American reading makes suspiciously little sense. But it makes more sense when you know that in British English, “fanny” is not a cutesy word for butt like “tushy” but instead a direct word for vagina, and Pop Tarts was probably only pretending not to know this too. It’s one of the first things an American learns in studying the pratfalls of cross-the-pond misunderstanding. When I moved in with a Brit and we talked about language differences, it came up on the second day. It’s virtually impossible for a skeptic to believe a professional marketing team didn’t know what it was doing here.
Nonetheless, it proved irresistible for Twitter to take the titillating bait and appear smarter-than, explaining to the Pop Tarts people where they had “erred” by generating thousands and thousands of retweets and write-up articles. That sure showed them. The Pop Tarts people must have laughed all the way to the bank.
That’s advertising dunkbait in action. I suspect marketers actually have their own term for this strategy.
In similarly attention-hungry online media, Bloomberg one-upped Pop Tarts’ dunkbait with a tweet that gave a master class in tersely eliciting antipathy, reading “yacht owners with priceless art need to beware of flying champagne corks.” It worked, with everyone rushing to retweet the offending tweet, showing just how much more class-aware they are than Bloomberg’s clueless editors. Did they really not pause to wonder if it was that class awareness, and the yearning of social media users to signal their outraged virtue, that helped Bloomberg get such attention and promotion?
The underlying article the tweet linked to was a short, lazily scraped piece, linking to an original article that was fundamentally critical of how ultra-rich people treat their yacht-bound art. But who got that far? Bloomberg and Pop Tarts got attention, and by then, new cycles had started.
When it comes to online know-how, it seems that there are haves and have yachts.
Who’s the real sucker, then?
